Thanks to generous support from Rakuten Mobile, we're looking to
appoint two PhD students to work on a new research project to develop
highly decentralised models for edge computation, leveraging modern
network transport protocols and new programming models to manage edge
compute infrastructure at scale.
The
24th Scottish Networking Event will be held online on 6 January
2021, hosted by the University of Edinburgh. The Scottish Networking
Event, SCONE, is an informal gathering of networking and systems
researchers in and around Scotland.
The School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow is
offering up to 17 studentships to support PhD research for students
starting in 2021. Funding is available to support tuition fees for
both home and international students, and in most cases to support
living expenses at the recommended UKRI rate (currently £15,285 per
annum) in addition.
Two members of my research group recently gave talks about our work
on parsing protocol standards.
Stephen McQuistin spoke in the
UK Next Generation Networks seminar series, giving an update on the
work presented in our
ANRW'20 paper, outlining the system architecture and showing how
our system can be used to describe the format of real-world protocols
such as TCP. Vivian Band
spoke about
Rust for Safer Protocol Development as part of RustFest Global 2020,
describing our approach to parsing protocols with a focus on the back-end
code generation, and our use of Rust
with the nom parser combinator
framework to generate safe parsing code.
Edge compute infrastructure is an essential part of modern networks,
but existing approaches to managing such infrastructure are complex
and do not scale. Thanks to generous support from Rakuten Mobile, we're
looking to appoint a Research Associate and two PhD students to work on
a new research project to develop highly decentralised models for edge
computation, leveraging modern network transport protocols and new
programming models to manage edge compute infrastructure at scale.
Stephen McQuistin presented our paper on
Parsing Protocol Standards to Parse Standard Protocols at the
ACM/IRTF Applied Networking Research Workshop 2020 last week. In
this paper we consider the problem of how to parse Internet protocols
standards documents to generate a typed representation of protocol
data units, and from that to generate parsing and serialisation code
to ease implementation of the protocol. The goal is to make it easier
to implement, test, and validate network protocols, and to help improve
security by removing the need to write protocol parsing code by hand.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual UK
Multi-Service Networks workshop,
that usually takes place at The Cosener's House in Abingdon, was held
online instead. My students
Mihail Yanev and Vivian Band
both gave talks at the workshop, and I'm pleased that Vivian was
jointly awarded the Brendan Murphy memorial prize for best PhD
student presentation. Many congratulations!
I'm pleased to announce that Rakuten Mobile have agreed to support
our work on Edge Computation and the Future of Transport. Look out
for more information in the coming weeks, but for now see the
press
release for details.
I was pleased to join a panel discussion at the IFIP Networking 2020
Workshop on the Future of Internet Transport today, along with Jana
Iyengar and Alessandro Ghedini, and moderated by Gorry Fairhurst. The
slides
I used to frame my position are available, and if you're registered for
the conference,
a recording of the discussion is also available.
We released an update to our Python library for access to the IETF
Datatracker and RFC Index
(GitHub,
PyPI). The library
is supporting infrastructure for our research, that we use to find
and retrieve new drafts to test our protocol parsing and generation
tools, and to support bibliometric analysis of IETF standards
documents.
Welcome to Dejice Jacob, who's joined our project on Improving Protocol
Standards. He will be working on improving our tooling to extract packet
descriptions from IETF standards documents, and on integration with the
IETF datatracker.
Good luck to my PhD student
Mihail Yanev, who recently started a six-month internship working with
Paul Harvey at Rakuten
Mobile research and innovation lab, in Tokyo.
The
23rd Scottish Networking Event will be held at the University of
Aberdeen on 6 March 2020. The Scottish Networking Event, SCONE, is an
informal gathering of networking and systems researchers in and around
Scotland.