The Mobility, Networks, and Systems (MNS) group conducts research in networking and systems. Our work and interests span several areas, including Internet-scale systems, distributed systems, network protocols, wireless networking, mobile computing, and sensor systems. We seek to advance the state of the art in these areas through measurement, design, and prototyping of real-world and experimental networked systems. We share our work with the research community by publishing in the leading research conferences and journals, and releasing software prototypes. We also work with Microsoft's product groups to transfer research technology where appropriate. Finally, we engage with academia through research collaborations and service on journal editorial boards, conference committees, and student thesis committees.
News
- Venkat Padmanabhan is appointed as Chair of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference Technical Steering Committee (Feb 2013)
- Learn more about our program for interns and research assistants.
- Ranjita Bhagwan organizes COMSNETS Panel Session on Right Career Decisions in Computer Science (Jan 2013)
- Saikat Guha is included in the 2012 MIT TR 35 list of "35 innovators under 35". (Aug 2012)
- Centaur, Radio-Jockey, and Zee papers accepted at MOBICOM, Click-spam at SIGCOMM, Koi and Wifi-NC at NSDI (Aug 2012)
- Vishnu Navda co-chairs ACM WiNTECH 2012 TPC (May 2012)
Current Projects
- Wireless: We re-imagine WiFi in a new world where spectrum may be fragmented (e.g, white spaces) and radios are feature-rich (e.g., cognitive, full-duplex, etc.)
- WiFi-Nano and WiFi-NC enable WiFi to operate over fragmented spectrum.
- SpecNet is a platform for identifying wide-area spectrum utilization in real-time.
- Ads: We build systems to automate analysis in online advertising systems, e.g., to predict, detect, preempt, or diagnose problems relating to anomalous drops in revenue, fraudulent clicks, privacy violations, etc.
- Revenue Debugging
- Fingerprinting, measuring, and catching click-fraud
- Dataflow and privacy analysis of large systems
- Physical: We devise techniques and build systems that help interface users, devices, and the environment.
- Mobile: We optimize energy usage on mobile devices to make them last longer on a single charge.
- Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Krishna Kant Chintalapudi, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Ramarathnam Venkatesan, Dhwani: Secure Peer-to-Peer Acoustic NFC, in SIGCOMM, ACM, 12 August 2013
- Raghav Bhaskar, Saikat Guha, Srivatsan Laxman, and Prasad Naldurg, Verito: A Practical System for Transparency and Accountability in Virtual Economies, in Proceedings of the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS), February 2013
- Anshul Rai, Ranjita Bhagwan, and Saikat Guha, Generalized Resource Allocation for the Cloud, in Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), San Jose, CA, October 2012
- Saikat Guha and Srikanth Kandula, Act for Affordable Data Care, in Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), Redmond, WA, October 2012
- Pavan Kumar Athivarapu, Ranjita Bhagwan, Saikat Guha, Vishnu Navda, Ramachandran Ramjee, Dushyant Arora, Venkat Padmanabhan, and George Varghese, RadioJockey: Mining Program Execution to Optimize Cellular Radio Usage, ACM MOBICOM, 22 August 2012
- Anshul Rai, Krishna Kant Chintalapudi, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Rijurekha Sen, Zee : Zero-Effort Crowdsourcing for Indoor Localization, in Mobicom, 22 August 2012
- Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Krishna Kant Chintalapudi, and Venkat Padmanabhan, Centaur : Locating Devices in an Office Environment, in Mobicom, 22 August 2012
- Vacha Dave, Saikat Guha, and Yin Zhang, Measuring and Fingerprinting Click-Spam in Ad Networks, in Proceedings of the Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), Helsinki, Finland, August 2012
- Krishna Chintalapudi, Bozidar Radunovic, Vlad Balan, Michael Buettener, Srinivas Yerramalli, Vishnu Navda, and Ramachandran Ramjee, WiFi-NC : WiFi Over Narrow Channels, in NSDI, NSDI, 27 April 2012
- Saikat Guha, Mudit Jain, and Venkata Padmanabhan, Koi: A Location-Privacy Platform for Smartphone Apps, in Proceedings of the 9th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), San Jose, CA, April 2012
Interns
We are fortunate to have several strong interns from India and abroad work with us each year. Please visit the internship page for more information.
Alumni
- Pavan Athivarapu, Research Assistant [Jul 2011 — Sep 2012]; joins Microsoft as Software Engineer
- Anshul Rai, Research Assistant [May 2010 — Apr 2012]; joins a startup as CEO Founder
- Anand P. Iyer, Research Assistant [May 2010 — Sep 2011]; joins UC Berkeley as Ph.D. Student
- Mudit Jain, Research Assistant [Jul 2010 — Sep 2011]; joins Microsoft as Software Engineer
- Bhavish Aggarwal, Research Assistant [Jul 2010 — May 2010]; joins Ola Cabs as CEO Founder
- Tathagata Das, Assistant Researcher [May 2008 — Sep 2010]; joins UC Berkeley as Ph.D. Student
- Prashanth Mohan, Assistant Researcher [May 2007 — Sep 2008]; joins UC Berkeley as Ph.D. Student
- Lenin Ravindranath, Assistant Researcher [May 2007 — Sep 2008]; joins MIT as Ph.D. Student
- Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Assistant Researcher [May 2006 — Sep 2007]; joins UC Berkeley as Ph.D. Student
Visiting Researchers
- George Varghese (UC San Diego) [Jun 2011 — Jul 2011]
- Kameswari Chebrolu (IIT Mumbai) [May 2008 — Jul 2008]
- Bhaskaran Raman (IIT Mumbai) [May 2008 — Jul 2008]
- Geoff Voelker (UC San Diego) [Sep 2007 — Feb 2008]
Recognition
Members of the MNS group are recognized internationally for the work the do. Here's a sampling of recent citations.
- Venkat Padmanabhan is appointed as Chair of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference Technical Steering Committee (Feb 2013)
- Saikat Guha is included in the 2012 MIT TR 35 list of "35 innovators under 35". (Aug 2012)
- Venkat Padmanabhan elevated to IEEE Fellow (Jan 2012)
Events
- Saikat Guha helps organize Workshop on Internet Tracking, Advertising, and Privacy (July 22, 2011)
- Saikat Guha helps organize MSR India Summer School on Security and Privacy (June 18-30, 2011)
- Venkat Padmanabhan and Ranjita Bhagwan help organize ACM SIGCOMM 2010 (Aug 30-Sept 3, 2010)
- Vishnu Navda organizes MSRI Wireless Networking retreat - Connecting the Next Billion (Aug 28-29, 2010)
- MNS organizes First Mysore Park Workshop on Building and Programming The Cloud (Jan 13-16, 2010)
- MNS organizes MSR India Summer School on Networking (June 9-19, 2009)
Talks and Visits
- Ram Ramjee gives a keynote talk at WASA 2012 (Aug 2012)
- Ranjita Bhagwan visits U Wisconsin, presents Automating Network and Systems Diagnostics (March 2012)
- Venkat Padmanabhan and Sandeep Karanth (ADG) give invited talk at the IISc/Bell Labs Green Telecom & IT Workshop (Apr 2012)
- Saikat Guha visits U Washington, UT Austin, IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, presents Koi and Click-spam (May 2012)
- Venkat Padmanabhan visits Stanford, presents NetPrints(March2009)
Professional Activities
Members of the MNS group are active in professional activities. Here's a sampling of recent and ongoing service on conference program committees and other activities:
- Saikat Guha serves on IMC 2013 and EuroSys 2014 TPC (May 2013)
- Venkat Padmanabhan and Ranjita Bhagwan serve on ACM SIGCOMM 2013 TPC (Jan 2013)
- Saikat Guha serves on ICDCS 2013, WWW 2013 TPC (Dec 2012)
- Vishnu Navda co-chairs ACM WiNTECH 2012 TPC (May 2012)
- Vishnu Navda serves on HotMobile 2012 TPC (Oct 2011)
- Saikat Guha serves on PAM 2012 TPC (Oct 2011)
- Venkat Padmanabhan (Co-Chair) and Krishna Chintalapudi serve on ACM SIGCOMM 2012 TPC (Jan 2012)
- Ram Ramjee serves on ACM MOBICOM 2012 TPC (Mar 2012)
- Ranjita Bhagwan serves on ACM HomeSys 2012 TPC, OSDI 2012 external review committee (June 2012)
- bhavish aggarwal, ranjita bhagwan, lorenzo de carli, venkata n padmanabhan, and krishna puttaswamy, Deja vu: Fingerprinting Network Problems, in The 7th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT 2011), ACM SIGCOMM, December 2011
- Alexey Reznichenko, Saikat Guha, and Paul Francis, Auctions in Do-Not-Track Compliant Internet Advertising, in Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Chicago, IL, October 2011
- Eugenio Magsiretti, krishna kant chintalapudi, Bozidar Radunovic, and Ramachandran Ramjee, WiFi-Nano : Reclaiming WiFi Efficiency through 800 ns slots, in Mobicom, September 2011
- Saikat Guha, Bin Cheng, and Paul Francis, Privad: Practical Privacy in Online Advertising, in Proceedings of 8th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Boston, MA, March 2011
- Anand Iyer, Krishna Kant Chintalapudi, Vishnu Navda, Ramachandran Ramjee, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Chandra Murthy, SpecNet: Spectrum Sensing Sans Frontières, in 8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), USENIX, March 2011
- Saikat Guha, Bin Cheng, and Paul Francis, Challenges in Measuring Online Advertising Systems, in Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Melbourne, Australia, November 2010
- Aaron Schulman, Vishnu Navda, Ramachandran Ramjee, Neil Spring, Pralhad Deshpande, Calvin Grunewald, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, and Kamal Jain, Bartendr: A Practical Approach to Energy-aware Cellular Data Scheduling, in Mobicom, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 20 September 2010
- Krishna Kant Chintalapudi, Anand Padmanabha Iyer, and Venkat Padmanabhan, Indoor Localization Without the Pain, in Mobicom, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., September 2010
- Tathagata Das, Ranjita Bhagwan, and Prasad Naldurg, Baaz: A System for Detecting Access Control Misconfigurations, in USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX, August 2010
- Tathagata Das, Pradeep Padala, Venkat Padmanabhan, Ramachandran Ramjee, and Kang G. Shin, LiteGreen: Saving Energy in Networked Desktops Using Virtualization, in USENIX Annual Technical Conference [BEST PAPER], USENIX, 23 June 2010
- Eric Rozner, Vishnu Navda, Ramachandran Ramjee, and Shravan Rayanchu, NAPman: Network-Assisted Power Management for WiFi Devices, in MobiSys, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 15 June 2010
- Tathagata Das, Prashant Mohan, Venkat Padmanabhan, Ramachandran Ramjee, and Asankhaya Sharma, PRISM: Platform for Remote Sensing using Mobile Smartphones, in International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (Mobisys), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 15 June 2010
- Bhavish Aggarwal, Aditya Akella, Ashok Anand, Athula Balachandran, Pushkar Chitnis, Chitra Muthukrishnan, Ramachandran Ramjee, and George Varghese, EndRE: An End-System Redundancy Elimination Service for Enterprises, in Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), USENIX, April 2010
- Krishna Chintalapudi, I-MAC - a MAC that learns, in International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2010
- krishna puttaswamy, ranjita bhagwan, and venkat padmanabhan, Anonygator: Privacy and Integrity Preserving Data Aggregation, in ACM/IFIP/USENIX 11th International Middleware Conference, 2010
- P. Agrawal, A. Kumar, J. Kuri, M. K. Panda, V. Navda, R. Ramjee, and V. Padmanabhan, Analytical Models for Energy Consumption in Infrastructure WLAN STAs Carrying TCP Traffic, in International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS), Best Paper Award, IEEE, January 2010
- Ashish Sharma, Vishnu Navda, Ramachandran Ramjee, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Elizabeth Belding, Cool-Tether: Energy Efficient On-the-fly WiFi Hot-spots using Mobile Phones, in International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., December 2009
- Ranveer Chandra, Sandeep Karanth, Thomas Moscibroda, Vishnu Navda, Jitu Padhye, Ramachandran Ramjee, and Lenin Ravindrananth, DirCast: A Practical and Efficient Wi-Fi Multicast System, in International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), IEEE, October 2009
- Ashok Anand, Chitra Muthukrishnan, Aditya Akella, and Ramachandran Ramjee, Redundancy in Network Traffic: Findings and Implications, in Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 2009
- Bhavish Aggarwal, Ranjita Bhagwan, Tathagata Das, Siddharth Eswaran, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, NetPrints: Diagnosing Home Network Misconfigurations Using Shared Knowledge, in Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation , USENIX, April 2009
- Li Erran Li, Richard Alimi, Ramachandran Ramjee, Harish Viswanathan, and Yang Richard Yang, muNet: Harnessing Multiuser Capacity in Wireless Mesh Networks, in Proceedings of IEEE Infocom Mini Symposium, IEEE, April 2009
- Prashanth Mohan, Venkat Padmanabhan, and Ramachandran Ramjee, Nericell: Rich Monitoring of Road and Traffic Conditions using Mobile Smartphones, in ACM Sensys, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., November 2008
- Anand Prabhu Subramanian, Vishnu Navda, P. Deshpande, and Sameer R. Das, A Measurement Study of Inter-Vehicular Communication Using Steerable Beam Directional Antenna, in ACM VANET Workshop, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., September 2008
- Bhavish Aggarwal, Ranjita Bhagwan, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, and Geoffrey Voelker, NetPrints: Diagnosing Home Network Misconfigurations Using Shared Knowledge, no. MSR-TR-2008-102, August 2008
- Venkat Padmanabhan, 10 Networking Papers: Elegance and Insight, in Invited paper in the Recommended Reading Series, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., July 2008
Careers
Microsoft Research India offers a unique environment for research, offering researchers the freedom to pursue projects of interest to them, excellent support in terms of equipment, travel, etc., an open environment that strongly encourages publication, and rich opportunities for collaboration, including with researchers across MSR's worldwide network of labs. Researchers also have the opportunity to work with and mentor students during their internships at MSR India and beyond. The lab also offers researchers the unparalleled opportunity to impact millions of users worldwide by transferring research technology to or otherwise influencing Microsoft's product groups. Our positions are open to applicants from the world over, regardless of nationality.
The MNS group at MSR India recruits for a range of positions in the broad areas of networking and systems:
1. Researcher/Post-doc: We encourage recent or soon-to-be PhDs with a strong record of research and publication to apply. We also welcome applications from people who completed their PhD some time ago but have remained active in research and publication.
2. Research Assistant: This is a unique position targeted at fresh bachelors and masters students interested in research, giving them the opportunity to work with researchers at the lab on cutting-edge projects, write papers based on their work, participate in conferences, etc. This is a fixed-term position ─ typically of a 2-year duration ─ which prepares the assistant researchers to pursue a PhD, if they so wish (indeed, our research assistants have gone on to join the PhD programs at top universities such as Berkeley and MIT). For more information, go to research assistant applications.
3. Intern: We have an active year-round internship program although the majority of our interns come during the summer. We invite applications from interested doctoral, masters, and bachelors students. Our interns' work over the past summers has lead to papers in top conferences, such as MobiSys, NSDI, and SIGMETRICS. If you are a student outside of India, this would be an opportunity to gain valuable international experience! For more information, go to internships.
4. Visiting researcher: We have a limited number of openings for visiting researchers, who are typically faculty members who share our interests and who would enrich the group and the lab through mutually beneficial collaboration.
If you believe that your record and interests are a fit for the MNS group, we encourage you to apply. Please submit your application online here (be sure to select the Mobility, Networks, and Systems group). Feel free to also send email to mnsrec@microsoft.com, especially if we have communicated about your application before. However, we do receive a large volume of email from applicants whose record and interests are clearly not a fit for the group, so please be considerate of our time when sending email.
