the homepage

The amount of information found on Nick Feamster's web page is almost staggering. Along with the basics (contact and school information) he has provided links to his curriculum vitae (CV), published works (with links to most of the articles), and lists of students and courses (with links to the syllabus) taught. Also included are his bookmarks, through Delicious the social bookmarking site, and Twitter. Today I took a look at his research statement also available through his web page.

Nick Feamster's research is in real-world solutions to network problems and issues using a principled approach. Meaning finding applications to current hassles and headaches with "provable properties and solid theoretical backing".

According to his research statement there are 3 themes to his work:

1) "Designing inherently robust and resilient networks", referring to work on improving network accountability (reasons for failure or performance loss) and reliability (keeping it running well).

2) "Defending against unwanted traffic", referring to Spam filtering. Who wants spam? The approach here is rather than trying to filter the contents of an email, filter on how the email was sent. "In other words, examine the network-level behavior of the email sender and classify the spam based on whether the observed sending behavior likely corresponds to a legitimate spammer."

3) "Improving fault detection and diagnosis" by analyzing configurations before going live. After deployment, improve the data operators use to pinpoint problem areas.

Next we'll take a look at a published work.