UCSD CSE - Systems and Networking

Nishant Bhaskar (Ph.D. 2023) → MQ Prime
Ariana Mirian (Ph.D. 2023) → Censys
Audrey Randall (Ph.D. 2023) → Google
Lixiang Ao (Ph.D. 2022) → Databricks
Gautam Akiwate (Ph.D. 2022) → Stanford postdoc
Sam Crow (Ph.D. 2022) → Meta
Haochen Huang (Ph.D. 2022) → Whova
Yizhou Shan (Ph.D. 2022) → Huawei Cloud
Bingyu Shen (Ph.D. 2022) → Meta
Alex Gamero-Garrido (Ph.D. 2021) → NEU pdoc → UC Davis
Rob McGuinness (Ph.D. 2021) → UCSD ECE Postdoc
Chengcheng Xiang (Ph.D. 2021) → Meta

Zachary Blanco (M.S. 2023) → IBM
Abhishek Vijeev (M.S. 2023) → Georgia Tech Ph.D. program
Yudong Wu (M.S. 2023)
Stephan Chenette (M.S. 2021) → Co-Founder and CTO AttackIQ
Xuhao Luo (M.S. 2021) → UIUC Ph.D. program

Yunxiang Chi (B.S. 2024) → Princeton Ph.D. program
Isabel Suizo (B.S. 2022) → Google → CMU Ph.D. program
Jie Jeff Xu (B.S. 2022) → Georgia Tech Ph.D. program
Godwin Pang (B.S. 2021) → Confluent
Priyal Suneja (B.S. 2021) → UW Ph.D. program

Grant Ho (postdoc 2021-2023) → University of Chicago
Alex Marder (postdoc 2019-2020, Res. Scientist 2020-2023) → Johns Hopkins University

[All Alumni]

Recent News

October 22— Each year, the Center for Networked Systems (CNS) awards the Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship and the Alan Turing Memorial Teradata Scholarship to one or more students for their academic commitment, particularly in networked systems, and their ongoing support for the LGBTQ community. This year the scholarship was awarded to Jonathan Ty for his academic achievements and his community engagement and leadership efforts. Congrats Jonathan!

October 3— Yiying Zhang became one of the first-ever Google Academic Research Award (GARA) winners for her project, "Learned Tiered Memory System: Optimizing Tiered Memory Performance with ML-Based Memory Access Pattern Prediction". Congratulations Yiying!

September 9— We just learned that Katherine Izhikevich has been named to this year's class of UCSD ACRS Scholars. Congrats Katherine!

May 23— Congratulations to Rajdeep Das for defending his dissertation, "Multiprocessing and Runtime Programmability on Virtualized RMT Switches". After a well-deserved vacation, Rajdeep will be starting at Microsoft Azure where he will be working on advanced networking devices. Congrats Rajdeep!

July 18— Today Yibo Guo defended his dissertation, "Towards Leaner Data Centers: Energy Efficiency and Carbon Savings through Network Optimization". Yibo is going to be joining Google where he'll contribute to solving their systems and networking challenges. We're proud of you Yibo!

July 15— Today Anil Yelam defended his dissertation, "Flexible, Application-Guided Paging for Far Memory". After a brief, well-deserved break, Anil will be (re-)joining Google full time to improve the efficiency of their AI Hypercomputer--or something like that. Great job, Anil!

July 10— Congratulations to Hadi Givehchian, Nishant Bhaskar, Alexander Redding, Han Zhao, Aaron Schulman, and Dinesh Bharadia for their 2024 IEEE Security & Privacy paper on obfuscating BLE fingerprints. The paper describes a practical approach for preventing attackers from tracking mobile users, effectively fixing a vulnerability they identified in previous work.

June 27— Congrats to Amy Ousterhout and Sysnet affiliate Earlence Fernandes for winning Google Research Scholar awards!

June 7— Sysnet represents for the second year in a row! Congrats to Alex Bellon and Alisha Ukani for sweeping the "Service and Leadership" category of the CSE Doctoral awards and Katherine Izhikevich for winning the Research category for CSE Masters awards (Katherine is joining us a Ph.D. student starting this fall so she's set a high bar to start). Congrats everyone!

May 23— Congratulations to Stewart Grant for defending his dissertation, "Disaggregated Data Structures: Sharing and contention with RDMA and Programmable Networks". Stew is moving on to Roblox, where he will apply his talents to scaling their virutal environment. Congrats Stew!

February 1— Sysnet members have a long history with USENIX. Many of us remember when the only USENIX Conferences were "Winter" and "Summer", and several of us were there at the first OSDI and the first NSDI, as USENIX became a dominant academic publisher in our field. Thus, we could not be more proud that our own George Porter has been elected to the USENIX board. Keep the flame burning George!

January 31— Congrats to Stefan Savage, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick (and Geoff Voelker, the application form only allowed two names) and their students for receiving one of the first Google "Trust and Safety" Research Awards for their work focused on using Large Language Models in scam honeypots. And we hear they wrote the proposal without any help from AI!

January 17— Each year the Jacbos School offers awards for faculty demonstrating exceptional Teaching or Mentorship. We were not surprised to learn that Pat Pannuto received the Outstanding Graduate Mentor award (Aaron Schulman having won just last year!) nor that Geoff Voelker received the sole award for "Outstanding Faculty Mentor". We were not surprised, but we are proud! Contrats folks!

[All News]

Recent Publications

Understanding the Efficacy of Security Training in Practice, Grant Ho, Ariana Mirian, Elisa Luo, Khang Tong, Euyhyun Lee, Lin Liu, Christopher A. Longhurst, Christian Dameff, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2025.

Eden: Developer-Friendly Application-Integrated Far Memory, Anil Yelam, Stewart Grant, Saarth Deshpande, Nadav Amit, Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Amy Ousterhout, Marcos K. Aguilera, and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the 22nd ACM/USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Philadelphia, PA, April 2025.

InferCept: Efficient Intercept Support for Augmented Large Language Model Inference, Reyna Abhyankar, Zijian He, Vikranth Srivatsa, Hao Zhang, and Yiying Zhang, Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, Vienna, Austria, July 2024.

Sublet Your Subnet: Inferring IP Leasing in the Wild, Ben Du, Romain Fontugne, Cecilia Testart, Alex C. Snoeren, and kc Claffy, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Madrid, Spain, November 2024.

Give and Take: An End-To-End Investigation of Giveaway Scam Conversion Rates, Enze Liu, George Kappos, Eric Mugnier, Luca Invernizzi, Stefan Savage, David Tao, Kurt Thomas, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Sarah Meiklejohn, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Madrid, Spain, November 2024.

Realizing RotorNet: Toward Practical Microsecond Scale Optical Networking, William M. Mellette, Alex Forencich, Rukshani Athapathu, Alex C. Snoeren, George Papen, and George Porter, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Sydney, Australia, August 2024.

Prudentia: Findings of an Internet Fairness Watchdog, Adithya Abraham Philip, Rukshani Athapathu, Ranysha Ware, Fabian Francis Mkocheko, Alexis Schlomer, Mengrou Shou, Zili Meng, Srinivasan Seshan, and Justine Sherry, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Sydney, Australia, August 2024.

DRust: Language-Guided Distributed Shared Memory with Fine Granularity, Full Transparency, and Ultra Efficiency, Haoran Ma, Yifan Qiao, Shi Liu, Shan Yu, Yuanjiang Ni, Qingda Lu, Jiesheng Wu, Yiying Zhang, Miryung Kim, and Harry Xu, Proceedings of the 18th ACM/USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), Santa Clara, CA, USA, July 2024.

Using Honeybuckets to Characterize Cloud Storage Scanning in the Wild, Katherine Izhikevich, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage, and Liz Izhikevich, Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, Vienna, Austria, July 2024.

Unfiltered: Measuring Cloud-based Email Filtering Bypasses, Sumanth Rao, Enze Liu, Grant Ho, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), Singapore, May 2024.

The Double Edged Sword: Identifying Authentication Pages and their Fingerprinting Behavior, Asuman Senol, Alisha Ukani, Dylan Cutler, and Igor Bilogrevic, Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), Singapore, May 2024.

Practical Obfuscation of BLE Physical-Layer Fingerprints on Mobile Devices, Hadi Givehchian, Nishant Bhaskar, Alexender Redding, Han Zhao, Aaron Schulman, and Dinesh Bharadia, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2024.

Efficient Microsecond-scale Blind Scheduling with Tiny Quanta, Zhihong Luo, Sam Son, Dev Bali, Emmanuel Amaro, Amy Ousterhout, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker, Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), La Jolla, CA, April 2024.

Effective Bug Detection with Unused Definitions, Li Zhong, Chengcheng Xiang, Haochen Huang, Bingyu Shen, Eric Mugnier, and Yuanyuan Zhou, Proceedings of the ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), Athens, Greece, April 2024.

SuperNIC: An FPGA-Based, Cloud-Oriented SmartNIC, Will Lin, Yizhou Shan, Ryan Kosta, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Yiying Zhang, Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, Montery, CA, USA, March 2024. (Best Paper Runner-Up).

Network Topology Facilitates Internet Traffic Control in Autocracies, Eda Keremoğlu, Nils B. Weidmann, Alexander Gamero-Garrido, Esteban Carisimo, Alberto Dainotti, and Alex C. Snoeren, PNAS Nexus 3(3), March 2024.

[All Publications]

Affiliations