Abstract: Network management plays a central role in keeping the most important networks up and running. An important network management task is configuring and updating a network's "control plane". The control plane governs how the network forwards data, and plays a critical role in imposing important communication policies, such as, who can/not communicate for security or compliance reasons, which flows to isolate, etc. Typical control planes are composed of several distributed routing protocols spread across many network devices. Unfortunately, this complexity often leads to bugs when configurations are updated. In turn, networks face catastrophic problems such as routing blackholes and isolation breaches.
In this talk, I will survey recent advances that are transforming the field of network management. These techniques, inspired by formal methods, aim to automate key network management tasks, and systematically improve resilience, leading to "zero touch" networking. These techniques automatically verify whether networks satisfy important properties; synthesize networks with provably correct policies realizations; and repair broken networks with minimal human involvement.
The impact of this confluence of formal methods and networking is transforming network management into a science. It is likely poised to have a foundational impact on network design, including both network topologies and network hardware. I will survey emerging directions on this front as well.
Bio: Aditya Akella is a Professor of Computer Sciences and an H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellow at UW-Madison. He received his B. Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Madras in 2000, and PhD in Computer Science from CMU in 2005. His research spans computer networks and systems, with a focus on network verification, synthesis, and repair, data center networking, software defined networks, and big data systems. Aditya has published over 100 papers, and has served as the program co-chair for several conferences including NSDI, SIGMETRICS, and HotNets. He is currently the Vice Chair for ACM SIGCOMM. Aditya co-leads CloudLab (http://cloudlab.us), a large-scale testbed for foundational cloud research. Aditya has recieved several awards including the "UW-Madison CS Professor of the Year" Award (2017), Vilas Associates Award (2017), IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (2015), ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award (2014), NSF CAREER Award (2008) and several best paper awards.

Jun Bi
Tsinghua University

Abstract: Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization have gained great attention from academia and industry. This talk first looks back upon the history of the Internet architecture's development as well as the challenges it has faced, while discussing its way of evolution. Then, aiming at the problems of traditional network architectures, we discuss the respective ideas of network functions' softwarization and virtualization, and present some recent research progress in this area at Tsinghua University.
Bio: Jun Bi is a "ChangJiang Scholars" Distinguished Professor, Deputy Dean of the Tsinghua University Institute of Network Science & Cyberspace (as well as Director of its Network Architecture Research Division), and chief expert in the national 863: "Future Network Architectures & Innovation Environments". He obtained his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the Tsinghua University Computer Science Department, served as postdoc and researcher at the U.S. Bell Labs, and joint Tsinghua University in 2003. Conducting research in the domain of network architecture innovation, Jun acquired significant achievements in areas such as IPv6 True Source Address Validation and SDN/NFV. As the first or second author he drafted four international Internet standards (RFCs); as the first or corresponding author he published near 60 SCI papers and over 200 EI papers (in particular, the first ever paper from Tsinghua University published at ACM SIGCOMM, the #1-ranked top international academic conference in the field of networking); as the first inventor he was granted over 20 patents. Professor Bi was awarded the National Sci-Tech Advancement Second Prize, Ministry of Education Technology Invention First Prize, China Institute of Communications Science & Technology First Prize, China College Top Ten Sci-Tech Advances, ICCCN Outstanding Leadership Award issued by IEEE, Student Research Contest Award from SIGCOMM 2014, and Best Paper Award or Nomination from significant international conferences such as IEEE ICNP 2015 and IEEE ICPP 2015, with his student winning the 2013 U.S. Internet2 Application Research Award. Chosen by the Ministry of Education as a "New Century Excellent Talent", he was titled "Excellent Young Intellectual" by Beijing City Committee and City Government and "Knowledge Impartment & People Cultivation Advanced Individual" by Tsinghua University. Now a chair of the Asia Future Internet Forum, he has successively acted as chair of more than 20 international academic conferences, and member of the organizing or technical program committees in first-class conferences like SIGCOMM/INFOCOM/ICNP/CoNEXT/SOSR.

Abstract: Network application optimization is essential for improving the performance of the application as well as its user experience. The network application parameters are crucial in making proper decisions for network application optimizations. However, many existing works are impractical by assuming a priori knowledge of the parameters which are usually unknown and need to be estimated. There have been studies that consider optimizing network application in an online learning context using multi-armed bandit models. However, existing frameworks are problematic as they only consider to find the optimal decisions to minimize the regret, but neglect the constraints (or guarantee) requirements which may be excessively violated. In this work, we first propose a novel online learning framework for network application optimizations with guarantee. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formulate the stochastic constrained multi-armed bandit model with time-varying “multi- level rewards” by taking both “regret” and “violation” into consideration. We are also the first to design a constrained bandit policy, Learning with Minimum Guarantee (LMG), with provable sub-linear regret and violation.
Bio: John C.S. Lui is currently the Choh-Ming Li Chair Professor in the CSE Department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and the Associate Dean of Research at the College of Engineering at CUHK. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA. His current research interests are in network sciences with large data implications, machine learning on large data analytics, network/system/mobile security, network economics, large scale distributed systems and performance evaluation theory. Currently, John is the senior editor in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and has been serving in the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Journal of Performance Evaluation, Journal of Network Science and International Journal of Network Security. He is a member of the review panel in the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award committee, and has served at the IEEE Fellow Review Committee. He received various departmental teaching awards and the CUHK Vice-Chancellor's Exemplary Teaching Award, as well as the CUHK Faculty of Engineering Research Excellence Award. He is an elected member of the IFIP WG 7.3, Fellow of ACM, Fellow of IEEE, Senior Research Fellow of the Croucher Foundation and was the past chair of the ACM SIGMETRICS (2011-2015). His personal interests include films and general reading.

Abstract: In this talk, I would like to share my opinion about the IoT integration with human networks such as social networks for possible smart city applications and what are the critical issues if AI and big-data are involved.
Bio:Prof. Weijia Jia is currently a Chair Professor at University of Macau while he is taking leave from Shanghai Jiaotong University. He is leading several large projects on next-generation Internet of Things, environmental sensing, smart cities and cybersoace sensing and associations etc. He received BSc and MSc from Center South University, China in 82 and 84 and PhD from Polytechnic Faculty of Mons, Belgium in 1993 respectively. He worked in German National Research Center for Information Science (GMD) from 93 to 95 as a research fellow. From 95 to 13, he worked in City University of Hong Kong as a full professor. He has published over 400 papers in various IEEE Transactions and prestige international conference proceedings in the fields of network protocols, network theory and wireless sensor networks.