We study the Internet as a global, critical infrastructure, one that billions of people depend on but which we still struggle to observe, understand, and secure. Our work spans large-scale networked systems, Internet measurement, and distributed systems, with an emphasis on problems that emerge when the Internet meets the real world: natural disasters, geopolitical conflict, consolidation, and increasingly opaque data-plane and control-plane behavior.
Our approach is to make the Internet observable from the outside. Those who operate its infrastructure rarely disclose how it works or fails, so we find other ways to see it, often by turning systems that already exist into measurement instruments. CDN redirections became a network positioning service (Ono, used by 1.5 million people). Peer-to-peer clients became vantage points at the network edge (Dasu). DNS names, decoded by language models, became a map of network infrastructure (The Aleph). Traceroutes, mapped onto the ocean floor, became a view of submarine cables (Calypso). We are particularly interested in the hidden dependencies that shape global connectivity, from submarine cable networks and transit ASes to DNS resolvers, CDNs, cloud providers, and service interconnections, and in how these dependencies affect resilience, sovereignty, and user experience.
We pick our own problems, looking for the ones that matter before they are widely recognized. Much of our work is a first look, whether at broadband reliability, in-flight connectivity, the criticality of submarine cables, or governments’ reliance on foreign infrastructure seen from inside the country itself. Our approach is unapologetically experimental. We build and deploy real systems, and we take the limits of inference seriously: an outside view is only useful if we know where it stops.
If you are interested in joining the group, please start with our research interest questionnaire — a considered set of answers there is far more likely to get a reply than email. We are always looking for PhD students who are excited about experimental systems, Internet-scale measurement, and making sense of the complex infrastructure that keeps the world online.