Rüdiger Birkner wins EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award
Rüdiger Birkner, former doctoral student at the Networked Systems Group (NSG), led by Prof. Laurent Vanbever, just won the EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award for his PhD thesis "Improving Network Understanding".
The "EuroSys Roger Needham PhD award" is an annual prize awarded to a PhD student from a European University whose thesis is considered to be an exceptional, innovative contribution to knowledge in the systems area. Rüdiger's PhD thesis aims at improving network understanding, i.e. helping network engineers figure out what is going on in their networks and why. He was co-advised by Prof. Laurent Vanbever and Prof. Martin Vechev (D-INFK).
The thesis describes three practical systems, Net2Text, Config2Spec and Metha:
1. Net2Text allows engineers to ask questions about their network behavior, e.g. “How is the network forwarding Google traffic?”, that it then automatically answers to, e.g. "Google's traffic enters via 6 ingresses and mostly (85%) leaves via ISP 1".
2. Config2Spec automatically mines the formal specifications of a network configuration. As for programmes, network configurations indeed often lack a formal specification. Discovering which properties hold (or don't) automatically is therefore of great value to network engineers.
3. Metha systematically tests network analysis and verification tools for discovering bugs in their network models. Doing so, it was able to find several (new) bugs in well-known verification tools, most of which were confirmed by the developers themselves.
Congratulations!