Ram Durairajan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Oregon. With his colleague Prof. Reza Rejaie, Ram co-leads the Oregon Networking Research Group (ONRG). Ram earned his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and his B.Tech. in Information Technology from the College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG), Anna University. Ram's research has been recognized with NSF CRII award, UO faculty research award, best paper awards from ACM CoNEXT and ACM SIGCOMM GAIA, and has been covered in several fora (NYTimes, MIT Technology Review, Popular Science, Boston Globe, Gizmodo, Mashable, among others). In addition, his research on Internet topology has been named as "One of the 100 Greatest Innovations" and has won a number of awards including UW-Madison CS Department "Graduate Research Award" for best dissertation research in 2018 and the "Best of What's New" (in security category) by the Popular Science Magazine in 2017.

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS

• We are looking for motivated students to work with us at ONRG. For more information, please see here and here. Feel free to drop me an email with your CV.
• December, 2019: Our work on comparative characterization of multi-cloud connectivity to appear in PAM 2020!
• November, 2019: Bahador Yeganeh successfully defended his PhD! Congrats Dr. Yeganeh, who will be joining Snapchat!
• October, 2019: Bokeh, a framework for obfuscating physical infrastructure maps to appear in ACM SIGSPATIAL LocalRec workshop!
• September, 2019: Our work on using weak supervision to denoise Internet delay measurements will appear in IEEE ICMLA'19! Congrats to Anirudh (my intern in the Summer of 2018)!
• August, 2019: Matt Hall won the Ripple fellowship. Congrats Matt!

More highlights

• July, 2019: Our work on understanding Amazon's peering fabric will appear in ACM IMC'19! Congrats Bahador!
• June, 2019: Matt Hall won the Erwin & Gertrude Juilfs Scholarship. Congrats Matt!
• June, 2019: Our work on containerizing Internet measurements and managing the timezone database will appear in Applied Networking Research Workshop!
• June, 2019: Co-organizing a tutorial on Reconfigurable Networks (ReNets) with Klaus-Tycho Foerster, and Stefan Schmid.
• May, 2019: Nolan Rudolph won the VPRI Fellowship. Congrats Nolan!
• May, 2019: Excited to announce that Yamini Lakshmi Narasimhan and Shivaani Krishnakumar will be working with me at ONRG as an interns this summer!
• April, 2019: Excited to receive NSF CRII Award. Thanks NSF!
• April, 2019: Thrilled to receive UO Faculty Research Award!
• April, 2019: It was fun to be a judge and a problem contributor for the 23rd Annual UO Eugene Luks Programming Competition!
• January, 2019: Co-organizing the 1st ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Optical Systems Design (OptSys) with Chen Avin, Paolo Costa, Manya Ghobadi, and Stefan Schmid.
• October, 2018: ADAPT to appear in Elsevier FGCS'19! We show how to use pretense theory to effectively defend attacks (e.g., DDoS, APT, etc.) in cloud platforms.
• September, 2018: Two posters from ONRG will appear in ACM IMC'18. Congrats Matt and Chris!
• July, 2018: Our work on strategies for active IPv6 topology discovery to appear in ACM IMC'18!
• July, 2018: Our work on time synchronization system for the Internet of Things to appear in the 8th ACM International Conference on the Internet of Things.
• June, 2018: Multiple awards won by my students at ONRG: Anisha Malynur won the J. Donald Hubbard Family Scholarship, Bahador Yeganeh won the Gurdeep Pall Graduate Fellowship, and Chris Misa won the VPRI Fellowship. Congrats Bahador, Anisha, and Chris!
• June, 2018: Checkout our time synchronization system for the Internet of Things.
• June, 2018: Excited to annouce that Anirudh Muthukumar will be working with me at ONRG as an intern this summer!
• May, 2018: Check out our preprint on strategies for active IPv6 topology discovery.
• May, 2018: Our work (EMPol) on using web browing logs to assess user's candidate preference to appear in ACM SIGKDD'18!
• May, 2018: Our work on characterizing "The Edge" in mobile edge computing to appear in ACM MECOMM workshop co-located with ACM SIGCOMM'18!
• May, 2018: Our work on climate change risks to Internet infrastructure will appear in Applied Networking Research Workshop!
• May, 2018: Our work (TimeWeaver) on using NTP to measure one-way delays between arbitrary hosts in the Internet to appear in International Teletraffic Congress!
• April, 2018: Excited and honored to receive UW-Madison's Graduate Research Award!
• March, 2018: It was fun to be a judge and a problem contributor for the 22nd Annual UO Eugene Luks Programming Competition!
• March, 2018: Our work on virtualizing unused optical fibers (vFiber) will appear in USENIX NSDI'18 as a poster. Congrats Matt!
• March, 2018: Our work (Tezzeract) on using NTP to create an Internet-wide event detection framework to appear in IFIP Networking'18!
• January, 2018: Dolus to appear in ACM ICDCN'18! We show how to use pretense theory to effectively defend DDoS in cloud platforms.
• December, 2017: Attended and presented our work on climate change risks to Internet infrastructure at the Dagstuhl seminar (17511).
• November, 2017: Our work on automatic metadata generation (SoMeta) in IMC'17. Source code is available here. The work is completely reproducible.
• October, 2017: Brainchild from my PhD ("Internet Atlas") has been named one of The 100 greatest innovations of 2017 by Popular Science.
• October, 2017: Excited to receive an NSF Support Grant for attending Dagstuhl seminar. Thanks NSF!
• September 16, 2017: Started at UOregon CIS as an Assistant Professor!

RESEARCH

Ram's research vision is to create a "robust Internet" by taking a measure-and-then-build approach. To this end, Ram is interested in (a) developing new techniques and tools to empirically measure issues, properties and characteristics of the Internet; and (b) building decision-support systems to enhance Internet robustness by mitigating risks, outages, and cybersecurity issues identified using empirical measurements.

Broadly speaking, Ram has addressed research questions in several areas of computer networking including network measurements and analysis, network economics, large-scale network simulations, debugging and testing in software-defined networks, mobile and wireless communication, Internet of things, visualization, cyber attacks and security issues, and datacenter transport protocols.

Recent projects:

• Multi-cloud Computing: [Characterization -- PAM'20], [CloudX -- IMC'19]
• Internet Topology: [Yarrp6 -- IMC'18, arXiv'18], [InterTubes -- SIGCOMM'15], [POPsicle -- IMC'14], [Internet Atlas -- HotPlanet'13]
• Topology-aware Systems: [vFiber -- NSDI'18]
• Smart ML-based Tools: [NoMoNoise -- ICMLA'19], [MACE -- ANRW'19, IMC'18], [EMPol -- SIGKDD'18]
• Decision Support Systems: [CSI -- IMC'18][SoMeta -- IMC'17], [Techno-Economic Framework -- CCR'17, GAIA'16]
• Security and Privacy: [ADAPT -- FGCS'19], [Bokeh -- LocalRec'19], [Dolus -- ICDCN'18], [Bigfoot -- VizSec'16]
• Risks to Topology: [LightsOut -- ANRW'18], [RiskRoute -- CoNEXT'13]
• Time Synchronization: [TZDB -- ANRW'19], [Tezzeract -- Networking'18], [TimeWeaver -- ITC'18], [Time's Forgotten -- HotNets'15]
• Mobile, Edge, Wireless, and IoTs: [SPoT -- IoT'18, arXiv'18], [MEC -- MECOMM'18], [MNTP -- IMC'16]
• SDN Debugging and Simulation: [OFf -- CoNEXT'14], [pfs -- SummerSim'15]
• Datacenter Transport: [ATCP -- IWQoS'13]

Students:

• Graduate Students:
  • Matt Hall (2018 -- present)
  • Chris Misa (2019 -- present, co-advised with Prof. Rejaie)
  • Yukhe Lavinia (2019 -- present, co-advised with Prof. Rejaie)
• Graduate Students Matriculation:
  • Bahador Yeganeh (2017 -- 2020; co-advised with Prof. Rejaie; first employment: Snapchat, Inc.)
• Undergraduate Students:
  • Nick Hendersen (Winter 2020 -- present)
  • Nolan Rudolph (Winter 2019 -- present)
  • Yamini Lakshmi Narasimhan (Summer 2019)
  • Chris Misa (Summer 2018 -- Fall 2018)
  • Anirudh Muthukumar (Summer 2018)
  • Anisha Malynur (2017 -- 2018)
• I (have) also work(ed) with: Soheil Jamshidi (UO, 2017 -- present), Sathiya Kumaran Mani (UW-Madison, 2013 -- 2019), Meenakshi Syamkumar (UW-Madison, 2013 -- 2018), Andrew Hill (UO, 2017 -- 2018).

TEACHING

• CIS 322: Introduction to Software Engineering [F19], [S19], [F18], [W18]
• CIS 407/507: Seminar Research Colloquiums [S18], [W18], [F17]
• CIS 410/510: Internet Measurement [W20], [W19]
• CIS 410/510: Advanced Topics in Networking [F17]
• CIS 607: Internet Systems Seminar [W20], [W19]

PUBLICATIONS

2020

• A First Comparative Characterization of Multi-cloud Connectivity in Today's Internet
  Bahador Yeganeh, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Reza Rejaie and Walter Willinger
  In Proceedings of PAM'20, Oregon, USA, March 2020.
  [PAPER]    
  

2019

• Denoising Internet Delay Measurements using Weak Supervision
  Anirudh Muthukumar and Ramakrishnan Durairajan
  In Proceedings of IEEE ICMLA'19, Florida, USA, December 2019.
  [PAPER]    
  
  
• Bokeh: Anonymizing Physical Network Maps
  Yugali Gullapalli, Jeremy Koritzninsky, Meenakshi Syamkumar, Paul Barford, Ramakrishnan Durairajan and Joel Sommers
  In Proceedings of 3rd Workshop on Location-based Recommendations, Geosocial Networks and Geoadvertising (ACM LocalRec'19)
  co-located with ACM SIGSPATIAL'19, Chicago, IL, USA, November 2019.
  [PAPER]
  
  
• How Cloud Traffic Goes Hiding: A Study of Amazon's Peering Fabric
  Bahador Yeganeh, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Reza Rejaie and Walter Willinger
  In Proceedings of ACM IMC'19, Amsterdam, Netherlands, October 2019.
  [PAPER]    
  
  
• Can We Containerize Internet Measurements?
  Christopher Misa, Sudarsun Kannan and Ramakrishnan Durairajan
  In Proceedings of ACM/IRTF/ISOC Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW'19)
  co-located with IETF 105, Montreal, Canada, July 2019.
  [PAPER]    
  
  
• What time is it? Managing Time in the Internet
  Sathiya Kumaran Mani, Paul Barford, Ramakrishnan Durairajan and Joel Sommers
  In Proceedings of ACM/IRTF/ISOC Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW'19)
  co-located with IETF 105, Montreal, Canada, July 2019.
  [PAPER]    
  
  
• Intelligent Defense using Pretense against Targeted Attacks in Cloud Platforms
  Roshan Neupane, Travis Neely, Prasad Calyam, Nishant Chettri, Mark Vassell and Ramakrishnan Durairajan
  In Elsevier Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS)---Special Issue on Cyber Threat Intelligence and Analytics, 2019.
  [PAPER]    
  Impact factor: 4.639!

2018

• In the IP of the Beholder: Strategies for Active IPv6 Topology Discovery
  Robert Beverly, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, David Plonka and Justin P. Rohrer
  In Proceedings of ACM IMC'18, Boston, USA, November 2018.
  [PAPER]     [arXiv]
  
  
• A Compressed Sensing Approach to Taming the Internet Measurement Data Deluge (Poster)
  Matt Hall, Joel Sommers and Ramakrishnan Durairajan
  In Proceedings of ACM IMC'18, Boston, USA, November 2018.
  [POSTER]
  
  
• Dynamic Measurement of Container Network Latency (Poster)
  Christopher Misa and Ramakrishnan Durairajan
  In Proceedings of ACM IMC'18, Boston, USA, November 2018.
  [POSTER]
  
  
• A System for Clock Synchronization in an Internet of Things
  Sathiya Kumaran Mani, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Paul Barford and Joel Sommers
  In Proceedings of ACM IoT'18, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, October 2018.
  [PAPER]     [arXiv]
  
  
• TimeWeaver: Opportunistic One Way Delay Measurement via NTP
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Sathiya Kumaran Mani, Paul Barford, Rob Nowak and Joel Sommers
  In Proceedings of ITC 30, Vienna, Austria, September 2018.
  [PAPER]     [arXiv]
  
  
• Deployment Characteristics of "The Edge" in Mobile Edge Computing
  Meenakshi Syamkumar, Paul Barford and Ramakrishnan Durairajan
  In Proceedings of 2nd Workshop on Mobile Edge Communications (ACM MECOMM'18)
  co-located with ACM SIGCOMM'18, Budapest, Hungary, August 2018.
  [PAPER]
  
  
• Assessing Candidate Preference through Web Browsing History
  Giovanni Comarela, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Paul Barford, Dino Christenson and Mark Crovella
  In Proceedings of ACM SIGKDD'18, London, UK, August 2018.
  [PAPER]     [PREVIEW VIDEO]
  
  
• Lights Out: Climate Change Risk to Internet Infrastructure
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Carol Barford and Paul Barford
  In Proceedings of ACM/IRTF/ISOC Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW'18)
  co-located with IETF 102, Montreal, Canada, July 2018.
  [PAPER]    
  
  
• Wrinkles in Time: Detecting Internet-wide Events via NTP
  Meenakshi Syamkumar, Sathiya Kumaran Mani, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Paul Barford and Joel Sommers
  In Proceedings of IFIP Networking'18, Zurich, Switzerland, May 2018.
  [PAPER]
  
  
• vFiber: Virtualizing Unused Optical Fibers (Extended Abstract)
  Matt Hall, Vijay Chidambaram and Ramakrishnan Durairajan
  In Proceedings of USENIX NSDI'18, Renton, WA, USA, April 2018.
  [POSTER]
  
  
• Dolus: Cyber Defense using Pretense against DDoS Attacks in Cloud Platforms
  Roshan Neupane, Travis Neely, Nishant Chettri, Mark Vassell, Yuanxun Zhang, Prasad Calyam and Ramakrishnan Durairajan
  In Proceedings of ACM ICDCN'18, Varanasi, India, January 2018.
  [PAPER]    
  Invited Paper

2017

• Automatic Metadata Generation for Active Measurement
  Joel Sommers, Ramakrishnan Durairajan and Paul Barford
  In Proceedings of ACM IMC'17, London, UK, November 2017.
  [PAPER]     [PROJECT WEBSITE]    
  
  
• Topology-aware Perspective for Enhacing Robustness in the Internet
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan
  Ph.D. Thesis, University of Wisconsin - Madison, August 2017.
  
  
• A Techno-Economic Approach for Broadband Deployment in Underserved Areas
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan and Paul Barford
  In proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM CCR'17, April 2017.
  [PAPER]    

2016

• MNTP: Enhancing Time Synchronization for Mobile Devices
  Sathiya Kumaran Mani, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Paul Barford and Joel Sommers
  In Proceedings of ACM IMC'16, Santa Monica, CA, USA, November 2016.
  [PAPER]
  
  
• Bigfoot: A Geo-based Visualization Methodology for Detecting BGP Threats
  Meenakshi Syamkumar, Ramakrishnan Durairajan and Paul Barford
  In Proceedings of IEEE VizSec'16, Baltimore, MD, USA, October 2016.
  [PAPER]
  
  
• A Techno-Economic Framework for Broadband Deployment in Underserved Areas
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan and Paul Barford
  In proceedings of ACM GAIA Workshop (ACM GAIA'16)
  co-located with ACM SIGCOMM'16, Florianopolis, Brazil, August 2016.
  [PAPER]     [SLIDES]    
  Best Paper Nomination to ACM SIGCOMM CCR

2015

• Time's Forgotten: Using NTP to Understand Internet Latency
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Sathiya Kumaran Mani, Joel Sommers and Paul Barford
  In Proceedings of ACM HotNets'15, Philadelphia, PA, USA, November 2015.
  [PAPER]     [PROJECT WEBSITE]     [SLIDES]    
  
  
• InterTubes: A Study of the US Long-haul Fiber-optic Infrastructure
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Paul Barford, Joel Sommers and Walter Willinger
  In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM'15, London, UK, August 2015.
  [PAPER]    
  Coverage: MIT Technology Review, Popular Science, Gizmodo, TechRepublic, VoA,
                     NYTimes, Boston Globe, Badger Herald, Business Insider, Mashable
  
  
• pfs: Parallelized, Flow-based Network Simulation
  Mukta Gupta, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Meenakshi Syamkumar, Paul Barford and Joel Sommers
  In Proceedings of ACM SummerSim'15, Chicago, IL, USA, July 2015.
  [PAPER]    
  

2014

• Controller-agnostic SDN Debugging
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Joel Sommers and Paul Barford
  In Proceedings of ACM CoNEXT'14, Sydney, Australia, December 2014.
  [PAPER]     [SLIDES]    
  Best Short Paper Award
  
  
• Layer 1-Informed Internet Topology Measurement
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Joel Sommers and Paul Barford
  In Proceedings of ACM IMC'14, Vancouver, Canada, November 2014.
  [PAPER]     [SLIDES]    
  
  
• OFf: Bugspray for Openflow (Extended Abstract)
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Joel Sommers and Paul Barford
  In Proceedings of ACM HotSDN Workshop (ACM HotSDN'14)
  co-located with ACM SIGCOMM'14, Chicago, IL, USA, August 2014.
  [PAPER]     [POSTER]    
  

2013

• RiskRoute: A Framework for Mitigating Network Outage Threats
  Brian Eriksson, Ramakrishnan Durairajan and Paul Barford
  In Proceedings of ACM CoNEXT'13, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, December 2013.
  [PAPER]     [SLIDES]    
  
  
• Internet Atlas: A Geographic Database of the Internet
  Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Subhadip Ghosh, Xin Tang, Paul Barford and Brian Eriksson
  In proceedings of 5th ACM HotPlanet Workshop (ACM HotPlanet'13)
  co-located with ACM SIGCOMM'13, Hong Kong, August 2013.
  [PAPER]     [PROJECT WEBSITE]     [SLIDES]    
  Coverage: New Scientist, Technology.org
  Discovery Challenge Research Award
  One of the 100 Great Innovations of 2017
  
  
• Adaptive Data Transmission in the Cloud
  Wenfei Wu, Yizheng Chen, Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Dongchan Kim, Ashok Anand and Aditya Akella
  In Proceedings of IEEE/ACM IWQoS'13, Montreal, Canada, June 2013.
  [PAPER]     [TECH REPORT]    
  

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

Organizing Committees

• 2020: General Co-chair, PAM
• 2019: Program Co-chair, OptSys

Program Committees

• 2020: ACM SIGMETRICS, PAM, IEEE Global Internet Symposium, IEEE/IFIP TMA
• 2019: ACM IMC, ACM SIGMETRICS, ACM CoNEXT, PAM, IEEE/IFIP TMA, ACM SIGCOMM CFI
• 2018: ACM SIGCOMM CCR, IEEE/IFIP TMA, UO Undergrad Research Symposium, ACM CoNEXT Student Workshop, ACM SIGCOMM Artifacts Evaluation, ACM CoNEXT Artifacts Evaluation
• 2017: ACM SIGCOMM CCR, ACM IMC (Shadow PC)
• 2013: ACM SIGCOMM CCR

Journal Refereeing

• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
• IEEE Transactions on Services Computing
• IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
• IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
• Elsevier Future Generation Computer Systems

Last Modified: December 2019