Colin Dixon

ckd@cs.washington.edu

PhD Candidate
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle

Research
Publications
Students
Previous Work
Interests

I've taken a job with IBM Research at their Austin Research Lab and will be joining them shortly. My application materials still online here if they are of interest: CV, research statement, and teaching statement.

I am a PhD candidate in Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UW, and my research interests are broadly in systems, spanning networks, distributed systems, operating systems and security with an emphasis on building real, secure, reliable and efficient computer systems.

My advisors are Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy.

Research

I am currently working on how to better program and manage complex systems by allowing third-party developers to write portable network management applications. This includes a platform on top of a programable shim layer at end hosts in the End to the Middle project as well as building a home-wide operating system, called HomeOS, to enable innovation in modern homes.

In the past I have worked on (and am still interested in) mitigating distributed denial of service attacks, peer-to-peer content distribution, distributed resource allocation, large-scale internet measurement, technology for developing regions, anonymous communication, and broadly in systems, networks and security.

Students

I've been fortunate enough to work with a few talented undergraduates at UW on the End to the Middle project:

Publications

The Network as a Platform [thesis]
Colin Dixon
PhD Thesis

Towards Commodity Smarthomes with HomeOS
Colin Dixon, Ratul Mahajan, Sharad Agarwal, A.J. Brush, Bongshin Lee, Stefan Saroiu, Victor Bahl
to appear in NSDI 2012

ETTM: A Scalable Fault Tolerant Network Manager [paper]
Colin Dixon, Hardeep Uppal, Vjekoslav Brajkovic, Dane Brandon, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy
NSDI 2011 (pptx slides, pdf slides, video)
UW CSE 2010 Affiliates Day poster, runner up for the Madrona Prize

Home Automation in the Wild: Challenges and Opportunities [paper]
A.J. Brush, Bongshin Lee, Ratul Mahajan, Sharad Agarwal, Stefan Saroiu, Colin Dixon
in CHI 2011

The Home Needs an Operating System (and an App Store) [paper]
Colin Dixon, Ratul Mahajan, Sharad Agarwal, A.J. Brush, Bongshin Lee, Stefan Saroiu, Victor Bahl
in HotNets 2010 (slides)

An End to the Middle [paper]
Colin Dixon, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
in HotOS 2009 (slides)
talk at UW (hi res) (slides as video) (classroom presenter)

Optimizing links in the developing world [paper]
Yaw Anokwa, Colin Dixon, Gaetano Boriello, Tapan Parikh
in WiNS-DR at MobiCom 2008

Withstanding Multimillion-node Botnets [article]
Colin Dixon, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
in USENIX ;login: August 2008

Phalanx: Withstanding Multimillion-node Botnets [paper]
Colin Dixon, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
in NSDI 2008 (slides)
UW CSE 2007 Affiliates Day talk and poster

Reciprocity: Tit-for-Tat Distributed Resource Allocation [extended abstract, poster]
Colin Dixon, Tanya Bragin, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
Poster in SIGCOMM 2006

iPlane: An Information Plane for Distributed Services [paper]
Harsha V. Madhyastha, Tomas Isdal, Michael Piatek, Colin Dixon, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Arun Venkataramani
in OSDI 2006

LiveSwarms: Adapting BitTorrent for end host multicast [technical report]
Michael Piatek, Colin Dixon, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
Technical report: UW-CSE-06-11-01

Previous Work

I received my M.S. in computer science from the University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering in June 2007 for work with Phalanx: a scalable, deployable system for denial of service mitigation.

I received my B.S. in computer science and B.S. in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 2005. While I was there I worked on anonymous communication with Bobby Bhattacharjee as a part of the Gemstone Program. I also worked on approximating vertex cover with Samir Khuller as part of the Computer Science Honors Program.

Interests

When I'm not sitting in front of a computer hacking code for an upcoming paper deadline or project there are a bunch of things I like to get out and do.

I'm an avid ultralight backpacker which I picked up largely through my Dad (that's me on the front page) who co-founded the backpacking magazine Backpacking Light. Also, you can find some (poorly organized and labeled) pictures of hikes around Seattle at my personal site and some more recent ones I've taken with my beautiful wife on my Picasa page.