Paul Barford

About

Paul Barford is a professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where he serves as Department Chair and holds the title of Carl de Boor Professor. He is a member of the university's networking group and the founder and director of the Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory. His academic background includes a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University. Prof. Barford has also held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, Wolfson College, and the University of Oxford, and has been an EPSRC visiting fellow. Prior to his academic career, he worked in industry for eight years and has been a consultant on computer networking and security issues. He was the founder and CEO of Nemean Networks LLC, which developed network intrusion detection technology and was acquired by Qualys Inc., where he served as Chief Scientist. He also co-founded Mdotlabs LLC, which developed fraud detection services for online advertising, and after its acquisition by comScore Inc., he served as Chief Scientist. His research interests focus on computer networking and communications, particularly measurement and analysis of Internet data, protocols, and topological structure. He also investigates Internet security, including detection and identification of fraud, traffic anomalies, malicious attacks, and intrusions. His research has been supported by organizations such as the…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Geography
• Data Mining
• Computer Security
• World Wide Web
• Telecommunications
• Computer network
• Real-time computing
• Environmental resource management
• Business

Selected publications

• Five Alarms

  2020 · 22 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Natural disasters can wreak havoc on Internet infrastructure. Short term impacts include impediments to first responders and long term impacts include requirements to repair or replace damaged physical components. In this paper, we present an analysis of the vulnerability of cellular communication infrastructure in the US to one type of natural disaster - wildfires. Three data sets are the basis for our study: historical wildfire records, wildfire risk projections, and cellular infrastructure de…

  DOI

• iGDB

  2022 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Maps of physical and logical Internet connectivity that are informed by and consistent with each other can expand scope and improve accuracy in analysis of performance, robustness and security. In this paper, we describe a methodology for linking physical and logical Internet maps that aims toward a consistent, cross-layer representation. Our approach is constructive and uses geographic location as the key feature for linking physical and logical layers. We begin by building a representation of…

  PublisherDOI

• Assessing the Expansion of Ground-Motion Sensing Capability in Smart Cities via Internet Fiber-Optic Infrastructure

  Seismological Research Letters · 2024-06-21 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Monitoring ground motion in smart cities can improve the public safety by providing critical insights on natural and anthropogenic hazards, for example, earthquakes, landslides, explosions, infrastructure failures, and so forth. Although seismic activity is typically measured using dedicated point sensors (e.g., geophones and accelerometers), techniques such as distributed acoustic sensing have demonstrated the utility of using fiber-optic cable to detect seismic activity over comparabl…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Improving Scalability in Traffic Engineering via Optical Topology Programming

  IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management · 2023-11-28 · 6 citations

  article

  We present a novel framework, GreyLambda, to improve the scalability of traffic engineering (TE) systems. TE systems continuously monitor traffic and allocate network resources based on observed demands. The temporal requirement for TE is to have a time-to-solution in five minutes or less. Additionally, traffic allocations have a spatial requirement, which is to enable all traffic to traverse the network without encountering an over-subscribed link. However, the multi-commodity flowbased TE form…

  PublisherDOI

• BigBen: Telemetry Processing for Internet-Wide Event Monitoring

  IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management · 2022 · 6 citations

  This paper describes BigBen, a network telemetry processing system designed to enable accurate and timely reporting of Internet events (e.g., outages, attacks and configuration changes). BigBen is distinct from other Internet-wide event detection systems in its use of passive measurements of Network Time Protocol (NTP) traffic. We describe the architecture of BigBen, and a cloud-based implementation developed to process large NTP data sets and provide accurate daily event reporting. We demonstra…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: CIRC: Planning-M: Internet Sensor Network Testbeds

  NSF · $130k · 2024–2026

• Collaborative ITR/CSE: Modular Strategies for Internetwork Monitoring

  NSF · $337k · 2003–2010

• EAGER: Internet Measurement Capability for FABRIC

  NSF · $270k · 2020–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Joel Sommers

  Colgate University

  68 shared

• Ramakrishnan Durairajan

  University of Oregon

  31 shared

• Mark Crovella

  Boston University

  30 shared

• Vinod Yegneswaran

  20 shared

• Brian Eriksson

  Adobe Systems (United States)

  17 shared

• Sathiya Kumaran Mani

  Microsoft Research (United Kingdom)

  13 shared

• Robert D. Nowak

  13 shared

• Scott Alfeld

  Amherst College

  12 shared

Awards & honors

• ACM SIGCOMM ('13 PC chair)
• ACM SIGMETRICS ('10 PC chair)
• ACM IMC ('06 PC chair)

Similar researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Yong Jae Leeh-90
• Somesh Jhah-69
• Michael Gleicherh-62