About Me
I am an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. My group focuses on developing models and designing algorithms and frameworks to improve the performance and availability of computer networks. In particular, my group explores the critical role that network state plays in determining network performance and availability with the state’s inherent semantics and emergent state management techniques by investigating designs and algorithms to more holistically understand and manage this state. More recently, we have applied this approach to addressing the digital divide, improving microservices/clouds, managing software defined networks, and rethinking CDN designs. Our designs and systems have been deployed at web scale companies, adopted by opensource systems, and acquired by a large hardware manufacturer.
News
| Award | Sept 2021 | Awarded a $250K grant from VMWare for research on ``Human in the Loop AIOps'' for Microservices management. |
| Paper | Aug 2021 | Our work on fault tolerance control planes, accepted to SoSR'21. |
| Impact | Aug 2021 | APNIC blog on our work on dissecting QUIC performance (WWW'21) updates is online!!! |
| Invited Keynote/Talk | Jun 2021 | Invited to give a talk on Abstractions for Next Generation CDNs, at LANMAN'21. |
| Paper | Jun 2021 | Our work on learning-augmented CDNs , accepted to NDSI'22. |
| Panel | May 2021 | Invited to serve on the HotOS'21 Panel on The Future of Hardware Development, A Perspective from Systems Researchers |
| Award | Apr 2021 | Awarded NEC grant for work on data-driven approaches for improving web performance on 5G!!! |
| Impact | Apr 2021 | Parts of our methodology for testing H3 has been incorporated into Envoy the proxy for Kubernetes!!! |
| Impact | Mar 2021 | APNIC blog on our work on Zero Down Time (SIGCOMM'20) updates is online!!! |
| Seminar Lead | Feb 2021 | Report from our joint US-Japan workshop on programmable data planes is online!!! |
| ISAT Study | Jan 2021 | Excited to join DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group. |
| Invited Keynote/Talk | Jan 2021 | Invited keynote at HotDC workshop!! |
| Jan 2021 | Teaching distributed systems (CSCI1380) in hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous modes!! | |
| Paper | Jan 2021 | Two papers on client side web optimizations (WebMedic and WebPerfOptimization) accepted to HotMobile'21. |
| Service | Jan 2021 | Excited to serve on the NSDI'22 PC. Please submit your papers. |
| Paper | Jan 2021 | Our work on dissecting production QuiC , accepted to WWW'21. |
| Service | Dec 2020 | Excited to serve on the OSDI'21 PC. Please submit your papers. |
| Service | Nov 2020 | Excited to join the Telemetry Working Group. |
| Paper | Nov 2020 | Four papers accepted at the CoNEXT student workshop. |
| Paper | Aug 2020 | Our work on Solver-Aided Multi-Party configuration of microservices, Muppet, accepted to HotNets'20. |
| Paper | Sep 2020 | Our work on understanding Mobile Web Browsing Under Memory Pressure, accepted to CCR'20's Oct Issue. |
| Award | Aug 2020 | Our work on extending tracing to P4, FoxHound, wins Student Research Competition. |
| Paper | July 2020 | Our work on rethinking microservices observation ViperProbe accepted at CloudNet'20. |
| Paper | May 2020 | Our work on zero downtime updates to Facebook's CDNs accepted to SIGCOMM'20. |
| Paper | Apr 2020 | Our work on fingerprinting CDNs, Inspector Gadget, accepted to TMA'20. |
| Paper | May 2020 | Journal paper on validating MUD profiles for IoT Security accepted to TDSC. |
| Outreach | Feb 2020 | Hosting a visiting scholar from Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) to explore the role of programmable data planes in debugging microservices. |
| Outreach | Jan 2020 | Hosting a visiting scholar from FORTH Crete to revisit the role of IXPs in DDoS prevention. |
Research
- Democratizing Mobile Web Performance
- Data-driven Protocol Optimizations: [Configanator, NSDI'22] [ConfigTron, ArXiV][ConfigTron, HotCloud'17] [YVideo, IMC'16] [ZeroDownTimeUpdates, SIGCOMM'20]
- Web Performance in Developing Regions: [MobilePerfInPakistan, IMC'16] [AnazlyingMobileBottlenecks, CCR'20] [WebMedic, HotMobile'21]
- Quantifying and Analyzing Configuration Heterogenity: [InspectorGadget-HTTP, MobileQoE'18] [InspectorGadget-TCP, TMA'20] [WebPerfOpt, HotMobile'21]
- Dissecting QUIC Performance: [ProductionQUIC, WWW'21]
- Systems Abstractions for Programmable Networks
- Fault Tolerant SDNs: [Tardis, SoSR'21] [LegoSDN, SoSR'16] [Chopin, APNet'17] [Mozart, SoCC'19]
- Debugging and Diagnosis: [P4-InTel, CoNEXT ECNP'19] [P4Visor, CoNEXT'18] [Dapper, SoSR'17] [Armageddon, HotNets'15] [YTrace, arXiv] [Yahoo Data Centers, arXiv]
- Storage Abstractions: [SCC, EuroSYS'19] [Hermes, CoNEXT'17] [ Mecury, SoSR'17] [ SwitchVisor, CAN'17]
- Self Managing Networks: Machine Learning and Networks
- Self Configuring Data Centers: [DeepConfig, ArXiv] [DeepConfig, NetAI'18] [DeepConfig, NeurIPS MLSYS'18]
- IoT Security: [ IoT Vision, IoTSP'17] [ Learning MUD, SoSR'19] [ Verifying MUD, TDSC'20] [Pot2DPI, CoNEXT CAN'17]
Software and Datasets
- Data Center Characteristics [IMC'2010]: data set
- LegoSDN (Fault Tolerant Controller) [SoSR'16]: source code
- Dapper (Data Plane diagnosis of TCP) [SoSR'17]: source code
- P4Visor [CoNEXT'18]: source code
- Hermes [CoNext'17]: Coming soon!
Funding: Grants & Gifts
- Google Faculty Research Awards, 2018 - 2019.
- NeTS: Small: Data Driven Mobile Web Performance., 2018 - 2022.
- NeTS: Small: Network-centric IoT Security., 2018 - 2022.
- NSF CAREER: Bug Tolerant Networking: Enabling Highly-Available Network Infrastructures through Semantic Transformations., 2018 - 2023.
- Democratizing Web Performance: Principled Measurements and Optimizations for Performance in Developing Regions, 2018 - 2019.
- NSF Medium:Towards Finer-Grained Cloud Computing., 2014 - 2019.
- Facebook Faculty Award, 2015, 2016.
- Google Cloud Resource Usage Grant, 2015.
- Yahoo! FREP, 2014, 2015.
- Yahoo! ACE, 2014.
- 2014 Equipment Gift from Yahoo, 300 servers.
- Facebook Gift, 2014-2016.
- Duke Bass Connections, 2014.
Selected Publications
Full list of publications can be found here.
- Configanator: A Data-driven Approach to Improving CDN Performance.
Usama Naseer, Theophilus A. Benson
[Proceedings of USENIX Networked Systems Designs & Implementation (NSDI), Renton, Washington, Apr 2022]
- Dissecting Performance of Production QUIC.
Alexander Yu, Theophilus A. Benson
[Proceedings of The Web Conference (WWW), Ljubljana, Slovenia, Apr 2021]
- Zero Downtime Release: Disruption-free Load Balancing of a Multi-Billion User Website.
Usama Naseer, Luca Niccolini, Udip Pant, Alan Frindell, Ranjeeth Dasineni,Theophilus A. Benson
[Proceedings of ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), New York, New York, Aug 2020]
- In-Network Compute: Considered Armed and Dangerous.
Theophilus A. Benson
[Proceedings of ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), Bertinoro, Italy, May 2019]
- Efficient and Safe Network Updates with Suffix Causal Consistency.
Sheng Liu, Theophilus A. Benson, and Michael Reiter
[Proceedings of ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (EUROSYS), Dresden, Germany, Mar 2019]
- Performance Characterization of a Commercial Video Streaming Service.
Mojgan Ghasemi, Partha Kanuparthy, Ahmed Mansy, Theophilus Benson and Jennifer Rexford
[Proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Santa Monica, CA, Nov 2016]