| Professor: | David Choffnes |
| Room: | Richards Hall 235 |
| Time: | Mondays and Thursdays 11:45AM-1:30PM |
| Office Hours: | By appointment |
| Teaching Assistants: | N/A |
| TA Email: | N/A |
| Lab Hours: | N/A |
| Class Forum: | HotCRP |
| Paper List: | HotCRP |
The Internet has brought decades of innovative techniques to provide global connectivity at a physical, economic, and social level. This connectivity has created many benefits, ranging from reliable network connectivity to support remote education and employment, to improved access to information, to online systems that enable social connections over time and across vast distances. However, this connectivity also has led to significant harms, such as inequity in connectivity contributing to the digital divide, the pervasiveness of mis/disinformation, and online systems that exhibit systemic bias in the content they make available. Frustrating efforts to understand these harms or benefits is the fact that the Internet is decentralized by design, many online systems are closed to external observers, and the behavior of Internet systems is highly dynamic.
This seminar will focus on how—despite these challenges—we can extract meaningful insights about Internet behavior through rigorous empirical measurements. The course offers a broad view of what constitutes "Internet measurement": ranging from low-level computer networking topics, to emergent properties of online systems such as social networks and algorithmic decision making. The seminar will focus on topics that include principles of Internet measurement, seminal work on important areas of measurement, ethics of Internet measurement, and evaluation of recent and ongoing work. The course entails reading papers, engaging in discussions, and providing reports (written and oral) on a semester-long measurement research project.
The basic requirement is that you are a Ph.D. student who has taken an upper-level networking course or who has experience with research, preferably both. Exceptions will be handled on a case-by-case basis.
Note for MS/Undergrad students You may sign up for this course only with prior consent from the instructor (me!). To be considered for this class, you must be interested in research in the field, and have done exceptionally well in a computer networking course at Northeastern.
The class forum will be on Piazza. Why Piazza? Because they have a nice web interface, as well as iPhone and Android apps. Piazza is the best place to ask questions about projects, programming, debugging issues, exams, etc. If you have questions while in lecture feel free to post to folders for the lecture. I will also use Piazza to broadcast announcements to the class. Bottom line: unless you have a private problem, post to Piazza before writing me an e-mail.
| Meeting Date | Topic | Readings | Discusison Lead | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan. 6 | Welcome: Overview and Challenges | How to Read a Paper | DRC | Join HotCRP |
| Jan. 9 | Introduction to Internet Measurement: Early days (worm) | Code-Red (2002) | TBA | IMC Test of Time Award (2022) |
| Jan. 13 | Introduction to Internet Measurement: Background radiation | Internet background radiation (2004) | TBA | IMC Test of Time Award (2022) |
| Jan. 16 | Foundational Internet measurement research: Stats | Wide-area traffic: the failure of Poisson modeling (1994) | TBA | |
| Jan. 20 | No class: MLK Day | |||
| Jan. 23 | Foundational Internet measurement research: View from the edge | Netalyzr (2010) | TBA | IMC Test of Time Award (2022) |
| Jan. 27 | Ethics: Overview | Belmont Report Menlo Report Ethical considerations in network measurement papers |
TBA | Project proposals due |
| Jan. 30 | Ethics: Examples | Encore (2015) Quack: Scalable Remote Measurement of Application-Layer Censorship |
TBA | |
| Feb. 3 | Internet structure: Interdomain traffic | Internet Interdomain traffic (2010) | TBA | Optional: E2E routing behavior (1995) |
| Feb. 6 | Internet structure: Paths/routes | Paris Traceroute (2006) | TBA | IMC Test of Time Award (2022) |
| Feb. 10 | Transport: TCP | Gentle Aggression (2013) | TBA | |
| Feb. 13 | Transport: BBR | Modeling BBR’s Interactions with Loss-Based Congestion Control (2019) | TBA | |
| Feb. 17 | No class: Presidents Day | |||
| Feb. 20 | Scanning the Internet: IPs | ZMap (2013) | TBA | |
| Feb. 24 | Scanning the Internet: Web | Online tracking (2016) | TBA | |
| Feb. 27 | Online social networks: Ancient times | Measurement and analysis of online social networks (2007) | TBA | SIGCOMM Test of Time Award (2017) |
| Mar. 3 and Mar. 6 | No class: Spring Break | |||
| Mar. 10 | Online algorithms: Prices | Price Discrimination (2014) | TBA | |
| Mar. 13 | Online algorithms: Google search engagement | Google Search (2023) | TBA | Optional: Uber study |
| Mar. 17 | DNS | Impact of DNS DDoS (2022) | TBA | |
| Mar. 20 | Security: Web | Heartbleed (2014) | Moinak | |
| Mar. 24 | Security: Routing | Mind your MANRS (2022) | TBA | |
| Mar. 27 | Over the air: Wireless and Mobile | Understanding 5G (2020) Mobile trackers (2018) |
TBA | |
| Mar. 31 | Events: CoVID-19 | Lockdown effect (2020) | TBA | |
| Apr. 3 | Events: Weather | Links under the weather (2019) | TBA | |
| Apr. 7 | IMC '24 Highlight: Best Paper | On the (In)Accessibility of Web Ads: Measurement and User Study | TBA | Project drafts due in HotCRP |
| Apr. 10 | IMC '24 Highlight: Best Student Paper | DiffAudit: Auditing Privacy Practices of Online Services for Children and Adolescents | TBA | |
| Apr. 14 | Project presentations | TBA | Peer reviews due in HotCRP | |
| Apr. 17 | Project presentations | TBA | Peer reviews due in HotCRP | |
| Apr. 24 | Final reports due |
The focus of this course will be on lectures, presentation of research papers, discussion, and original reseach projects/presentations. Thus, I do not require that you get a textbook. However, a textbook may be useful if you are not totally comfortable with fundamentals, or if you just want to have a handy reference book. I will post suggestions if requested.
As previously mentioned, a large component of this course will be reading important papers from the Internet measurement research community. Some of these papers are classics: older, but intrumental in guiding measurments of today's Internet systems. Other papers will be more contemporary, and focus on a broader set of Internet-connected systems that impact our lives online and in the real world. Papers will be posted before the start of the semester.
One to two papers will be assigned as reading before each meeting. Each paper will be presented by one student, after which we will have a discussion about questiosn raised during the presentation, the merit/impact of the work, and other comments inspired by the research.
During class, students may be called at random to answer questions about papers. Thus, although attendance in meetings is not required, if you get called and you are not present (or you haven't read the paper), then you are busted.
25% of your final grade will be based on participation in the form of giving presentations and participating in discussions.
Each student will take on an original research project that entails Internet measurements. As you might imagine, the variety of topics that fit this descritpoin is vast. This project will culminate with a project presentation in front of your peers (20') and a writeup of results that is no shorter than 6 pages (in standard sig-alternate format). The project will be worth 75% of your grade: 10% for the proposal, 25% for the presentation, 40% for the writeup.
Students must provide the instructor with a project proposal no more than 2 pages in length, and must obtain approval for the instructor. Failure to do so will result in a zero for the project. The proposal must include: (1) a brief project summary, (2) A description of the problem being solved, (3) a brief outline of research questions you will answer during your work, (4) a short description of how you will address these questions, and (5) a timeline for completing the work described in (4).
I expect students to work alone on projects, but will make exceptions if the research requires a small group.
There will be no exams. Instead, your project presentation will serve as an oral exam.
| Project proposal: | 10% |
| Project presentation and writeup: | 25% and 40% |
| Participation: | 25% |
To calculate final grades, I simply sum up the points obtained by each student (the points will sum up to some number x out of 100) and then use the following scale to determine the letter grade: [0-60] F, [60-62] D-, [63-66] D, [67-69] D+, [70-72] C-, [73-76] C, [77-79] C+, [80-82] B-, [83-86] B, [87-89] B+, [90-92] A-, [93-100] A. I do not curve the grades in any way.
This is a pretty straightforward seminar. Please don't turn in your project late, or miss your presentation. If I can't grade you before the grade-submission deadline, I'll have to give you a zero.
Projects must be entirely the work of the students turning them in, i.e. you and your group members. Copying code or text from other students (past or present) or websites is strictly prohibited. If you have any questions about using a particular resource, ask the course staff or post a question to the class forum.
All students are subject to the Northeastern University Academic Integrity Policy. All cases of suspected plagiarism or other academic dishonesty will be referred to the Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution (OSCCR).
You cannot use generative AI tools (ChatGPT, Bard, etc) in a copy/paste manner to write your papers, code, paper reviews, or presentations. You can, however, use them to assist with these items only to the extent that it provides suggestions for improving your text. In other words, your use of these tools should be similar to IDE suggestions and spelling/grammar checkers.
Consequences of Violating Academic Integrity Policy
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects individuals from sex or gender-based discrimination, including discrimination based on gender-identity, in educational programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance.
Northeastern’s Title IX Policy prohibits Prohibited Offenses, which are defined as sexual harassment, sexual assault, relationship or domestic violence, and stalking. The Title IX Policy applies to the entire community, including male, female, transgender students, faculty and staff.
If you or someone you know has been a survivor of a Prohibited Offense, confidential support and guidance can be found through University Health and Counseling Services staff (http://www.northeastern.edu/uhcs/) and the Center for Spiritual Dialogue and Service clergy members (http://www.northeastern.edu/spirituallife/). By law, those employees are not required to report allegations of sex or gender-based discrimination to the University.
Alleged violations can be reported non-confidentially to the Title IX Coordinator within The Office for Gender Equity and Compliance at: titleix@northeastern.edu and/or through NUPD (Emergency 617.373.3333; Non-Emergency 617.373.2121). Reporting Prohibited Offenses to NUPD does NOT commit the victim/affected party to future legal action.
Faculty members are considered "responsible employees" at Northeastern University, meaning they are required to report all allegations of sex or gender-based discrimination to the Title IX Coordinator.
In case of an emergency, please call 911.
Please visit http://www.northeastern.edu/titleix for a complete list of reporting options and resources both on- and off-campus.
Students who wish to receive academic services and/or accommodations should visit the Disability Resource Center at 20 Dodge Hall or call (617) 373-2675. If you have already done so, please provide your letter from the DRC to me early in the semester so that I can arrange those accommodations.