11th TMA PhD School

Modern Network Monitoring and Privacy-Preserving Analysis

Following the success of the previous editions, the 11th TMA PhD School will take place on June 26th and 27th 2023 in Napoli, Italy. The school will include 4 tutorials, by 4 distinct lecturers, over a 2-days program. Lectures are accompanied by related practical lab sessions, where students have the opportunity to put into practice learned notions.

The 11th TMA PhD School will follow a tried and tested format, in which four topics are covered by field-renowned experts both from academia and industry. The topics will be introduced through tutorial-style lectures combined with hands-on lab work. Our topic for 2023 is Network Monitoring, Privacy and Applications in an Age of Accelerated Digitalization. To cover this topic, the program will focus on methods and techniques to understand how to monitor network resources while making sure that privacy and application performance are preserved.

The PhD school program will include social activities on both days, where students, lecturers and attendees of the main TMA conference will have the opportunity to interact informally. A social dinner would be organized.

The PhD school will take place at “Dipartimento di Architettura” (Via Forno Vecchio, 36, 80134 Napoli, https://maps.app.goo.gl/q3PWiVyL8A8wf9Js7?g_st=iw ) room SL3.7.

PhD School Speakers

The list of speakers for the 11th TMA PhD school includes:

  1. Cristel Pelsser holds a chair in critical embedded systems at UCLouvain. From 2015 to 2022 she was a full professor at the University of Strasbourg (France) where she led a team of researchers focusing on core Internet technologies. She spent nine years as a researcher working for ISPs in Japan. Her aim is to facilitate network operations, to avoid network disruptions and, when they occur, pinpoint the failures precisely in order to quickly fix the issues, understand them in order to design solutions to prevent recurrence. Cristel received the PhD degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium. Her talk will be focused on BGP data analysis.

  2. Pascal Mérindol is an Associate Professor at the University of Strasbourg. His research interests fall in the area of IP measurements and monitoring, Internet mapping, and routing. His tutorial will be about Measuring Routing Performance (Measuring Routing Performance, a P4 practice with Source Routing (SR)). Indeed, Measuring routing systems is complex for many reasons, in particular when probing the whole Internet and its numerous domains. However, not only their scale is a challenge, the protocols in use are difficult to predict and monitor as they evolve in time and can involve complex effects. In this lecture, students will take the example of SR and how it can implement basic segment lists in P4 (emulation with BMv2 and mininet). They will first review options enabled with SR and P4, looking at many routing problems and use-cases. The idea will be to develop basic primitives to monitor paths deployed with SR, i.e., verify connectivity, routes, latency and check the protocol performance and behavior in general.

  3. Luca Vassio is an Assistant Professor, in the Department of Control and Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Torino. His research interests include big data analysis, complex networks, machine learning and data mining. During his tutorial he will introduce to students the basic concepts of privacy-preserving data processing, introducing the main motivations, challenges, and opportunities of anonymization techniques. He will focus on k-anonymity (and its variants) as a classical approach to anonymizing tabular data, and give an overview of differential privacy as a flexible technique for performing privacy-preserving queries. During the tutorial, students will get their hands on a real case-study and learn how to anonymize a dataset before publishing or querying it using Python code and modern libraries.

  4. Kevin Vermeulen is a Full Researcher at Laboratoire d’analyse et d’architecture des systèmes (LAAS), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Toulouse, France. His work focuses on building networked measurement systems to better understand and improve the Internet. His lecture will focus on novel techniques for network monitoring.

Poster Sessions

Every student who registers will be asked to submit a poster about their own current research. Throughout the PhD School, there will be two poster sessions during the lunch break.

The program will also include an informal interactive session between students and the speakers, with the explicit goal of fostering “vertical” interaction between students and the speakers, and “horizontal” interaction between the students themselves. Students will have the opportunity to interview the speakers, asking for their expert opinion on general aspects (non-technical) of the current research dynamics in the field of traffic monitoring and analysis (e.g., how they see the prospective development of a particular research topic in the near future, or what are the key ingredients that drive the success of an experimental measurement platform, etc).

Registration

Registrations are now open, you can apply at https://hotcrp.info.ucl.ac.be/tma2023phd/

As the PhD school is popular, we encourage students to register early. Our goal is to admit as many students as possible but we do note that we might have limited room availability. To foster interaction with the TMA community, students are encouraged to join the TMA Conference in the days following the PhD School. PhD students participating to the school are invited to join the main TMA conference free of charge (except for those participants authors of an accepted paper).

Deadlines:

Application deadline: April 19th at 23:59 CEST
Tentative decision notification: April 24th

 

How to apply and Travel Grants

The price for registration for the TMA 2023 PhD school is EUR 250,00. This fee will be levied on all attending students, also those receiving travel grants (see below), as the travel grant rules from our sponsors require us to ask for a small own investment.

In order to apply, please submit the following as a single PDF document:

  • the title and abstract of your poster (in the fields required by the submissions system)

  • a current CV with contact information and e-mail address

  • a short personal statement, including: i) a description of the research subject followed by the student, and (ii) information that the applicant feels is relevant to support his/her application, e.g., why the PhD School attendance is important to the applicant’s research and career development;

In case you also want to apply for optional travel support, we ask you to also include:

  • a letter from your advisor which should: (i) confirm the applicant’s good standing in the institution; (ii) explain why the applicant would benefit from attending the TMA PhD School

  • the estimated expenses for attending the TMA PhD School (total, and breakdown by travel and lodging), and an indication of which cost items would need to be covered by the grant; if the applicant will be unable to attend the school without a travel grant, they should explain why this is the case (in this case the advisor’s letter should additionally explain the current funding status of the applicant and why the applicant is in need of the travel grant);

The organization will prioritize awarding of travel grants to students who will be unable to attend without a grant, and additionally based on diversity and the region from which the applicant has to travel, to ensure representation from traditionally underrepresented regions. In special cases, where the registration fee is also prohibitive, the organization may decide to waive the fee at its discretion.

Any decision made by the organization regarding attendance and awarding of travel grants is final. We note that reimbursements of travel grants may take up to several months to complete.

Notes

Please pay attention to the following details about the student travel grant application and reimbursement process:

  • The School will admit a limited number of students.

  • Students enrolled in PhD study programs will receive preference both in the admission to the School and the travel grant awarding.

  • Students admitted to the school are encouraged to attend the TMA conference.

  • We expect a student travel grant will significantly offset air fare and shared hotel accommodation. However, it may not fully cover these expenses, since our desire is to maximize participation by students.

  • In order to obtain reimbursement, you must provide original receipts for air fare and hotel expenses, along with boarding passes (plane or train) for both outbound and inbound journeys.

  • All students participating in the School are required to present a poster describing their research and to actively engage with all activities. Failing to do so will lead to admission rejection.

  • Please provide complete contact information. You will be notified via email, so make sure your email address is correct on your application.

Selected Posters

  • Ivan Bartolec “Performance estimation of encrypted video streaming considering end-user playback-related interactions”
  • Matteo Boffa “Large Language models for honeypot analysis”
  • Francesco Cerasuolo “Class Incremental Learning for Mobile Traffic Classification”
  • Elisa Chiapponi “BADPASS: Bots taking ADvantage of Proxy AS a Service”
    Davide Di Monda “Classification of Rare Mobile-App Encrypted Traffic Samples via Few-Shot Learning”
  • Pegah Golchin “Fast and Robust Intrusion Detection System in Software-Defined Networking”
  • Idio Guarino “Traffic analysis of communication and collaboration apps bloomed with Covid-19 via advanced Deep Learning approaches”
  • Ciro Guida “Synthetic and privacy-preserving Traffic Generation for training Machine- and Deep-Learning-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems”
  • Ebrima Jaw “Deployability, transparency, and room for improvement: Reproducing BGP hijacking detection techniques”
  • Orlando Eduardo Martínez Durive “A new approach to Spatial Diffusion of Mobile Network Traffic”
  • Sachit Mishra “A High-resolution Multi-region Service-level Mobile Data Traffic Cartography”
    Alfredo Nascita “Improving Performance, Reliability, and Feasibility in Multimodal Multitask Traffic Classification With XAI”
  • Fariba Osali “Identifying Sibling Prefixes in the Internet”
  • Selim Ozcan “The Internet delay evolution between metropolitan areas”
  • Fabio Palmese “Designing a Forensic-ready Wi-Fi Access Point for the Internet of Things”
  • Gianluca Perna “When Satellite is All You Have: Watching the Internet from 550 ms”
  • Wissem Soussi “ML-Driven Moving Target Defense for Network Slice Protection”
  • Florian Steurer “Measuring the IPv6-readiness in the Domain Name System”
  • Zeya Umayya “PTPerf: On the performance evaluation of Tor Pluggable Transports”
  • Florian Wiedner “Hardware-assisted Virtual Networking for low-latency network services”

Supporters

The PhD School and the Travel Grants are gently supported by: