I am an associate professor in the
Faculty of Computer Science at
Dalhousie University, Halifax,
where, I lead Programmable and Intelligent Networking (PINet) research group.
PINet members specialize in developing cutting-edge, high-performance, secure, and dependable distributed and emerging networking systems, with a specific focus on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Internet of Things (IoT), and 5G/6G technologies. I am also interested in applying data-driven approaches (AI/ML/RL) to solve practical and relevant problems.
I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. Subsequently, I held an NSERC post-doctoral position at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, before joining Dalhousie University. I regularly get involved in the organizing committee of IEEE ICNP, IEEE CloudNet, IEEE NetSoft, and IFIP Networking. I served as an area editor of the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and am currently an Editor of the Internet of Things Series of the IEEE Communications Magazine (ComMag). I won the ACM/IEEE N2Women Rising Star Award 2021, Digital Nova Scotia's Thinking Forward Award 2022, and University of Alberta Alumni Award 2024.
I received my Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. Subsequently, I held an NSERC post-doctoral position at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, before joining Dalhousie University. I regularly get involved in the organizing committee of IEEE ICNP, IEEE CloudNet, IEEE NetSoft, and IFIP Networking. I served as an area editor of the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and am currently an Editor of the Internet of Things Series of the IEEE Communications Magazine (ComMag). I won the ACM/IEEE N2Women Rising Star Award 2021, Digital Nova Scotia's Thinking Forward Award 2022, and University of Alberta Alumni Award 2024.
News
- May 2025: "A Generalized GNN-Transformer-based Radio Link Failure Prediction Framework in 5G RAN" is accepted at IEEE Transactions on Machine Learning in Communications and Networking. Congratulations, Papry and Hasan.
- April 2025: I am excited to share that I am part of the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF)-funded project, Securing Smart Environments, led by the University of Calgary, Concordia University, and Dalhousie University. Grateful for the support from CFREF and Concordia!
- Jan 2025: "It Works (only) on My Machine: A Study on Reproducibility Smells in Ansible Scripts" is accepted at ACM/IEEE Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) (acceptance rate around 25%). Congratulations, Ghazal.
- Dec. 2024: "Spotlight: Shining a Light on Pivot Attacks Using In-network Computing" is accepted at ACM Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT) (acceptance rate around 19%). Congratulations, Carson.
- Dec. 2024: "Composing Fault Tolerant In-Network Computing Systems via High-Level Intents" is accepted at IEEE NOMS (acceptance rate 27). Congratulations, Ricardo.
- Oct 2024: I am going to offer a keynote at IEEE NFV-SDN.
- Sept. 2024: "Characterizing the Security Facets of IoT Device Setup" is accepted at ACM Internet Measurement Conference (acceptance rate 21.74). Congratulations, Han and Carson.
- August 2024: I was a member of a panel "Next-generation (xG) Communication Network Infrastructures for Sustainability, Equitable Access, and Security" at IEEE CCECE, Kingston, Canada.
- May 2024: Offered an invited seminar on "Making 5G Networks Reliable for Next-generation Applications using AI" at ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy.
- April 2024: "P4Hauler: an Accelerator-aware In-network Load Balancer for Applications Performance Boosting" is accepted at IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (impact factor 6.5). Congratulations, Hesam and Ricardo.
- April 2024: "PoirIoT: Fingerprinting IoT Devices at Tbps Scale" is accepted at IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (impact factor 3.7). Congratulations, Carson.
- December 2023: I offered an invited talk at 10th International Conference on Networking, Systems and Security (NSysS 2023).
- September 2023: I will give a keynote at IEEE Workshop on Machine Intelligence in Networked Data and Systems (MINDS).
- May 2023: "Offloading Machine Learning to Programmable Data Planes: A Systematic Survey" is accepted at ACM Computing Survey (impact factor 14.3). Congratulations, Ricardo and Alberto.
- April 2023: "Fast Prototyping of Distributed Stream Processing Applications with stream2gym" is accepted at IEEE ICDCS (acceptance rate 18.9%). Congratulations, Monzurul and Miguel.
- April 2023: "On the (dis)Advantages of Programmable NICs for Network Security Services" is accepted at IFIP Networking (acceptance rate 27%). Congratulations, Miguel and Jack.
- Dec 2022: "A Deep Neural Network-based Communication Failure Prediction Scheme in 5G RAN" is accepted at IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. Congratulations, Arif and Hisham.
- Sept 2022: I am going to give a keynote talk (Innovating in Computer Networks One Data-plane Program at a Time) at IEEE LatinCom 2022 .
- Aug 2022: “NetGVT: Offloading Global Virtual Time Computation to Programmable Switches" is accepted at ACM SOSR. Congratulations, Ricardo.
- June 2022: “Towards Portable End-to-End Network Performance Characterization of SmartNICs" is accepted at ACM APSys. Congratulations, Hesam and Tong.
- April 2022: “Accelerator-Aware In-Network Load Balancing for Improved Application Performance" is accepted at IEEE/IFIP Networking. Congratulations, Hesam and Ricardo. Dec 2021: “IoT Device Fingerprinting on Commodity Switches" is accepted at IEEE/IFIP NOMS 2022. Congratulations, Carson and Miguel.
Awards and Recognitions
- Feb 2025: I am honored and delighted to receive the IEEE WICE outstanding mentoring award 2025.
- Jan 2025: Our project "Characterizing the Security Facets of IoT Device Setup" received recognition from Amazon. Thanks Amazon
- Nov 2024: Our poster "GreenStream: Enabling Sustainable LLM Inference in Stream Processing" won the Best-Poster Runner Up Award at CASCON. Congratulations Monzurul.
- Sept 2024: I am honored and delighted to receive the University of Alberta Alumni Honour Award 2024.
- June 2024: Our paper is showcased in ACM Breakthrough Paper on Fair AI Wins Top Award at ACM FAccT 2023.
- June 2023: "Preventing Discriminatory Decision-Making in Evolving Data Streams" received the best paper award at ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) (Best paper award).
- Nov 2022: I am honored and delighted to receive the Thinking Forward Award from Nova Scotia tech forward award 2022.
- Aug 2022: Our research proposal, "Making AI inference coordination fast and cheap using switching ASICs," is a finalist in the Network for AI Research competition from Meta.
- Feb 2022: Our research proposal, "Securing home IoT devices at the Terabits per second scale," won the Fast Forward Initiative competition from Intel Research. Thanks, Intel.
- Dec 2021: I am in Dal news Rising Star: Award‑Winning Dal Computer Science Researcher Focused On Improving our Connectivity.
- Nov 2021: I am happy to share that our proposed project, "EDRON: Edge-based object detection at sub-RTT scale," was one of the finalists in the Facebook's research competition.
- July 2021: I am in Dal news Meet the 2021 President’s Research Excellence Award Winners.
- June 2021: I am honored to receive the IEEE/ACM N2Women 2021 Rising Star award.
- June 2021: Another recognition!!!!! The President’s Research Excellence Awards for Emerging Investigators from Dalhousie University.
- May 2021: I received Dean's Research Excellence Award from the Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University.
Blogs
- June 2024: When a System Specialist Meets Big Data Experts.
- January 2021: Communication Reliability in a Hyperconnected World.
Current Research Project
- I am currently engaged in three distinct sub-projects within my research domain. The first one involves network programmability, with a specific emphasis on creating robust, high-performance systems for cloud and edge computing in IoT applications (e.g., smart home). In the second sub-project, my focus is on developing distributed and networked systems for stream processing applications to meet the demands of mission-critical applications, such as those in maritime and first responder contexts. The final sub-project centers on 5G/6G, delving into root cause analysis, security considerations, and sustainability aspects within the Radio Access Network (RAN). For more detailed information, please refer to the Projects page.
Teaching
Recent Professional Service
- 2025: ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE ICC, IEEE NetSoft. ACM eBPF.
- 2024: ACM IMC, IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE NetSoft, IEEE Globecom, IEEE ICC, IEEECCECE.
Selected Recent Publications (Google Scholar)
- Characterizing the Security Facets of IoT Device Setup, ACM on Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2024.
- PoirIoT: Fingerprinting IoT Devices at Tbps Scale, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON) 2024.
- P4Hauler: An Accelerator-Aware In-Network Load Balancer for Applications Performance Boosting, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC) 2024.
- Learn to Compress (LtC): Efficient Learning-based Streaming Video Analytics, IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS) 2024.
- Calibration and Automation of a 5G Simulator for Realistic Evaluation and Data Generation, IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft) 2024.
- Fast Prototyping of Distributed Stream Processing Applications with stream2gym, IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2023.
- On the (dis)Advantages of Programmable NICs for Network Security Services, IEEE/IFIP Networking Conference 2023.
- Preventing Discriminatory Decision-making in Evolving Data Streams, ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2023 (best paper award).
- Offloading Machine Learning to Programmable Data Planes: A Systematic Survey, ACM Computing Surveys 2023.
- A Deep Neural Network-based Communication Failure Prediction Scheme in 5G RAN , IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management 2023.
- NetGVT: Offloading Global Virtual Time Computation to Programmable Switches, ACM SOSR 2022.
- Towards portable end-to-end network performance characterization of SmartNICs, ACM APSys 2022.
- Accelerator-Aware In-Network Load Balancing for Improved Application Performance, IEEE/IFIP Networking 2022.
- IoT Device Fingerprinting on Commodity Switches, IEEE/IFIP NOMS 2022.
- Towards Network-accelerated ML-based Distributed Computer Vision Systems, IEEE ICPADS 2021.
- Characterizing Network Performance on Single-node Large-scale Container Deployments, IEEE CloudNet 2021.
- Development and Testing of an OFDM Physical Layer for the DESERT Simulator, IEEE OCEANS, 2021.
- SoftIoT: A resource-aware SDN/NFV-based IoT network, JNCA, 2021.
- Embedded vs. External Controller in Software-defined IoT Networks, IEEE NetSoft, 2021.
- SafeGuard: Congestion and Memory-aware Failure Recovery in SD-WAN, IFIP/IEEE CNSM, 2020.
- An Energy-Aware SDN/NFV Architecture for the Internet of Things, IFIP/IEEE Networking Conference, 2020.
- SD-FAST: A Packet Rerouting Architecture in SDN, IEEE CNSM, 2019.
- ReMon: A Resilient Flow Monitoring Framework, IFIP/IEEE Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference, 2019.
- PIQoS: A Programmable and Intelligent QoS Framework, IEEE INFOCOM workshop on Network Intelligence, 2019.
- SDSense: An Agile and Flexible SDN based Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, Dec 2018.
- Experimental Evaluation of Two OpenFlow Controllers, IEEE ICNP 2017 Workshop PVE-SDN
- CTCV: Coordinated Transport of Correlated Videos in Smart Camera Networks, ICNP 2016 (best paper award).
- Wireless Software Defined Networks: A Survey and Taxonomy IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials 2016
Current Members of PINet
I have the privilege of working with this talented group of students.- Khaleda Akter (PhD)
- Emmanuel Etti (PhD)
- Conrado Boeira (PhD)
- Monzurul Amin (PhD)
- Carson Kuzniar (PhD)
- Han Yang (PhD, University of Alberta, co-supervise with Ioanis Nikolaidis)
- Safae Naciri (PhD, Laval University, co-supervise with Talal Halabi)
- Ava Powelson (MSc, NSERC-CGS and NSGS)
- Nazmus Sakib Akash (MSc)
- Nir Kazatsker (BSc, USRA summer intern)
- Silvio Tremblay (BSc, USRA summer intern)
- Kassem Zeinab (BSc, USRA summer intern)
Past Members of PINet
- Ricardo Parizotto (Senai, Brazil)
- Hesam Tajbakhsh (Huawei R&D)
- Miguel Neves (Samsung R&D)
- Mahdi Rabbani (Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity)
- Han Yang (University of Alberta)
- Burhanuddin Murtaza Rangwala (Cisco)
- Ghazal Sobhani (Codalio)
- Chengyan Jiang (SE in AI)
- Kazi Hasan (NovaResp)
- Jack Zhao
- M. Ariful Islam (NTT)
- Hisham Siddique (IBM)
- Meysam Shojaee (Navigator)
- Miheer Kulkarni (MUFG)
- Dipon Saha (Cisco)
- Tahajjat Begum (Walmart)
- MA Moyeen (Faculty in Bangaldesh)
- Fangye Tang (SE in China)
- Udaya Lekhala (Google)
- Cindy Yan (IT consultant in China)
Undergraduate students - Gobind Singh (in job market)
- Zhang Yue (University of Toronto)
- Pan Gong (Dalhousie University)
- Ava Powelson (Dalhousie)
- Ehssan Mousavipour (University of Calgary)
- Tasneem Hoque (Nova Scotia Govt.)
- Mirazul Islam (Dalhousie ITS)
- Callum MacNeil (Dalhousie University)
- Hassaan Asif (Dalhousie University)
- Weiye Liang (University of British Columbia)
- Lareina Yang (Dalhousie University)
- Chloe Bae (REDspace)
- Alice Liu (Nova Scotia Govt.)
- Pulkit Garg (Kaloom)
- Carson Kuzniar (Dalhousie University)
- Christophe Goulet-LeBlanc (Quest)
- Syed Babak Lopez (Amazon)
Visitors - Ioanis Nikolaidis (Visiting professor from University of Alberta)
Graduate and Post-graduate
Sponsors and Collaborators
