Sharad Agarwal Victor Bahl Lujo Bauer Mark Baugher A.J. Brush Edward (Ned) Burns Ramón Cáceres Tanzeem Choudhury Bruce Davie Colin Dixon

W. Keith Edwards Deborah Estrin Ben Greenstein Rebecca E. "Beki" Grinter Haym Hirsh Jason Hong Srikanth Kandula S. Keshav Peter Key Tadayoshi "Yoshi" Kohno

Hank Levy Ratul Mahajan Henrique "Rico" Malvar Dr. David W. McDonald Jitu Padhye Dina Papagiannaki Joseph Paradiso Shwetak N. Patel Erika S. Poole Mario Romero

Srinivasan Seshan Anmol Sheth Andrew S. Tanenbaum Brendan Traw Anders Vinberg Geoffrey M. Voelker David Wetherall John Zahorjan

Sharad Agarwal is a researcher in the Networking Group in the Systems and Networking Group at Microsoft Research. He completed his Ph.D. in September 2004 in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. His work was in wide-area routing, traffic performance and network management under the supervision of Professor Randy Katz. During his Ph.D. tenure, he spent two years with the IP and Security Research group at Sprint Labs. He received his M.S. in December 2000, also in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. During his M.S. tenure, he spent time at HRL Labs. Agarwal has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Victor Bahl is a Principal Researcher and founding Manager of the Networking Research Group in Microsoft Research Redmond. He is responsible for directing research activities that push the state-of-art in the networking of devices and systems. He and his group build proof-of-concept systems, engage with academia, publish papers in prestigious conferences and journals, publish software for the research community, and work with product groups to influence Microsoft’s products. His personal research interests span a variety of topics in wireless systems design, mobile networking, and network management. He has built and deployed several seminal and highly cited networked systems with a total of over 7600 citations. His research has been incorporated into Microsoft's core products, industry standards, and numerous non-Microsoft commercial products. He has authored over 85 papers in highly-selective conferences and 114 patent applications, 60 of which have issued; he has delivered close to two dozen keynote & plenary talks; he is the founder and past Chairperson of ACM SIGMOBILE; the founder and past Editor-in-Chief of ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, and the founder and steering committee chair of the Mobile Systems Conference. He has served as the General Chair of several IEEE and ACM conferences, including SIGCOMM and MobiCom, and is serving on the steering committees of seven IEEE & ACM conferences & workshop; he has served on the board of over half-a-dozen journals; on several NSF and NRC panels, and on over six dozen program committees. Dr. Bahl received Digital's Doctoral Engineering Fellowship Award in 1995 and SIGMOBILE's Distinguished Service Award in 2001. In 2004, Microsoft nominated him for the innovator of the year award. He became an ACM Fellow in 2003 and an IEEE Fellow in 2008.  When not working, he loves to read, travel, eat in fine restaurants and spend time drinking with friends and family.

Lujo Bauer is a Research Scientist in CyLab and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his BS in Computer Science from Yale University and his PhD, also in Computer Science, from Princeton University. Lujo's research interests include building usable access-control systems with sound theoretical underpinnings, developing languages and systems for specifying and enforcing security policies, and generally in narrowing the gap between a formal model and a practical, usable system.

Why Usability Can't be Just Skin Deep
Creating usable systems often requires not just the help of usability experts, but that the system architects are usability experts. I will support this thesis with several examples from my recent research. First, I will describe a study that shows that the underlying semantics of an access-control interface affects its usability. Second, I will talk about an architecture for configuring access-control policies in collaborative environments that leverages data mining to improve the usability of the system.

Mark Baugher is a Technical Leader in Cisco Systems’ Research and Advanced Development group where he focuses on home networking. Prior to Cisco, Mark co-founded and served as chief technical officer of Passedge Incorporated, which sold a multicast media security product. Mark has worked in data communications since 1983, when he maintained a distance vector routing protocol for an international time-sharing network. Over the years, Mark has authored, co-authored and edited several widely used international standards in the IETF, ISMA and presently in the UPnP Forum™. Mark holds an M.A in Computer Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in Economics, With Distinction, from the University of Missouri - Kansas City.

Manipulating the Home Network
Much as personal computing needed the "direct manipulation" interface, home networking today needs a new human computer interface: Like the PC, circa 1980, huge numbers of people want new home-networking services but most lack the expertise to use current products. The home network HCI is typically based on web pages, uses passwords as access controls, and fails to enable the great mass of people to directly connect personal devices or even to recognize that they own a home network. The simplest, "plug-and-play" home networking techniques have problems today and good alternatives are lacking. This talk considers some of the problems and alternative solutions for secure home network setup, control, and use by people in a recent ethnographic study.

A.J. Brush works at Microsoft Research as a researcher in the VIBE group. Her main research interest is human-computer interaction with a focus on computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) and ubiquitous computing. She enjoys investigating how technology can help people and families with everyday problems including coordination, awareness, and energy conservation. She has built and deployed LINC, an inkable digital family calendar, as well as studied sharing information between extended families with the SPARCS (Sharing Photos and Relevant Calendar Stuff) prototype. A.J.’s currently obsessed with re-envisioning computers to better support shared use in public spaces like kitchens and using technology to help households be more green. Recent research inspired by these obsessions include the FamilyAccounts project which proposed a new user account model for shared computers in homes, and a field study logging people’s use of power management software on their home computers. A.J. graduated Summa cum Laude from Williams College and then earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Washington. A.J. has just finished serving as the ACM SIGCHI VP for Membership and Communications and the program co-chair for the Pervasive 2009 conference. She has also served on Program Committees for numerous conferences including UbiComp, Pervasive, and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and CHI Notes.

What Would Geek Squad Do?
The last time you bought a house did you start by choosing what type of water heater you wanted and where the pipes should go? Probably not, your house likely already had the water, electrical and other infrastructure pre-installed. While home networking infrastructure continues to evolve at a rapid pace, the current assumption seems to be that home users should be primarily responsible for installing, maintaining, and adding devices to their home network. Drawing on past experience deploying technologies in homes, I’ll argue that we should not expect everyone to do their own technical support. Instead devices and infrastructure should be designed so that some tasks are appropriate and easy for home users and others require a professional (or very motivated home users), what Poole and Edwards term the Outsource model. In addition, based on my passion for green computing I’ll argue that the designing home networks and devices for the Outsource model is the only way we’ll be able to realize the potential for technology in homes to help address global warming by enabling smarter energy consumption and turning homes into places that can produce and store of energy.

Edward (Ned) Burns is a graduate student in the House_n Consortium at the MIT Media Lab. He is currently involved in the Boxlab project, a light-weight, mobile system for collecting data in homes, as well as a new project that explores methods for enabling and encouraging users to participate in home activity recognition. Originally from a background in computer science, he is now exploring new applications of HCI in home environments after doing early work in music analysis.

Cracking the Black Box: User-Driven Context Recognition in the Home
Recent work has demonstrated that sensors placed in the home can be used to develop algorithms that infer context, such as activities of daily living. Context-aware applications can then be created that drive preventive health interventions, communication, entertainment, etc., but some critical aspects of the “human-centric” side of creating and deploying these home health systems have been largely ignored by the research community. Currently, typical research and commercial systems require an (expensive) expert to install sensors in the home, to help acquire necessary training data, and to be available to maintain the system as the environment and the users change. Such systems frequently require extensive tweaking and customization by these experts while presenting a “black box” to the end user, leaving them helpless when it breaks. With no way of understanding what went wrong, much less how to fix the problem, these users are likely to construct and react to an incorrect mental model of how the system actually works. The community needs to explore ways to “crack open” the black box and allow users to peer inside, and even to twiddle with the various knobs within. This presents new challenges, including how to express the problem in ways that users can understand, how to expose parts of the system to user modification (and by how much to do so), and how to motivate the user to participate.

Ramón Cáceres is a Lead Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Labs - Research. His research interests include mobile and pervasive computing, wireless networking, and virtualization. He has previously been a Research Staff Member at IBM Research and Chief Scientist of Vindigo, an award-winning provider of location-based services for mobile devices. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and is an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He was born and raised in Dominican Republic.

Better Living Through Managed Private Virtual Machines
Individuals have proven unable or unwilling to manage their home computing environments well. The problem is growing worse as more of the home becomes computerized and networked. Virtual machines running in the cloud and managed by utility computing providers could relieve individuals of much of the management burden. In addition, under the terms of paid utility computing, individuals could own these machines without relinquishing rights over personal information stored in them. Services are emerging that offer such managed and private virtual machines to enterprises. The falling cost of computing holds promise for these services being extended to individuals in the future.

Tanzeem Choudhury is an assistant professor in the computer science department at Dartmouth. She joined Dartmouth in 2008 after four years at Intel Research Seattle. She received her PhD from the Media Laboratory at MIT. Her research involves developing machine-learning techniques for systems that can reason about human activities, interactions, and social networks in everyday environments. Tanzeem’s doctoral thesis demonstrated for the first time the feasibility of using wearable sensors to capture and model social networks automatically, on the basis of face-to-face conversations. She was recognized in MIT Technology Review's 2008 TR35 list for her work in this area and is a recent recipient of the NSF CAREER award.

Empowering Users by Developing Transparent Context-Models
Context-aware systems are often designed as magical black-boxes that automatically sense and reason about users' behavior and their environment. As devices in the home become embedded and highly networked, systems that can intelligently configure itself to support the needs of its inhabitants become appealing. However, the problem of a black-box approach is that when systems fail the user have no idea what went wrong and can feel frustrated and helpless.

In this talk, I would like argue that machine-learning algorithms used in context-aware computing need to be transparent and allow users to troubleshoot problems and understand failures. In building transparent models, researchers need to think not only about model tractability and accuracy but also model interpretability. For example, can we factorize the dependencies between different variables in a given model to increase interpretability? Or develop models that are suitable for parameterizing human intuitions? Or is it enough to focus on presenting the output of these systems more intuitively? Will transparent models help or further muddy the picture? Please bring your thoughts!

Bruce Davie is a visiting lecturer at MIT, and a Fellow at Cisco Systems, where he has been since 1995. For many years he led the team of architects responsible for Multiprotocol Label Switching and IP Quality of Service at Cisco. He recently joined the Video and Content Networking Business Unit in Cisco's Service Provider group. He is also an active participant in both the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Research Task Force. Prior to joining Cisco he was director of internetworking research and chief scientist at Bell Communications Research. Bruce holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Edinburgh University. His research interests include routing, measurement, quality of service, transport protocols, and overlay networks.

Improving the Home Network User Experience
It is widely accepted that the "user experience" of home networking leaves much to be desired. This problem is more serious and widespread than the canonical wireless-router-setup problem
-- home networks need to be reliable, secure, and even enjoyable througout their lifetimes, not just tolerably manageable during the initial setup phase. We can identify several trends that are likely, if anything, to exacerbate the situation:
-- a proliferation of standards. As Len Kleinrock memorably observed, the problem with "standards" is the last letter: there are too many of them. Home network device manufacturers apparently do not know which ones to implement, and there are enough gaps and overlaps between standards to make interoperability a gamble at best. And even if devices can be made to interoperate, interoperability alone may fall far short of providing a satisfying and intuitive user experience.
-- increasing topological complexity of home networks. Many home networks today function as a fairly simple hub and spoke topology behind a single NAT box, but this is beginning to change. IPv6 has the potential to reduce NAT usage, leading to more complex topologies, while the need to use wireless bandwidth more efficiently also argues against hub and spoke connectivity.
-- the need for adaptability and personalization. Consumers already personalize their devices (e.g. adding ringtones to mobile phones) and adapt to new capabilities (e.g. the widespread availability of Internet video). Home networks need to be as customizable and adaptable as other consumer devices, without becoming overwhelmingly complex.

The aim of this session is to stimulate a discussion about how the user experience might be improved. One line of research would require a significant rethinking of network architecture: rather than making users think about connecting computing devices together, we should be creating network architectures specifically to achieve user objectives. For example, "The Knowledge Plane" (Clark et al.) suggests a network architecture in which user objectives are explicitly understood by components inside the network. "Content Centric Networking" (Jacobson et al.) aims to move away from interconnecting named computers to connecting users with named content. Another line of thinking is that ISPs (or some other sort of SPs) might play a more active role in the user experience - clearly a challenge to the traditional "intelligence at the edge" model of the Internet. Rethinking traditional views will be the goal of this session.

Colin Dixon is a graduate student at the University of Washington. While an undergraduate at the University of Maryland he worked on approximation algorithms and anonymous communication. His current research interests include computer security, network architecture and distributed systems with a focus on deployable solutions for real-world problems.

Towards a Platform for Homes
The last fifteen years has seen a vast proliferation of middleboxes to solve all manner of persistent limitations in the Internet protocol suite. Examples include firewalls, NATs, load balancers, traffic shapers, deep packet intrusion detection, virtual private networks, network monitors, transparent web caches, content delivery networks, and the list goes on and on. However, most smaller networks in homes, small businesses and the developing world are left without this level of support. Further, the management burden and limitations of middleboxes are apparent even in enterprise networks.

We argue for a shift from using proprietary middlebox harware as the dominant tool for managing networks toward using open software running on end hosts. We show that functionality that seemingly must be in the network, such as NATs and traffic prioritization, can be more cheaply, flexibly, and securely provided by distributed software running on end hosts, working in concert with vastly simplified physical network hardware. This has the potential to create more powerful tools for managing even small networks in homes, small business, and the developing world.

W. Keith Edwards is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in Georgia Tech's College of Computing. His research focuses on bringing HCI perspectives to core computing concerns such as networking and information security. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech he was Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC, where he also managed the Ubiquitous Computing group and contributed toward the commercialization of several key technologies.

Interaction and Infrastructure: Bridging the Gap Between Human-Computer Interaction and Networking
We often think of the "user experience" as being an application layer concern, something that can be applied in a thin veneer of menus and graphics atop a software and hardware infrastructure. In this talk I'd like to challenge that notion, to argue that user experience concerns reach deep down the stack, and likewise that our networking infrastructure often largely determines what user experiences can be created in the first place. Despite this intertwined relationship between interactive experience and infrastructure, however, these aspects are often addressed in isolation. In this talk I'll discuss some of the human-centered problems that arise from the current networking infrastructure, especially in the home, and argue for why bridging the gap between human-computer interaction and networking is essential if we are to make progress on unraveling the technological knot in homes.

Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UCLA. She holds the Jon Postel Chair in Computer Networks, and is Founding Director of the National Science Foundation funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). CENS’ mission is to explore and develop innovative, end-to-end, distributed sensing systems, across an array of scientifically and socially relevant applications, from ecosystems to human systems. Estrin is currently exploring Mobile Personal Sensing systems that leverage the location, motion, image, and attached-sensor data streams increasingly available globally from mobile phones; with particular emphasis on human and environmental health applications and on privacy-aware architectures. Estrin’s earlier research addressed Internet protocol design and scaling, in particular, inter-domain and multicast routing. She received her PhD in 1985 from MIT and her BS in 1980 from UC Berkeley, both in EECS. Estrin currently serves on the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and was previously a member of the NSF National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Advisory board, the NSF CISE Advisory Committee, and DARPA-ISAT. Estrin was selected as the first ACM-W Athena Lecturer in 2006 and was awarded the Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Award for Innovation in 2007. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009. She is a fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAS and was granted Doctor Honoris Causa from EPFL in 2008.

Ben Greenstein joined Intel Research Seattle in September 2006. Currently, he leads Trustworthy Wireless, a project focused on improving privacy for users of wireless devices. His interests fall broadly at the intersection of wireless networks, embedded systems, and distributed systems, but he gets most excited when the low-level mechanisms he designs have the potential to help real users. Ben received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA, where he studied embedded networked sensing systems with Deborah Estrin and Eddie Kohler.

Boxes and Arrows for the Couch Potato
Do I really need to know what a subnet mask is to connect to the Internet? Why does my stereo give me the option of playing in 7-speaker surround sound when, clearly, seven speakers are not connected to it? Why can’t my TV tell me where my remote control is? Why can't my baby monitor double as an agent in a home security system, and vice versa? And why doesn't my fridge talk to my to-do list?

In this talk I’ll argue that the problem is that we’re dealing with a growing number of increasingly sophisticated network-capable devices in the home, and yet we have no methodology to make it easy for them to work together. Any one device is difficult for the average consumer to configure on its own (think AP, VCR, phone), so it’s no wonder that stringing together several to construct even the simplest of applications (e.g. connecting a camera to a motion detection algorithm to an alarm), generally speaking, is an act of futility. Simple applications are hard to create: their components are hard to find in the morass of offered features and there’s no language to glue components together with any flexibility. Worse yet, invalid configurations are easier to stumble upon than valid ones. There’s no feedback that a setup isn’t going to work until it winds up not working. It’s like programming a distributed system without a debugger.

So, what we need is a way to make it easy to string applications together and a way to make it hard to misconfigure them. To do this, we first need a massive simplification of the system. Wide "I-can-do-anything" interfaces of today must be rewritten as simple, narrow, clear, and meaningful interfaces, like "connect to get Internet access," or video, or whatever. We’ll then need someone to write roadmaps for mass consumption. These little constellations of boxes and arrows with well-chosen default parameters would define how the devices in our home could operate and connect to one another to achieve some desired application. The consumer’s task of configuring a system would then be reduced simply to choosing the right roadmaps, and, if necessary, overriding some of the defaults. These maps would live in the devices in our home; the current collection of available devices would define which maps are currently valid. And we’d all live happily ever after.

Rebecca E. "Beki" Grinter is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on problems at the intersection of Computing and Humanity. Specifically, she applies empirical methods to understand how Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) are both human-built and human-used machines. Her research has shown how human-centered problems impact the production of complex technologies, and how people's patterns of appropriation give rise to surprising patterns of system use. Beki received her Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining the Georgia Institute of Technology, she worked in the Computer Science Division of Bell Laboratories and in Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory.

Domestic Networking as a Starting Point for Investigations about Human Network Interaction
In the last five years, people have become increasingly aware of the challenges that home networking creates, for some households. Empirical and technical research show a wealth of problems and possibilities to move some households closer to the "smart home" posited. But end-user centered domestic networks are just one starting point for a Human-Network Interaction agenda. In this short talk I will focus on some other locations and places where people are beginning to want networks and encounter the limits of those technologies for end-user configurations. I will argue that broadening the agenda beyond the household, while keeping the human network interaction central, creates new, interesting opportunities for the human-interaction and network sciences.

Haym Hirsh is Professor and past Chair of Computer Science at Rutgers University, and is currently on assignment as Director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. His research is on foundations and applications of machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval. He received his BS degree from the Mathematics and Computer Science Departments at UCLA and his MS and PhD from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.

Jason Hong joined the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 as an assistant professor in the Human Computer Interaction Institute. He works in the areas of ubiquitous computing and usable privacy and security, focusing on location-based services, anti-phishing, and mobile social computing. He is also an author of the book The Design of Sites, a pattern-based approach to designing customer-centered web sites. He received his PhD from Berkeley and his undergraduate degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Visualizations for Helping People Manage Home Networks
Who's connected to my network? What are they doing? This device used to work, why isn't it working anymore? These are questions that from a conceptual standpoint are quite simple, but from an execution standpoint require a great deal of knowledge about topology, network protocols, packet sniffing, and so on. We're in the initial stages of developing better visualizations to help people answer basic questions about their home network. We will present early designs and results, as well as open questions.

Srikanth Kandula is a researcher in the Networking Research Group. His interests are in building and analyzing networked systems. Of late, he has worked on learning rules underlying network communication, aggregating bandwidth from multiple access points, and diagnosing problems in enterprise networks. Most of his work applies machine learning and statistics to working systems. Srikanth completed my PhD in Computer Science from MIT in 2008.

A OneBox for Home (network)
As the numbers and types of devices that hang off the home network increase, the constraint that a lay user be able to setup and manage the network is an increasingly bigger hurdle to surmount. Current stabs at the problem include efforts to improve interoperability via plug-n-play mechanisms and improved diagnosis such as Windows NDF. In this talk, I will pitch a rather contrarian approach. Suppose we could put a new box that sits at head of the home's link to the Internet, arbitrates all connectivity to and from the home, and serves as a single point of co-ordination for configuration and management activity. I will argue that with this OneBox a lot of management problems become simpler. Configuring the NAT and the Wireless Access point could be hidden away from the user. To facilitate better collaboration across different operating systems, the OneBox could provide a web-based interface to shared content as well as wrappers to OS specific sharing and discovery methods (for example, support mac os's snooping for music, mounting remote drives in linux, SMB for windows).

Further, the OneBox can facilitate application scenarios that would otherwise not be possible via a NAT tunnel. It could trivially plug into available cloud based services that backup data, serve as a synchronization point for exchanging user documents to and from the outside world, sandbox the connectivity to the Internet for guests or inexperienced users perhaps by providing single-use virtual machines that are promptly deleted upon completion of a (browsing) session and provide an always-on point of presence for the home.

S. Keshav is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Tetherless Computing at the School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada. Earlier in his career he was a researcher at Bell Labs, an Associate Professor at Cornell, and a co-founder of Ensim Corporation, a Silicon Valley startup. He is the author of a widely used graduate textbook on computer networking and has been awarded the Director's Gold Medal at IIT Delhi, the Sakrison Prize at UC Berkeley, and the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. His current interests are in infrastructural issues underlying tetherless computing. Keshav received a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Delhi in 1986 and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991, both in Computer Science.

From Theory to Practice to Deployment
The ultimate test of a theory is to put it into practice and the ultimate test of an implementation is to deploy it in the field. We are all aware of the gap between theory and practice: the simplifying assumptions made by a theoretical model often assume away potentially important practical considerations. As a case in point, the assumption of circular wireless coverage allows us to prove beautiful theorems that just happen to be false in the real world. Many of us have taken the steps necessary to translate from elegant theorems on paper to real systems and know how hard that can be. In my talk, I will argue that the long-term deployment of these systems in the real world, when being used (and abused) by real users, is just as important, and just as hard a gap to bridge. Long-term deployment requires understanding what the real problems facing users are, simplifying the solution, making the solution robust, and ensuring that the system can be maintained by untrained or lightly trained users. Drawing from my experience with the KioskNet project, I will highlight some lessons that may prove useful for any solution to the 'technological knot' in the home. Hopefully, this will allow potential solutions to be solutions, rather than additional knots that do 'knot' work.

Peter Key joined Microsoft Research's European Research Centre in Cambridge, U.K., in 1998 where he is a Principal Researcher, co-leading the Systems and Networking area. He also acts as Intern Tsar! His current research is on multipath routing in wired and wireless networks, home networking, and the economics of networks and of ad-auctions. His other research interests include Distributed Control, Application Performance, Quality of Service and Stochastic Networks. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was at BT, working in the field of Teletraffic Engineering and Performance Evaluation, where he was involved with the development and introduction of DAR (Dynamic Alternative Routing) into BT’s trunk network. At BT he led a mathematical services group, and 1992 ventured in to ATM to lead performance group. In 1995 he led a Performance Engineering team and then managed the Network Transport area. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Statistical Laboratory, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET). In 1999 he was Technical co-chair of the 16th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC) , and Program co-chair for Sigmetrics 2006.

Towards an efficient green networked home: a social Gordian knot?
Within a home, people consume resources such as power or network resources inefficiently and "selfishly," which imposes negative externalities on both their fellow home dwellers and the wider community. Can technology which measures and inform help to improve the situation, or does the problem lie with the social network dynamics within the home, which may be immune to technological intervention? We present some insight from economics and from the author's own (statistically invalid) experiences with teenage daughters ....

Tadayoshi "Yoshi" Kohno is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research focuses on assessing and protecting the security and privacy of current and future technologies. Example topics of past and on-going research include: provable security for cryptographic protocols; security and privacy for wireless medical devices; electronic voting machine security and privacy; digital rights management and DMCA enforcement; human-computer interaction and security and privacy; and RFID security and privacy. Kohno is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Kohno is also the author of multiple award papers, including papers at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland), the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), the International Conference on Mobile Systems, Application, and Services (MobiSys), and the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC). In 2004 Kohno presented his research on electronic voting security and privacy to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2007 Kohno was awarded the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, recognizing him as one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35. Kohno is also dedicated to computer security education and his methods for teaching "the security mindset" have received national attention. Kohno received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at San Diego.

Overcoming Security and Privacy Risks in the Home
At first glance home networks might look identical to any other kind of network: multiple heterogeneous devices communicating with each other and performing actions on behalf of their owners. Given this view, one might conclude that home networks pose no new challenges and no unique opportunities for security research. I will argue why this perspective is not true. Home networks do pose unique challenges and opportunities. I will ground my arguments with recent experimental results regarding the security and privacy properties of an emerging class of home network devices: household robots. Such robots are indicative of a broader set of future networked cyber-physical systems within a home.

Hank Levy is Chairman and Wissner-Slivka Chair of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Levy’s research involves operating systems, computer architecture, distributed computing, and the Web. He is the author of two books and many publications, including 8 best paper award winners from the top operating system conferences. With his UW colleagues, he invented Simultaneous Multithreading, which is used in the Intel Pentium-4 (“Hyperthreading”), IBM Power-5, and other CPUs. In a previous life, Hank spent 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation working on operating systems and architecture. He is also co-founder of two startups, Skytap and Performant (acquired in 2003). Hank is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, and recipient of a Fulbright Research Scholar Award.

Ratul Mahajan is a Researcher at Microsoft Research. His research interests include all aspects of networked systems, especially their architecture and design. His work spans Internet routing and measurements, incentive-compatible protocol design, practical models for wireless networks, and vehicular networks. He has published several highly-cited papers in top-tier venues such as SIGCOMM, SOSP, and NSDI. He is a winner of the SIGCOMM best paper award, the William R. Bennett Prize, and Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Washington (2005) and B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (1999).

The understandability challenge in building diagnostic systems for non-experts
Common concerns in the design of a diagnostic system tend to be accuracy, fraction of faults covered, and the granularity at which the faulty components are identified. I argue that understandability of the system's analysis should be included as a first-order concern, especially when targeting non-experts. The system will be of limited use otherwise. Based on my experiences with co-developing NetMedic, a diagnostic system for small-scale networks, I describe what it means for a diagnostic system to be understandable. I argue that it is a challenge that not only poses hard questions for both UI and systems domains but also requires close cooperation between the two.

Henrique "Rico" Malvar is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and the Managing Director of Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. Previously, Rico was a founding member of the Signal Processing research group at Microsoft Research, which evolved into the Communication and Collaboration Systems group and the Knowledge Tools group. Rico's technical contributions at Microsoft include co-development of the Windows Media Audio digital audio format, image compression technologies for Microsoft Office, Tablet PC, Xbox 360 and Flight Simulator X, digital elevation map compression technologies for Flight Simulator X, rights management technologies for Windows Media, new video transform and quantization techniques that were adopted into H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC), ink compression formats for Microsoft Office and Tablet PC, acoustic signal processing technologies for Windows Messenger, Microsoft Office RoundTable, and Windows Vista, and co-development of the HD Photo format for digital pictures, which is the basis for the upcoming JPEG XR standard. His technical interests include audio and video signal enhancement and compression, multirate signal processing, signal decompositions (filter banks, transforms, wavelets), fast algorithms, coding theory, and electronics hardware. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT in 1986.

Before coming to Microsoft, Rico was Vice President of Research and Advanced Technology at PictureTel (later acquired by Polycom). Prior to that, he headed the Digital Signal Processing Research Group at Universidade de Brasília, Brazil. He received the Marconi Young Scientist Award in 1981, was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1997, and received the Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2002. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis (ACHA) and was until recently an associate editor of the journal IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. He holds over 85 issued patents and has published over 150 technical articles in journals, conferences, technical reports, and standards contributions. Rico is a "carioca", which means he was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Dr. David W. McDonald joined the faculty at The Information School at University of Washington in January 2002. Dr. McDonald is currently serving as a Program Director for Human Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation in the Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. David has ongoing projects studying Wikipedia and technology and media use in the home. He has published research on collaborative authoring, recommendation systems, organizational memory, and public use of large screen displays. His general research interests span Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). David earned his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. At UC Irvine he was part of the Computing, Organizations, Policy and Society (CORPS) group. David has worked at FX Palo Alto Laboratory in the Personal and Mobile technology group and at AT&T Labs.

Problem Solving Probes: Uncovering Conceptual Disconnects with Networked Ensembles
As people adopt a digital lifestyle a wide range of network enabled digital devices are brought into the home and family. Yet the difficulty of getting networked digital devices to interoperate is frustrating for many people. This presentation will describe a study of how households resolve interoperability issues with digital media ensembles; sets of networked media devices. We describe our methods for studying households and some of our preliminary results. We have found that our participants have problems at different conceptual levels. Resolving problems or misconceptions at a lower level may only result in uncovering another problem at a higher level. The results point to strategies for improving how people interact and mange ensembles of networked devices.

Jitu Padhye received his BE in Computer Engineering from Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute, Mumbai, India in 1992, MS in Computer Science from the Vanderbilt University in 1995, and PhD from the Computer Science department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2000. He then spent two years working at ACIRI, now called ICIR. Jitu has been at Microsoft Research since April 2002.

Dina Papagiannaki has been a researcher at Intel Research since January 2004; from 2004 until the end of 2006 in Cambridge and recently moved to Pittsburgh. From the beginning of 2000 until the end of 2003, Dina was a member of the IP Group at the Sprint Advanced Technology Labs. She received her PhD from the Computer Science Department of University College London (UCL) in March 2003. Her supervisors were Prof. Jon Crowcroft and Dr. Saleem Bhatti. She got her first degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in October 1998. Dina currently hold an adjunct faculty position in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Do-it-for-me Home Network Management
Recently I came across the quote "'The market for digital home technology support is one of the most dynamically-growing segments,' said Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst with Parks Associates. 'As consumers grapple with ever-more complex digital home technology headaches, 'DIY' is quickly becoming 'do-if-for-me,' which opens up significant opportunity for many players.'" In this short talk I will try to cover what I see as the main trends pointing to increased complexity of technology in the home, and the research questions that are bound to surface as we work towards those "do-it-for-me" solutions.

Joseph Paradiso is the Sony Career Development Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he directs the Responsive Environments group, which explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction, and perception. In addition, he co-directs the Things That Think Consortium, a group of industry sponsors and Media Lab researchers who explore the extreme fringe of embedded computation, communication, and sensing. After two years developing precision drift chambers at the Lab for High Energy Physics at ETH in Zurich, he joined the Draper Laboratory, where his research encompassed spacecraft control systems, image processing algorithms, underwater sonar, and precision alignment sensors for large high-energy physics detectors. He joined the Media Lab in 1994, where his current research interests include embedded sensing systems and sensor networks, wearable and body sensor networks, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, localization systems, passive and RFID sensor architectures, human-computer interfaces, and interactive media. His honors include the 2000 Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation, and he has authored 200 articles and technical reports on topics ranging from computer music to power scavenging. After receiving a BS in electrical engineering and physics summa cum laude from Tufts University, Paradiso became a K.T. Compton fellow at the Lab for Nuclear Science at MIT, receiving his PhD in physics there for research conducted at CERN in Geneva.

Wearable Dynamic Management of Distributed Domestic Utilities
Just as pilots can no longer grab the stick in a modern aircraft and mechanically control the flaps, occupants of homes and offices in the future won't necessarily be able to just flip the switch and turn the thermostat to control building utilities. For one thing, there may well be too many devices to easily control with direct "switches" - they should instead be driven by inferred intention or simple, intuitive collective control. More crucially, energy conservation concerns will pull our hand off the dial as they mandate that environments regulate themselves to attain the occupant's objectives and best tend to their comfort while minimizing utility use. In this talk, I'll introduce current work in the Media Lab's Responsive Environments Group that falls under this broad theme. This will include an automated system for controlling HVAC systems based on information from wireless, wearable sensors that monitor integrated motion, temperature, and humidity (from which comfort is inferred), and a dense interactive media system composed of distributed sensor "portals" that feature multimodal sensing (including video and audio capture) as well as media output through a display and speaker. Initial applications running on the portal system will be introduced, and a scheme is introduced that automatically brokers privacy preferences in this media-capture-rich environment.

Shwetak N. Patel is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington. Dr. Patel is also a member of dub. His research interests are in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, and User Interface Software and Technology. He is particularly interested in developing easy-to-deploy sensing technologies and approaches for location and activity recognition applications. Shwetak is also the co-founder of Unsenso, Inc., a demand side energy monitoring solutions provider. Shwetak received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008 and B.S. in Computer Science in 2003.

Bringing Sensing to the Masses
The use of sensing systems in the home has the potential to influence various research areas such as chronic care management, aging in place, and sustainability. A major challenge remains in identifying and developing truly ubiquitous sensing solutions that address deployment challenges of cost-effectiveness, installation, maintenance, and overall acceptability for a general audience. In this talk, I will explore the need for building practical sensing systems for the home to enable large-scale explorations so we can begin to move out of the "living laboratories." In addition, I will highlight existing and new research topics in this area.

Erika S. Poole is a PhD candidate in human-centered computing at Georgia Tech. Her dissertation research examines the user experience difficulties people have with information technologies in residential settings. She has conducted empirical work investigating how and why householders engage with professional technical support, online communities, as well as people within their social networks to coordinate to solve complex technology problems at home. She is currently developing social computing technologies that support householder efforts to setup, maintain, and understand their home computing environments. Erika holds a BS degree in computer science from Purdue University and an MS in computer science from Georgia Tech. She is a member of IEEE, ACM, SIGCHI, and the ACM US Public Policy Committee.

Unraveling the Technological Knot: It’s Not Just about Usability or Technological Innovation
When people have trouble with home technologies, where do they go for help? My research has shown that they often dismiss using documentation, help manuals, or other "official" channels (e.g., professional technical support in person and over the phone) to get answers. These resources are often described as irrelevant to the task, too difficult to comprehend, or too expensive to obtain. Further, when householders do have contact with professional help, it tends to be short-term and for a specific acute problem; professionals typically do not have a long-term relationship with those they are helping. I’ve spent the last several years looking at how we might use "unofficial" help sources such as friends, family members, and peers online to make the user experience of technology at home just a little bit less frustrating. In this talk, I’ll tell you a bit about how and why people rely on these unofficial sources, and why we should think about designing home technologies that support social helping practices.

Mario Romero is a Computer Science PhD candidate at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing working with Professor Gregory Abowd. His research integrates ubiquitous computing, computer vision, and information visualization. He designs and builds sensing and visualizing tools and he evaluates the tools through user studies. Mario defended his PhD thesis on June 24, 2009. He holds an MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois and undergraduate degrees in Industrial Engineering and Civil Engineering from his home town university, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. He has consulting experience for PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning systems, and he has created a number of startups.

Supporting Architectural Design for Technological Homes through Activity Visualization
We present a domain-expert user study of Viz-A-Vis, a tool for visualizing long-term activity in natural environments. We introduced Viz-A-Vis to a group of professional architects with the goal of informing and shaping their current design practices. The architects' task was to remodel the interior of an under performing home in order to support avid media and technology consumption practices by the occupants. The home in question was Georgia Tech's Aware Home, a living laboratory of experimental technology. Through Viz-A-Vis, or visualization of vision, we capture everyday living patterns using a network of overhead cameras. We compute simple yet robust low-level computer vision abstractions of these patterns and we visualize them using interactive information visualization techniques. In our study, we visualized a continuous nine-day recording of the activities of a couple and their guests. We engaged two groups of architects. The first group consisted of five participants. The second group consisted of six participants. Only the second group interacted with Viz-A-Vis. After the remodeling sessions, we guided a focus group discussion with each set of architects. We report our findings as they relate to unraveling the technological knot in homes through informed architectural design. Most significantly, only the second group generated architectural spaces specifically designed for media consumption and technology interaction. The architects based the design on their discovery of behavioral patterns around the culture and technology in the home. Finally, based on the visualizations, our participants produced a richer and more structured vocabulary for describing and categorizing activities.

Srinivasan Seshan is currently an Associate Professor and held the Finmeccanica chair at Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department from 2004 to 2006. Dr. Seshan received his Ph.D. in 1995 from the Computer Science Department at University of California, Berkeley. From 1995 to 2000, Dr. Seshan was a research staff member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. Dr. Seshan's primary interests are in the broad areas of network protocols and distributed network applications. In the past, he has worked on topics such as transport/routing protocols for wireless networks, fast protocol stack implementations, RAID system design, performance prediction for Internet transfers, ISP multihoming, new approaches to congestion control, large-scale multiplayer games, and large-scale sensor networks. His current work explores the challenges and opportunities created by chaotic wireless network deployments.

Low-Level Tools for Diagnosing Wireless Problems
The use of wireless communications within homes is growing dramatically as a result of the explosion in the deployment of mobile computers and phones, consumer electronics for home entertainment, media players, ?tness and medical devices, and a myriad of other wireless devices. Unfortunately, wireless is something of a black box as far as its users are concerned. When it works well it is a tremendous enabler. When it does not, there is little that the average user can do to understand and remedy the situation. What we require are tools for wireless, analogous to ping and traceroute for wired networks, that let experts understand how well the network is working and what has likely gone wrong. Current attempts at such tools rely on standard 802.11 cards with modified drives that return as much information as possible. However, this information is quite limited and reveals just the "tip of the iceberg." In this talk, I describe some of our work on developing tools and techniques that improve a user's ability to make observations about the RF transmissions around them. We believe this to be a critical first step towards enabling user's to diagnose their own wireless networking problems.

Anmol Sheth joined Intel Research Seattle in June 2007. His research interests span the broad area of wireless systems. His current research focuses on building novel multiple-antenna based wireless systems. Anmol's prior research dealt with diagnosing performance degradation faults in distributed wireless systems and building high performance long distance Wi-Fi networks. Anmol received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2007.

Rethinking Wireless Access for Future All-Wireless Homes
The rapid integration of Wi-Fi in a variety of everyday consumer electronic devices has led to a growing demand for wireless bandwidth in homes. The recent advances in multiple antenna based wireless systems, like 802.11n MIMO radios and phased-array directional antennas, have resulted in wireless performance to reach an inflection point that provides an opportunity to meet this growing demand and enable the vision of an all-wireless home. For example, 802.11n based MIMO radios can provide link speeds upto 600 Mbps over a couple of hundred feet enabling wireless displays and new usage models in the home. While these multiple antenna based systems primarily provide high throughput for a single link, the question of how we can deliver high throughput to a large number of densely-packed devices that all want to share the RF spectrum remains an open research problem. In this talk I will present the challenges involved and some initial results in using these multiple antenna based systems to architect novel wireless home networks that can significantly improve spatial reuse and overall performance in densely packed Wi-Fi networks of future homes.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum was born in New York City and raised in White Plains, NY. He has an S.B.from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

Prof. Tanenbaum is the principal designer of three operating systems: TSS-11, Amoeba, and MINIX. TSS-11 was an early system for the PDP-11. Amoeba is a distributed operating systems for SUN, VAX, and similar workstation computers. MINIX is a small operating system designed for high reliability. In addition, Tanenbaum is the author or coauthor of five books. These books have been translated into over 20 languages and are used all over the world. Tanenbaum has also published more than 140 refereed papers and has lectured in a dozen countries on many topics. Tanenbaum is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1994 he was the recipient of the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. In 1997 he won the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science. In 2007 he won the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr., Education Medal.

Brendan Traw is an Intel Fellow and chief technology officer for Intel's Digital Home Group. He is responsible for the technology roadmap, industry standards, strategic initiatives and architecture for Intel's consumer electronics platforms. Previously, Traw focused on the management and protection of entertainment content in digital environments, leading the team which developed Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP), the basis for content protection in today's digital home networks, as well as a range of other content protection solutions for recordable DVD, DVD-Audio, SDcard, and HDMI. A recognized leader across the computer, consumer electronics and content industries, he has published numerous papers and holds over 20 patents in the areas of content protection, system architecture, and network security. Traw received his Ph.D. in computer information science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Overcoming the Barriers of Delivering the Internet to the Television: Where Do We Stand After 15 Years?
Bringing Internet content and experiences to the television screen has been a dream of many for over a decade. Numerous approaches have been tried, yet none have been broadly embraced by consumers or the marketplace. What have we been doing wrong? This talk will identify some of the barriers which have been encountered and possible solutions to overcome them.

Anders Vinberg is a Technical Fellow in the Management and Services Division, responsible for technical direction across Microsoft’s management initiatives: the products in the System Center family, the management infrastructure in Windows, and management services including Windows Update. His current areas of focus include virtualization, large-scale datacenters and clients for the new mobile lifestyles. Prior to Microsoft, Vinberg worked for 14 years at Computer Associates as the principal architect of Unicenter, the company’s flagship enterprise management system, and in many other product categories. He has also spent several years working in computer graphics. Vinberg grew up in Sweden, and holds a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He lives in Kirkland, Wash. with his wife Anki.

What Could New-Era Corporate Systems Management Mean for the Home? And Vice Versa?
Systems management in the commercial world is undergoing dramatic changes: a proliferation of mobile devices, work from anywhere, federated identities and de-perimeterized security are up-ending clients, and in the datacenter we have new requirements posed by extreme scale and restrictions on power and cooling. We speak of user-centric and service-centric management. Increased government involvement, litigation and criminalization are changing requirements for governance, risk and compliance; different perspectives on cost control are changing everything. I will explore how these factors, and the solutions being developed, apply in the home environment. And how we even define a home environment.

Geoffrey M. Voelker is an Associate Professor at the University of California at San Diego. His research interests include operating systems, distributed systems, and computer networks. He received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 1995 and 2000, respectively.

Diagnosing Home Network Misconfigurations Using Shared Knowledge
Networks and networked applications depend on several pieces of configuration information to operate correctly. Such information resides in routers, firewalls, and end hosts, among other places. Incorrect information, or misconfiguration, could interfere with the running of networked applications. This problem is particularly acute in consumer settings such as home networks, where there is a huge diversity of network elements and applications coupled with the absence of network administrators. To address this problem, we present NetPrints, a system that leverages shared knowledge in a population of users to diagnose and resolve misconfigurations. Basically, if a user has a working network configuration for an application or has determined how to rectify a problem, we would like this knowledge to be made available automatically to another user who is experiencing the same problem. NetPrints accomplishes this task by applying decision tree based learning on working and nonworking configuration snapshots and by using network traffic based problem signatures to index into configuration changes made by users to fix problems. We describe the design and implementation of NetPrints, and demonstrate its effectiveness in diagnosing a variety of home networking problems reported by users. This is joint work led by Ranjita Bhagwan at MSR India together with Bhavish Aggarwal, Tathagata Das, Siddharth Eswaran, and Venkata N. Padmanabhan also at MSR India.

David Wetherall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and Director of nearby Intel Research Seattle. He joined Intel in 2006 to lead the Seattle lab in research on computing systems woven into the fabric of everyday life. Wetherall joined the University of Washington faculty in 1999 after receiving his Ph.D, E.E. and S.M. in computer science from MIT; he received his B.E. in electrical engineering from the University of Western Australia in 1989. His research interests are focused on network systems, especially wireless networks and mobile devices, network measurement, and the design of Internet protocols. His thesis research pioneered active networks, an architecture in which new network services can be introduced rapidly using mobile code, and for which he received the SIGCOMM Test-of-Time award in 2007. He was been recognized with an NSF CAREER award in 2002 and became a Sloan Fellow in 2004.

John Zahorjan, is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research interests are in networking and distributed and parallel systems. His most recent workis in the area of wireless networking, with publications in SIGCOMM and IMC.

---

Last updated: 08/03/2009