Projects

Thank you for thinking of NAL​​​​​​!

PhD semester projects

Contact: Katerina.

MS theses (PDMs) and MS/BA semester projects 

Our long-term goal is to improve Internet transparency, and we keep looking for new ways to achieve that. At the moment, we are looking for help to explore two ideas. Each of them could be an MS thesis (PDM) or (in a simpler form) an MS or advanced BA semester project:

  • Using online games to map Internet latency: We collect video-game streaming footage from Twitch and extract the latency numbers to build a universal map of Internet latency. We are looking for a motivated student to help us build a gaming extension that streamers can install to share information with us. Contact: Catalina
  • Using edge caching to map Internet bandwidth: Most content that end-users download from the Internet today comes from edge caches (that are managed by public or private clouds). By measuring the cache hit rate achieved when downloading different content from different caches, we can infer the approximate popularity of each content in each area of the world. This, in turn, can give us information on the bandwidth available to different end-users (e.g., end-users with more bandwidth tend to download higher-quality videos). We are looking for a motivated student to help us measure cache hit rates from different vantage points around the word and use the measurements to create a map of Internet bandwidth. Contact: Abdullah

To enjoy either of these topics, you must have enjoyed your Computer Systems and/or Networks courses (including all those quirky delay computations and TCP diagrams).  

Before we start working together, it’s important for both you and us to agree that the project matches your interests and background. So, if you are interested, please contact us to schedule a meeting.

Cybersecurity MS

The above topics do not qualify as security or privacy topics, so they are not good matches for Cybersecurity MS semester projects. Occasionally we do offer such projects, but unfortunately this won’t be the case in Fall 2024 and Spring 2025.