Future Internet Infrastructure Research at UMass Amherst and at the Isenberg School

I was delighted to hear this morning from Karen Hayes, the Director of Research Communications and Outreach, that the Feature Article, UMass Amherst experts are driving the future of Internet infrastructure, is now online on the ResearchNext website.

The faculty from Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Isenberg School of Management that appear in the article were interviewed last summer.

It is truly amazing that at UMass Amherst there are two (out of the five) funded National Science Foundation (NSF) Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects.

As the article notes, my doctoral students and I are working with Professor Tilman Wolf of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering on the FIA project that we are calling ChoiceNet. Our collaborators include colleagues at the University of Kentucky (Professors Ken Calvert and Jim Griffioen), NCState (Professors Rudra Duuta and George Rouskas), and RENCI an UNC (Dr. Ilya Baldine). My doctoral students who have been funded on this NSF grant are: Sara Saberi, who is an Isenberg Scholar Award recipient, and Dong "Michelle" Li, who received the Outstanding Doctoral Student Researcher Award from the Isenberg School in 2014.  Both Sara and Michelle are PhD students in the Management Science track at the Isenberg School.

Just last week, I spoke at the INFORMS Computing Society conference on our latest research on ChoiceNet in the form of introducing duration-based contracts for Internet services so as to offer consumers more choices.  The paper, which is online, thanks to INFORMS and the great conference Proceedngs editors, is: A Game Theory Model for a Differentiated Service-Oriented Internet with Duration-Based Contracts,  Anna Nagurney, Sara Saberi, Tilman Wolf, and Ladimer S. Nagurney, Proceedings of ICS 2015: Operations Research and Computing: Algorithms and Software for Analytics, Brian Borchers, J. Paul Brooks, and Laura McLay, Editors, INFORMS (2015) pp 15-29. Our presentation can be viewed here.

The project page for ChoiceNet is here where you can find some of our papers.

I very much liked the quote from our Vice Chancellor in the article: “The fact that our campus was selected to take a leadership role on two of the five FIA projects speaks volumes about our faculty expertise,” says Mike Malone, vice chancellor for research and engagement. “We take an interdisciplinary approach to science, which is critical to an initiative of this size.”

In addition to ChoiceNet, the other FIA project that UMass Amherst researchers are involved in is MobilityFirst. Professors Jim  Kurose, Arun Venkataramani, and Michael Zink are working on that project.  And, for those who have not heard, Distinguished University Professor Jim Kurose of Computer Science is now the new Program Director of CISE (Computer & Information Science & Engineering)  Directorate at NSF!