Author: Aaron

[August 31st, 2023] A few general pieces of advising information for those in the BACS (Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science) program or those who are looking to join the program:

• Students who are admitted to Notre Dame as a BACS student need not worry about applying to join the program. If you are admitted / accepted as a BACS student and start your freshmen year as a BACS student, you are in.
• Students who are not part of the BACS program but may want to join / apply should try to attend the Arts & Letters information session. Students may only apply to join the BACS program in the spring of their freshmen year. Application information will be posted in January 2024 with applications due the Friday before fall break.
• In terms of coursework, you should take challenging classes and stay on track for math. That means Calc I, II, and III. Ideally, if you take either Principles / Elements of Computing (if space allows) or EG 10118 (Intro to Engineering), that would be fantastic.

Otherwise, feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about the program and I would be happy to answer any questions.

[October 10, 2022] Looking ahead to the AY23-24 (academic year) recruiting cycle, our research group is aiming to recruit one or possibly two Ph. D students in the areas of wireless network measurement and wearables. Subject to funding, we may also have some work in network security, particularly blended 4G / 5G / WiFi. We do not envision having funding for post-docs for this coming year (CY23) and are unlikely to have post-doc funding for the next cycle (AY23-24).

In particular, we envision efforts on the following projects or offshoots of these efforts:

Short video: Platforms such as TikTok, Facebook Watch, Instagram Reels and others present fascinating challenges when it comes to QoE. Unlike traditional QoE, short video browsing is tempered by unique circumstances including QoE spanning multiple videos, varying periods of video watching (full or partial viewing), and highly dynamic network performance. We are interested in studying the underlying tradeoffs associated with how best to pre-stage, adapt quality, and handle various dynamics in such scenarios.

Network performance: One of the major thrusts of our research group over the past few years has been to study how to better measure the network through intentional, structured packet trains injected at the server to elicit a rapid, improved understanding of network performance characteristics. Newly emerging networks such as 5G, WiFi 6E, CBRS, and mmWave introduce intriguing new challenges for measurement.

Wearables and pervasive computing: The new capabilities of wearable devices continue to advance offering increased lifetime, sensing capabilities, and unobtrusive form factors. Our research group is interested on how COTS or COTS wearables plus enhancements can be better leveraged to bring robust quantitative measurement to previously unexplored aspects of human physiological and overarching social interactions.

If you might be interested in joining our research group, we encourage you to apply to join the graduate program at the University of Notre Dame. Depending on your area of interest, you might also want to check out the research groups of Spyros Mastorakis (networking – joining ND in January 2023), Toby Li (human computing interface / mobile apps), and Taeho Jung (security).

Many thanks to Lucy Li for the Twitter recommendation to post this to help new graduate students.

[September 6, 2021] Office hours for the fall semester will be Monday at 1 PM, Wednesday at 9 AM, and Friday at 2 PM. Friday’s office hours will be held via Zoom. All in-person office hours are held in 211B Cushing Hall.