Sanjay Rao

Professor
322-A 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. In the past, I have been been a Visiting Research Scientist at the Computer Science Department of Princeton University (Feb –Aug, 2015), Google (June 2011-July 2012), and at AT&T Research (May 2006-June 2006). My research has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award (2010), and with the ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award (2011).

My CV/Resume is here

A list of significant recent publications is here

Research

My current research has a few broad themes:

Networks with verifiable performance properties: Designing and managing large networks is challenging today. By many estimates a large portion of the IT budget of organizations is driven by the need to manage networks, with configuration errors and design faults often accounting for a large fraction of cyber-attacks. My work seeks to verify that network designs meet desired performance properties, and seeks to synthesize network designs in a principled manner with verifiable properties.

Low latency mobile web: The latency of web applications is critical, and by many estimates even hundreds of milliseconds of latency can impact business revenue and user engagement. The issues are particularly relevant in cellular networks, where web latencies are 6X desktop environments. My research seeks to address this gap through a novel cloud-based approach that redundantly execute Web pages on behalf of the client, and scales computation through the use of programming language techniques.

Delivering Internet video with high quality of experience: Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in the popularity of Internet video, which forms a major fraction of Internet traffic today. We are investigating ways to deliver high quality video across diverse and variable network conditions, leveraging new opportunities provided by cloud computing.

Some of my past work has developed abstraction-driven approaches to driven network design and configuration, designed trust-worthy peer-to-peer systems, and pioneered Internet peer-to-peer video streaming.

You can find more details about my research here:

Internet Systems Lab

Projects

Publications

Graduate Students

Teaching

I usually teach the following courses:

Introduction to Computer Networking (ECE 463), typically every Fall.
Computer Network Systems (ECE 595), typically every Spring

In the past, I have taught the following courses:

Principles of Network Management (ECE 695/CS 590, Spring 06-07
Introduction to Computer Security (ECE 495F, Spring 2005)

Professional Service

Associate Editor, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (December 2016 – Present)
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
Publicity Chair, ACM CoNext 2013
Student Travel Grant Chair, ACM CoNEXT 2008
Review Panel, NSF (2009,13,14,18), DOE (2013)
Conference Technical Program Committees: ACM Sigcomm (2008,2020), NSDI (2014), Sigmetrics (2021), IEEE Infocom (2008-19), ACM CoNEXT (2008-09,13), IEEE ICDCS (2006, 2012-13), IEEE ICNP (2012), ACM Multimedia (2011,13,14), Sigcomm Poster Committee (2007,10,13,18,19), IEEE/ACM Symposium on Edge Computing (2018-20), IFIP Networking (2010)
Workshop Technical Program Committees: Usenix HotCloud (held with Usenix ATC) (2011), Usenix HotICE (held with NSDI) (2012), NOSSDAV (2009-12), ACM Safeconfig (with ACM CCS) (2009,2010), INM (with Sigcomm and ICNP) (2007,2008).

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 research spans network synthesis/design/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, and won the ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award for his work on End System Multicast (peer-to-peer video streaming). He has served on the Technical Program Committees of conferences including ACM Sigcomm, Usenix NSDI, and ACM CoNext, has served as the Area technical program chair of IEEE Infocom, is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and was the technical program co-chair of the INM/WREN workshop held in conjuction with NSDI 2010.