Rodrigo Fonseca

email
office
329, CIT Building. Office hours by appointment.
mail
Box 1910, Brown University
115 Waterman St
Providence, RI 02912
phone
401-863-6533 (voice) 401-863-7657 (fax)
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About

I am an associate professor at Brown University's Computer Science Department.

My work revolves around distributed systems, networking, and operating systems. Broadly, I am interested in understanding the behavior of systems with many components for enabling new functionality, and making sure they work as they should. In particular, I'm interested in how to build, operate, and diagnose large scale Internet systems; and in networking and power management in embedded distributed systems such as sensor networks.

I'm updating this page. Take a look at my CV for the authoritative information.

News

Feb-2020
I'm starting as a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research
Nov-2019
I'm the General Chair for SoCC'2020! Stay tuned.
Nov-2019
Was PC co-chair for HotNets 2019, with Sylvia Ratnasamy. The workshop was a big success!
May-2019
Congratulations to Dr. Da Yu, PhD #5! Going to Microsoft, to work on Azure Networking.
May-2019
Congratulations to Dr. Jeff Rasley, PhD #4! Going to Microsoft, to work on AI Infrastructure at Bing.
Jan-2019
Going for an 8-month visit to Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA!
Oct-2018
New NSF grant: Network-centric IoT Security, with Theo Benson
May-2018
Congratulations to Dr. Jonathan Mace, PhD #3! He is starting as a tenure track faculty at MPI-SWS!
Oct-2017
Keynote at The 17th International Conference on Runtime Verification, RV’17. Seattle, WA
Jul-2017
Now Associate Professor with Tenure!
Jun-2017
Busy summer: I'll be spending the summer in Palo Alto, with Flowtune. Jeff will be at MSR in Seattle, Da at Alibaba, Seattle, and Jon at Facebook in Cambridge
Apr-2017
Congratulations to Dr. Marcelo Martins, PhD #2!
Mar-2017
NSDI Test of Time Award for X-Trace! With George Porter, Ion Stoica, Scott Shenker, and Randy Katz!
Nov-2016
Switches are Monitors Too! presented at HotNets
Oct-2016
Raja presented our paper 'Principled Workflow-centric Tracing of Distributed Systems' at SoCC.
Aug-2016
Went to Floripa, Brasil for Sigcomm. We had a paper at the main conference, a paper in the Workshop on QoE, and I gave an invited talk at NetPL.
May-2016
cDVD, on fair bandwidth allocation for competing DASH video streams, accepted at Internet-QoE 2016!
Apr-2016
2DFQ accepted to Sigcomm 2016, which will be in Brazi!
Apr-2016
Teaching Networking in the Fall!
Apr-2016
NetEx [pdf], our architecture for a network marketplace inside of a datacenter, accepted for HotCloud!
Feb-2016
Teaching Distributed Systems with Tom Doeppner
Jan-2016
Yak, joint work with my student Jeff Rasley and Microsoft, accepted into Eurosys 2016!
Oct-2015
Pivot Tracing gets best paper award at SOSP!
Oct-2015
Presented "We are Tracing like it's 1973" [pptx] at the Open Zipkin workshop in San Francisco
Sep-2015
Presented 'We are Losing Tack: a Case for Causal Metadata in Distributed Systems' at the 16th Asilomar HPTS
May-2015
Good Summer looking ahead: Jeff and Jonathan will have internships at Microsoft Research, Da will go to HP Labs
May-2015
Jonathan will be presenting our work "Retro: Targeted Resource Management in Multi-tenant Distributed Systems" at NSDI 2015! This is join work with Peter Bodik and Madan Musuvathi from Microsoft Research.
Apr-2015
Our paper "Simon: Scriptable Interactive Monitoring for SDNs", accepted at SOSR'15! Joint work with Da Yu, Yiming Li, Tim Nelson, and Shriram Krishnamurthi.
Apr-2015
Our paper "Exodus: Toward Automatic Migration of Enterprise Network Configurations to SDNs" accepted at SOSR'15! Joint work with Tim Nelson, Andrew Ferguson, and Shriram Krishnamurthi.
Apr-2015
Marcelo's paper "Selectively Taming Background Android Apps to Improve Battery Lifetime" accepted at USENIX ATC, joint work with Justin Cappos.
Mar-2015
Won an NSF CAREER Award on "Understanding the Performance of Distributed Systems Through Causal Tracing"
Feb-2015
Teaching CS-138 Distributed Systems with Tom Doeppner.
Oct-2014
Co-organizing the first New England Networking and Systems Day, Oct 24th, at the Hariri Institute at BU. We will gather more than 90 participants with many talks, posters, and much discussion time.
Sep-2014
I recently documented (in Portuguese) an attack to a bank website in Brazil that got some media attention
Sep-2014
The Brown-Brazil Initiative is hosting my former advisor Prof. Virgilio Almeida for the innaugural talk of the Fall Lecture Series.
Sep-2014
Our paper "Towards General-Purpose Resource Management in Shared Cloud Services" (with my PhD student Jon Mace, Peter Bodik, and Madan Musuvathi) was accepted for publication at HotDep'14, the 10th Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability!
Sep-2014
Teaching Computer Networks this fall!
Aug-2014
Jeff Rasley successfully presented "Planck: Millisecond-scale Monitoring and Control for Commodity Networks" at Sigcomm 2014.
Apr-2014
Our paper "Planck: Millisecond-scale Monitoring and Control for Commodity Networks" was accepted for publication at Sigcomm 2014. See you in Chicago!
Apr-2014
Very proud of my first minted PhD student, Andrew Ferguson. Congrats, Andrew!
Mar-2014
Jeff Rasley will be interning at VMWare, and Marcelo at Intel.
Feb-2014
Teaching Advanced Networking as a special topics class, focusing on Datacenter Networking and SDNs.
Jan-2014
I'll be part of the Program Committees for Sigcomm 2014 and IMC 2014!
Dec-2013
I'm part of the Program Committee for HotMobile 2014!
July-2013
NSF NeTS Grant on Participatory Networking, to advance SDNs northbound APIs!
July-2013
Our paper "Growth Analysis of a Large ISP" was accepted at IMC!
May-2013
Highly successful internship season for students! Andrew is going to the SDN group at Google (with Amin Vahdat), Jeff is going to IBM Research in Austin (with Collin Dixon), Jonathan is going to MSR Redmond (with Peter Bodik)!
Apr-2013
We are going to Sigcomm 2013 to present our paper on Participatory Networking! Congrats to Andrew Ferguson, Arjun Guha, Chen Liang, and Shriram Krishnamurthi!
Apr-2013
Chen Liang accepted as a PhD student at Duke University! Congrats, Chen!
Jan-2013
Teaching Advanced Networking as a special topics class, focusing on Datacenter Networking and SDNs.
Dec-2012
Our paper "Application Modes" accepted for publication at HotMobile 2013!
Sep-2012
Big welcome to Jeff Rasley (new PhD student), Jonathan Mace (new advisee), and Matheus Caldas (visiting PhD student from UFMG, Brazil)!
Sep-2012
Teaching CS168, Computer Networks this spring.
Jul-2012
Spending the summer at MSR Redmond, with Victor Balh's group
Jul-2012
Our paper PARMA: A Parallel Randomized Algorithm for Approximate Association Rule Mining in MapReduce accepted at CIKM 2012!
Jun-2012
Program Committee Member for NSDI'13!
May-2012
Our paper Hierarchical Policies for Software Defined Networks accepted for publication at the HotSDN 2012 workshop, co-held with Sigcomm 2012!
Apr-2012
Nathan's paper C-MR: Continuously Executing MapReduce Workflows on Multi-Core Processors accepted for publication at the MAPREDUCE 2012 workshop!
Apr-2012
Andrew presented Jockey: Guaranteed Job Latency in Data Parallel Clusters at Eurosys 2012. Work with Srikanth Kandula and Peter Bodík from Microsoft Research.
Mar-2012
Our paper Participatory Networking accepted for publication at HotICE'12, co-held with NSDI'12.
Mar-2012
External Review Committee Member for OSDI 2012!
Feb-2012
Google funds research on distributed tracing!
Sep-2011
Teaching CSCI2950-U in Fall 2011, focusing on Large-scale data intensive computing
Jul-2011
I will be co-chairing HotClouds'12 with Dave Maltz, from MSR!
May-2011
Solomon Award from Brown University to work on energy managdtent in Wireless Sensor Networks!
Sep-2010
NSF funds research on security in Cloud Computing.
Jun-2010
Program committee for NSDI'11!
Jun-2010
Intel funds research on 'Whole-platform Energy Usage of Software Activities'
Jun-2010
Andrew's poster on block placdtent in Hadoop accepted at the USENIX ATC
May-2010
Teaching CSCI1680 'Computer Networks' in Spring 2011
May-2010
Teaching CSCI2950-U 'Special Topics on Networking and Distributed Systdts' in Fall 2010
Apr-2010
Experiences with X-Trace paper presented on INM/WREN 2010

Teaching

Fall 2019
CSCI1680 Computer Networks. Previous: F'16, F'16, F'16, F'14, F'12, S'12, S'11
Spring 2018
CSCI1380 Distributed Systems. Previous: S'17 S'15
Spring 2017
Advanced Networking. Previous: S'14 - CSCI2950-U Advanced Networking: SDNs and Datacenter Networking, S'13, F'11, F'10, F'09

Research Projects

Participatory Networking

The PANE project aims to allow end-user applications to help in the configuration of a network. PANE is both a paradigm and a prototype SDN controller that solves the problem of privilege delegation and conflict resolution when unprivileged users are given read and write access to network services, configuration, and state. Read more...

Mobile Device Energy

We are interested in improving the battery life of mobile devices. Today's mobile devices' need for energy far surpasses their battery capacity to allow for unrestricted use and long battery life. Users must prioritize their usage to avoid running out of battery. However, for a user to do this efficiently is almost impossible: it requires knowledge of the energy and power characteristics of the applications and of the hardware components of the particular phone. This leads to a poor experience and to frustration. We propose an OS abstraction, Application Modes, that allow applications and the OS to collaborate in exposing to the user only what she cares about and understands: the tradeoff between battery lifetime and functionality. Read our HotMobile paper for an introduction to our approach.

Tracing Distributed Systems

Distributed systems are growing ever more complex, spanning many layers of abstraction, machines, and administrative domains, and integrating code written, deployed, and operated by different people. In these scenarios it becomes increasingly difficult to understand how a system behaves, and, especially, how and why it fails. Causal tracing is a technique that captures the causality of events across all of these components, layers, and machines, and eases the task of understanding complex distributed systems. There are a multitude of causal tracing systems and frameworks, including many research and industry projects. Examples include our own X-Trace project [GitHub], as well as systems such as Google's Dapper, Twitter's Zipkin, and Cloudera's HTrace.

We are interested in how to extract information from both complex individual traces and across traces, to identify root causes of problems, detect unexpected anomalies, and make tracing more efficient, by biasing trace sampling and detail capture to maximize trace information on a fixed performance budget.

Older Projects

Quanto

Fine-grained tracking of energy usage in wireless sensor networks, Quanto determines which applications used how much energy on each hardware component, even for applications that span multiple network nodes.

Collection Tree Protocol

Robust all-to-few routing in wireless sensor networks, CTP is de-facto routing protocol for TinyOS 2.x, and formed the basis for IETF's RPL (Routing over Low Power and lossy networks) - RFC 6550.

Beacon Vector Routing

BVR is an anchor-based pseudo-geographical any-to-any routing protocol for wireless sensor networks.

Students

I am really very fortunate to work with an amazing set of students!

Graduate Students

Alumni

Selected Publications   All Publications

Professional Activities

Conference Organization

2015
Co-Organizer, 2nd New England Networking and Systems Day
2014
Co-Organizer, 1st New England Networking and Systems Day
Doctoral Symposium, IC2E 2014
2012
Program Co-Chair: HotCloud'12

Technical Program Committee

2016
Eurosys'16, USENIX ATC'16, NSDI'16, SBRC'16
2015
SBRC'15, DCOSS'15, NSDI'15, HotCloud'15, DSN'15
2014
SIGCOMM'14 PC, IMC'14 PC, HotMobile 2014, Eurosys'14 Ext. Review Committee
2013
NSDI'13 PC, TRIOS, SOCC'13
2012
OSDI'12 Ext. Review Committee, Middleware'12, HotDep'12, MAD'12, IGCC'12, DSN'12
2011
NSDI'11, DSN'11, CoNEXT'11, HotPower'11, HotCloud'11, NetDB'11
2010
...

Personal

You can find some of my photography as @319studio on Instagram, or at 500px. I almost never tweet as @rodrigo_fonseca.

My wife Paula runs an amazing party design business, Festiva Party Design, check it out!