I am a professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at
Dalhousie University, Halifax,
where I lead the Programmable and Intelligent Networking (PINet) research group.
PINet members specialize in developing cutting-edge, high-performance, secure, and sustainable distributed and emerging networking systems (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT), 6G RAN, AI)
using network programmability, system-level monitoring, and data-driven techniques.
I am also an adjunct professor in the department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta.
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, followed by an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, before joining Dalhousie University. I am actively involved in the research community, regularly serving on the organizing committees of flagship conferences such as ACM SIGCOMM, ACM APNet, IEEE ICNP, and IEEE NetSoft, and previously served as an Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and the Internet of Things Series of IEEE Communications Magazine (ComMag). My recognitions include the ACM/IEEE N2Women Rising Star Award (2021), Digital Nova Scotia's Thinking Forward Award (2022), and the University of Alberta Alumni Award (2024).
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, followed by an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside, before joining Dalhousie University. I am actively involved in the research community, regularly serving on the organizing committees of flagship conferences such as ACM SIGCOMM, ACM APNet, IEEE ICNP, and IEEE NetSoft, and previously served as an Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and the Internet of Things Series of IEEE Communications Magazine (ComMag). My recognitions include the ACM/IEEE N2Women Rising Star Award (2021), Digital Nova Scotia's Thinking Forward Award (2022), and the University of Alberta Alumni Award (2024).
News
- Aug 2026: "A Graph Neural Network and Transformer-based Anomaly Detector and Root Cause Analyzer in Radio Access Networks" is accepted at IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (impact factor 5.7). Congratulations, Papry and Conrado.
- July 2026: I am going to offer keynotes at IEEE NFV-SDN and NSysS.
- Apr 2026: I am pleased to deliver a keynote title "Advancing Network Security Using In-Network Computing and In-Kernel Processing" at IEEE High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR 2026).
- Feb 2026: "Keep Calm but Log for Trouble: Coordination-Free Fault-Tolerance for In-Switch Applications" is accepted at IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (impact factor 5.66). Congratulations, Ricardo.
- Jan 2026: "Characterizing Performance–Energy Trade-offs of Large Language Models in Multi-Request Workflows" is accepted at ACM SIGMETRICS (acceptance rate 16%). Congratulations, Monzurul.
- Oct 2025: A co-led project (with the lead from the University of Calgary), Frontier Quantum-AI Cyber Defense: Pioneering Unprecedented Security Measures for Critical Infrastructure, has been accepted by the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC). Thank you to NCC for the support.
- Oct 2025: I had the privilege of delivering a speech at Dalhousie University’s Fall Convocation.
- Sept 2025: "Reinforcement Learning-based In-network Load Balancing" is accepted at IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (impact factor 5.4). Congratulations, Hesam.
- June 2025: "streamline: Accelerating Deployment and Assessment of Real-time Big Data Systems" is accepted at IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (impact factor 6). Congratulations, Monzurul.
- 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.
- Sept. 2024: I am in Computing Science news at the University of Alberta .
- 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.
Awards and Recognitions
- Feb 2026: I am excited and deeply honored to share that I have been named to the list of 100 Brilliant and Inspiring Women in 6G.
- 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
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I am currently leading three interrelated sub-projects on distributed and networked systems for emerging technologies. Please visit the Projects page for further details.
- The first focuses on network programmability, designing robust, high-performance, and secure systems for cloud and edge computing, with an emphasis on Internet of Things applications.
- The second explores distributed systems for AI and Big Data, with a particular focus on systems support for Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing the systems and networking challenges required to make AI scalable, efficient, and dependable in real-world deployments.
- The third targets 5G and emerging 6G networks, investigating root-cause analysis, security, and sustainability in the Radio Access Network (RAN).
Teaching
Recent Professional Service
- 2026: ACM APNet, IEEE NetSoft.
- 2025: ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE NetSoft, ACM eBPF, ACM NSysS.
Selected Publications (Google Scholar)
- A Graph Neural Network and Transformer-Based Anomaly Detector and Root Cause Analyzer in Radio Access Networks, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management 2026.
- Characterizing Performance–Energy Trade-offs of Large Language Models in Multi-Request Workflows, ACM SIGMETRICS, 2026.
- Keep Calm But Log for Trouble: Coordination-Free Fault-Tolerance for In-Switch Applications, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC) 2026.
- Reinforcement Learning-Based In-Network Load Balancing, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management 2025.
- streamline: Accelerating Deployment and Assessment of Real-Time Big Data Systems, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 2025.
- A Generalized GNN-Transformer-Based Radio Link Failure Prediction Framework in 5G RAN, IEEE Transactions on Machine Learning in Communications and Networking 2025.
- It Works (only) on My Machine: A Study on Reproducibility Smells in Ansible Scripts, IEEE/ACM Conference on Mining Software Repositories 2025.
- Spotlight: Shining a Light on Pivot Attacks Using In-network Computing, ACM CoNEXT 2025.
- 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.
- SoftIoT: A resource-aware SDN/NFV-based IoT network, JNCA, 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.
- 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).
Current Members of PINet
I have the privilege of working with this talented group of students.- Saadman Ahmed (PhD)
- Elham Roshanbin (PhD, Killam fellow)
- Khaleda Akter (PhD)
- Conrado Boeira (PhD)
- Monzurul Amin (PhD)
- Carson Kuzniar (PhD, NSERC-CGS and Killam fellow)
- Han Yang (PhD, University of Alberta, co-supervise with Ioanis Nikolaidis)
- Tiago Torres Schmidt (MSc, UFRGS, co-supervise with Alberto Filho)
- Ava Powelson (MSc, NSERC-CGS and NSGS)
- Bella Arsenault (BSc, NSERC USRA, Honours)
- Nir Kazatsker (BSc, CREATE USRA, Honours)
- Rafael Egbor (BSc, Honours)
- Alex Loginov (BSc, CREATE USRA)
Past Members of PINet
- Ricardo Parizotto (Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul (UFFS), Brazil)
- Hesam Tajbakhsh (Huawei R&D)
- Miguel Neves (Samsung R&D)
- Mahdi Rabbani (Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity)
- Nazmus Sakib Akash
- 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 (Telesat)
- Tahajjat Begum (Walmart)
- MA Moyeen (Concordia University)
- Fangye Tang (SE in China)
- Udaya Lekhala (Google)
- Cindy Yan (IT consultant in China)
Undergraduate students - Kassem Zeinab (Dalhousie University)
- Silvio Tremblay (Dalhousie University)
- Gobind Singh (in job market)
- Zhang Yue (University of Toronto)
- Pan Gong (Global Relay)
- Ava Powelson (Dalhousie University)
- Ehssan Mousavipour (University of Calgary)
- Tasneem Hoque (Nova Scotia Govt.)
- Mirazul Islam (Dalhousie ITS)
- Callum MacNeil (Dalhousie University)
- Hassaan Asif (Halifax Citadel Society)
- Weiye Liang (University of British Columbia)
- Lareina Yang (Dalhousie University)
- Chloe Bae (REDspace)
- Alice Liu (Nova Scotia Govt.)
- Pulkit Garg (Shopify)
- Carson Kuzniar (Dalhousie University)
- Christophe Goulet-LeBlanc (Quest)
- Syed Babak Lopez (Amazon)
Visitors - Alberto E. Schaeffer-Filho (Visiting professor from Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil)
- Ioanis Nikolaidis (Visiting professor from University of Alberta, Canada)
Graduate and Post-graduate
Sponsors and Collaborators
