Sanjay Rao
Professor
312 BSEE Building
School of Electrical and
Computer Engineering
Purdue University
465 Northwestern Avenue
West Lafayette, IN 47907
Phone: 765-494-3399
Fax: 765-494-0676 (ATTN: Sanjay)
E-mail: sanjay AT ecn DOT purdue DOT edu
I am a faculty at Purdue University with research interests in
Computer Networks. My recent and ongoing research focuses on developing principled
approaches to harness the exciting potential that AI offers for
automating the management and operations of large-scale network and cloud
infrastructure. Over my career, my research has made important contributions
to network verification and synthesis especially in the context
of enterprise and wide-area networks, and in delivering
high quality Internet video in heterogeneous Internet environments.
My CV/Resume is here
Research
Selected recent publications
-
Abd AlRhman AlQiam, Yuanjun Yao, Zhaodong Wang, Satyajeet Ahuja Singh, Ying Zhang, Sanjay G. Rao, Bruno Ribeiro, and Mohit Tawarmalani,
"Colt: Handling Traffic Bursts using Piecewise Linear Adaptive Traffic Engineering"
NSDI 2027
(to appear)
-
Chenan Wen, Yizhan Qing, Curt P Jansen, Xiaokang Qiu, and Sanjay Rao,
"Elastispec: Formalizing Enterprise Firewall Management with Informal and Elastic Specifications"
SIGCOMM 2026
[Paper]
[Github]
-
Abd AlRhman AlQiam, Zhuocong Li, Satyajeet Singh Ahuja, Zhaodong Wang, Ying Zhang, Sanjay G. Rao, Bruno Ribeiro, and Mohit Tawarmalani,
"Hattrick: Solving Multiclass TE using Neural Models"
Sigcomm 2025
PDF
[Github]
-
Abd AlRhman AlQiam, Yuanjun Yao, Zhaodong Wang, Satyajeet Ahuja Singh, Ying Zhang, Sanjay G. Rao, Bruno Ribeiro, and Mohit Tawarmalani,
"Transferable Neural WAN TE for Changing Topologies"
Sigcomm 2024
PDF
[Slides]
[Video]
[Github]
-
Syed Usman Jafri, Sanjay Rao, Vishal Shrivastav and Mohit Tawarmalani,
"Leo: Online ML-based Traffic Classification at Multi-Terabit Line Rates"
NSDI 2024
PDF
[Slides]
[Video]
[Github]
-
Chandan Bothra, Jianfei Gao, Sanjay Rao, and Bruno Ribeiro,
"Veritas: Answering Causal Queries from Video Streaming Traces"
Sigcomm 2023
PDF
[Slides]
[Video]
[Github]
-
Ehab Ghabashneh, Chandan Bothra, Ramesh Govindan, Antonio Ortega, and Sanjay Rao,
Dragonfly: Higher Perceptual Quality For Continuous 360° Video Playback
Sigcomm 2023
PDF
[Slides]
[Video]
[Github]
You can find more details about my research here (pages somewhat dated):
Teaching
I have taught the following courses:
- ML-Driven Computer Networking (ECE 695, Fall 2025)
- Computer Network Systems (ECE 50863, Spring 2009-11;12-20;22-24; Fall 24,26)
- Object Oriented Programming in C++ (ECE 30862) (Fall 2022;23 Spring 25).
- Introduction to Computer Networking (ECE 463) (Fall 2005-10; 12-20) .
- Principles of Network Management (ECE 695/CS 590, Spring 06-07)
- Introduction to Computer Security (ECE 495F, Spring 2005)
Selected and Recent Professional Service
- Chair, ACM Sigcomm Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee (2022)
- Associate Editor, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (December 2016–2020)
- Area Technical Program Chair, IEEE Infocom (2017, 2018)
- Technical Program Co-Chair, Internet Network Management/Workshop on Research in Enterprise Networks (INM/WREN), co-located with NSDI, 2010
- Technical Program Committee of ACM Sigcomm (2020,22,23,26); NSDI (2023,25,26); HotNets (2026); MLSys(2026); PACMI (Practical Adoption Challenges of ML for Systems; with SOSP, 2025); ACM Sigcomm workshop on Emerging Multimedia Systems, 2024;
Sigmetrics (2021); ACM CoNEXT (2021); SOCC (2021); ACM Multimedia (2021).
Selected Recent Department and College Service
- Chair, ECE Faculty Search Committee (Tenure Track and Professor of Practice Positions in Software Engineering)
- Purdue Engineering Area Promotions Committee (EAPC) (2026 – Present).
- ECE Head Search Committee (2023-24)
- ECE Faculty Search Committee (2019-20)
Bio
Sanjay G. Rao is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, where he leads the Internet Systems Laboratory. His current research is on principled approaches to AI-driven networking,
while his past work has made important contributions to network synthesis and verification, and Internet video distribution. He received a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and the Ph.D from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. He has been a Visiting Researcher at Google, AT&T Research and Princeton University. He is a recipient of the NSF Career award, has won the ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award for his work on End System Multicast (peer-to-peer video streaming), and is an ACM Distinguished Member. He has served on the Technical Program Committees of conferences including ACM Sigcomm, Usenix NSDI, ACM Sigmetrics and MLSys, has served as the Area technical program chair of IEEE Infocom, and has been an Associate Editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.