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Welcome to the NetScale Laboratory

The NetScale laboratory is an effort by Dr. Aaron Striegel of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. The goal of the wiki is to help capture our standard processes as well as provide an easier to access view of our various resources. While you are here, feel free to browse on over to our other wikis which include educational offerings and research papers that our group has discussed. For fun, you can catch the blog of Dr. Striegel here as well.

Additional information regarding our sponsored research, current projects, publications, current student researchers, and our released software tools can be found here on the wiki. Our group meeting (Fall 2011 schedule) will be scheduled shortly pending the availability of our group members. You can follow along with our weekly paper reviews here if you would like.

Our apologies for delays on updates to the site. Content updates should remove in the second week of October once Prof. Striegel finishes with the on-site ABET assessment visit.

Flagship Projects

NetSense Study	Wireless Networks	A large scale study examining how always-on networking affects network usage and social ties
Lockdown	Streamlined Security Management	Novel visualization of host / user / application relationships across the enterprise
Rehab	Human / Computer Interfacing	Stroke rehabilitation via the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Surface
NDMesh	Wireless networking	Live testbed of thirty wireless mesh routers deployed on the University of Notre Dame campus
	Quality of Service	Practical end-to-end quality of service techniques, explorations into the fundamental principles of wireless channel performance
ScaleBox	Transparent Bandwidth Conservation	Dramatically scaling first mile and last mile capacities through application-agnostic bandwidth conservation
WiiLab	Education	Efforts to extend the Nintendo Wiimote and Microsoft Kinect for the purposes of education

Interested in the topics but want to find researchers in similar areas? Take a visit to recent collaborators of Dr. Striegel in both CS and beyond. You can also browse prior flagship projects that have now wound down.

Web Server Updates, Issues and Information

Recent News

Feb 2012	General	Prof. Striegel now has an official Google Scholar profile.
Nov 2011	Symposium	Prof. Striegel attended the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium in Irvine, CA.
Oct 2011	Conference	Prof. Striegel presented our work on SAVE (Sensor Anomaly Visualization Engine) at IEEE VAST which is part of VisWeek.
Aug 2011	Courses	Prof. Striegel will be teaching Graduate Operating Systems this fall. System Interface Design will be taught by Dean Stewman albeit sadly without a Microsoft Surface this year.
Aug 2011	Study	Our large scale cell phone study will be going live with the start of the new fall semester.
Aug 2011	Publicity	Our WeHab vision appeared in Fast Company. Very, very cool quotes regarding the work.
Jul 2011	Conference paper	Prof. Striegel presented an invited paper to the WiMan workshop regarding our explorations on the viability of Bluetooth as an indicator of face-to-face proximity.
Jul 2011	Publicity	Our cell phone study that will be going live this coming fall was highlighted in a joint Notre Dame / Sprint release. The work will be exploring the effects of always-on network access on friendships / network usage as well as including a secondary project regarding cell phone analytics. Kudos to the Wireless Institute for helping to make this happen.
Jun 2011	Best paper	Our stroke rehab paper fusing the Wii balance board and customized software won the Best Paper award at IEEE Healthcom.
May 2011	Ph. D. Defense	Congratulations to Qi Liao on successfully defending his Ph. D. dissertation. Qi will be joining Central Michigan University as a tenure-track professor in the Department of Computer Science this fall.
Apr 2011	Publicity	Our work on stroke rehab was highlighted on the Just Before 6 segment of the local NBC affiliate, WNDU. It has been picked up News Channel and may be viewed at various local news stations across the country. Very cool and a big thanks to Maureen McFadden from WNDU for highlighting our work!
Mar 2011	Conference paper	Our initial work on stroke rehabilitation with the Wii balance board entitled "Enhanced Feedback in Balance Rehabilitation using the Nintendo Wii Balance Board" has been recently accepted into IEEE Healthcom. Congratulations to Prof. Schmiedeler's student Michael Kennedy on successfully leading the paper preparation process and the first flagship publication on this topic by our inter-disciplinary group.
Mar 2011	Job Success	Congratulations to Qi Liao on accepting a tenure-track position at Central Michigan University.
Mar 2011	Publicity	Highlight on the morning news at WSBT, Notre Dame students tie Wii to stroke patient rehab. The WSBT article was also highlighted in ASEE First Bell and the local South Bend Tribune.
Feb 2011	Publicity	The publicity on our Wii stroke rehabilitation work continues with a highlight news blurb on the main university web page as well as an article in the student paper, the Observer.
Jan 2011	Publicity	Our work on stroke rehabilitation has had an article published in Notre Dame Magazine.
Jan 2011	REU Site	Our NSF REU site (ERWiN: Experimental Research on Wireless Networking) has been renewed and is now accepting applications for the Summer 2011 session.
Dec 2010	Job Success	Congratulations to Dr. Andrew Blaich on successfully defending his Ph. D dissertation and for accepting a job at Samsung research.
Dec 2010	Conference	IEEE PDF eXpress tutorial for INFOCOM 2011 camera ready papers.
Nov 2010	Ph. D Defense	Congratulations to Andrew Blaich who successfully defended his Ph. D on the topic of computer security and wireless performance.
Aug 2010	Grant	We will be receiving a NSF SoCS (Socially Oriented Computing System) grant to study the effects of pervasive wireless access on social tie creation and persistence. The work is jointly being conducted by the Wireless Institute and Complex Network Center at the University of Notre Dame with Profs. Striegel (PI), Poellabauer, Hachen, and Lizardo.
July 2010	Journal	After a bit of delay, the journal version of our LISA best paper entitled "Managing Networks through Context: Graph Visualization and Exploration" was finally accepted to Computer Networks special issue on Managing Emerging Computing Environments.
July 2010	Conference	Our newest paper on the ENAVis tool, "Visualizing Graph Dynamics and Similarity for Enterprise Network Security and Management" was accepted to appear at VizSec 2010.
May 2010	News	Congratulations to our collaborators Prof. Chris Poellabauer and Prof. Doug Thain who were recently promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.
Apr 2010	Award	Prof. Striegel recently won an ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) Outstanding Young Career award from Iowa State University.
Mar 2010	Ph. D Defense	Congrats to Yingxin Jiang who successfully defended her Ph. D on the topic of quality of service. Best wishes as she finalizes her dissertation for a summer graduation.
Dec 2009	Local Grant	Our group will be receiving a small, internal Notre Dame grant to help populate the System Interface lab with equipment for the stroke rehabilitation project.
Nov 2009	NSF Grant	We will be receiving a NSF CCLI grant for our Wiimote work to extend and enhance our current WiiLab software. Our grant "Curriculum and Laboratory Development Through 3-D Interfacing via the Nintendo Wiimote," is a two year effort with Profs. Striegel and Chaudhury of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in collaboration with Profs. Crowell and Villano of the Department of Psychology.
Nov 2009	Updates	Lots of updates coming soon with the events over the past few months.
Aug 2009	New movie	New movie for the Lockdown project can be found here. The movie explores some of the more advanced data mining aspects of Lockdown with regards to our features currently under development.
July 2009	Conference Papers	Two new papers recently accepted. One into NPSec regarding the tradeoffs of public versus private firewalls and another into Globecom regarding Fast TCP admission control.
June 2009	Ph. D Defense	Congratulations to the soon to be Dr. Mike Chapple for successfully passing his Ph.D final exam.
	New course	We will be receiving two Microsoft Surface devices in a few weeks that will form the core of a new System Interface Design course.
May 2009	Ph. D Proposal	Congrats to Andrew Blaich on successfully passing his Ph. D candidacy exam!
		Congratulations to Qi Liao and Andrew Blaich for taking second place in the National Security Innovation Competition (NSIC) held in Colorado Springs, Colorado. They presented their work on ENAVis, the visualization component of the Lockdown tool suite. The two won a prize of $2500 and the ability to share their work at a defense trade show in November. The official press release can be found here.
April 2009	Conference Paper	Our conference paper entitled "Is High Deﬁnition a natural DRM?" was recently accepted to appear in the ICCCN 09 Workshop on Multimedia Computing and Communications (MCC).
	Conference Paper	Our conference paper "WiiLab: Bringing Together the Nintendo Wiimote and MATLAB" has been accepted to appear in the upcoming Frontiers In Education (FIE) conference. The work is based on our WiiLab software project that was primarily developed through the work of two REU students: Jordan Brindza and Jessica Szweda.
	Journal	Our journal paper "Reflections on The Virtues of Modularity: A Case Study in Linux Security Modules" has been accepted to appear in the journal Software: Practices and Experiences.
	Conference Paper	Our paper entitled "End-wise Admission Control Delegation for Effective End-To-End Quality of Service" was recently accepted to appear in IWQoS 2009
	Competition	Our work on ENAVis has made it in as one of the ten finalists at the National Security Innovation Competition to be held May 1st in Denver, Colorado. Press Release
Mar 2009	Conf Paper	Our recent paper entitled "On the Difficulties of Passively Detecting 802.11n Rogue Wireless Access Points" was recently accepted into the IEEE WoWMoM conference.
Feb 2009	REU Site	We are now accepting applications for the second year of our REU site program, ErWIN: Experimental Research on Wireless Networking. Applications are due March 13, 2009 through the REU website. Relevant to the NetScale research, we will be continuing our WiiLab development and augmentations to the ENAVis / Lockdown visualization projects.
Jan 2009		Our paper entitled "An Analysis of Firewall Rulebase (Mis)Management Practices" has been accepted to appear in the Information Systems Security Association Journal. The paper is our first published collaboration with John D'Arcy over at the Notre Dame College of Business. The paper examines through a set of information professional surveys and managers how firewall rules are overly complex and known to have significant potential security risks but yet resources (usually time) do not exist to properly fix the risks.
Nov 2008	Best Paper	Our paper at LISA (Large Installation System Administration) 2008 on our visualization tool for Lockdown (ENAVis) won the best paper award. Congratulations to Qi and Andrew on their hard work on the paper!
	Journal	Our paper entitled "An Exploration of the Effects of State Granularity Through (m,k) Real-Time Streams" has been accepted to appear in IEEE Transactions on Computers. A special thanks to Yingxin on all the hard work she put in to get the paper through.
Sep 2008		The Wiilab effort created by Jordan Brindza and Jessica Szweda, two of our REU site participants, allows one to bring simple motion capture via the Nintendo Wiimote into MATLAB. We will be highlighting the code for the fall offering of EG 10111 (Freshmen Engineering) and continuing with additional development in the following spring / summer. The project includes complete tutorials on installation, setup, testing, and MATLAB interactions. Apologies for the logo manipulation in advance.
		The winning REU poster from our REU site now has the presentation posted in both Flash and Quicktime variants - Streaming / High Quality.
		Pictures from this last summer's REU final poster presentations are now on-line along with a slideshow as well.
July 2008	Ph. D Defense	Congratulations on Dave Salyers on defending his Ph. D entitled "Improving Network Efficiency." Dave will be joining the Amazon S3 group in August and we wish him the best of luck there!
	Tutorial	While it has been up for a few months (albeit hidden), we have a nice tutorial on the usage of libpcap containing several sets of example code from our ScaleBox architecture.
	Conference Paper	Our paper regarding the application of stealth multicast over the last wireless mile has been accepted at a workshop at IEEE LCN, entitled "Opportunistic Wireless Broadcast (OWB): Dynamic Redundancy Detection in the Wireless Medium."
June 2008	Conference Paper	The second paper on the Lockdown project, ENAVis: Enterprise Network Activities Visualization, focusing on the visualization aspects has been accepted to appear at LISA 2008.
	Position Paper	Our first wiki position / technical report is on-line regarding considering the size of HD content as a natural DRM. Our goal is to post 2-3 of these position papers a year.
	Equipment Grant	The departmental news item is up regarding the experimental campus-wide mesh network that we are constructing as part of the DURIP grant funded via ONR.
	Award	Congratulations to our Ph.D group member, Mike Chapple, on receiving a Notre Dame Presidential Award for his service to the university as part of the Notre Dame Information Security effort.
	Subversion	We have now transitioned the core ScaleBox tool suite to Subversion. The files are now directly browsable here or also in ViewVC form here. Over the course of the summer, we will be transitioning most of our software tools over to Subversion for simplified download of the tools in source form.
May 2008	Summer	Summer schedule is now here with the group meeting shifting to Thursdays in the CSE conference room from 11-12 PM.
	Grant	Thanks to Motorola Labs for a grant of $10k plus equipment along with support for the Motorola Labs design challenge for the Computer System Design course.
	Wiki	Hop on over to new wiki for the DARTS lab.
	Conference	Our paper on wireless time coordination entitled "A Light Weight Method for Maintaining Clock Synchronization for Networked Systems" has been accepted to appear at ICCCN 2008.
		Congrats to Team 2 (Jeff Simmer, Ed Suski, A. J. Sporinsky) from CSE 40422 (Computer System Design) on winning the Motorola Labs Challenge project. The students designed a novel media-sharing application for smart mobile devices as part of a new joint effort between Dr. Striegel, Dr. Poellabauer, and Dr. Shivajit Mohapatra of Motorola Labs.
	REU Supplement	Our REU site for the summer will be up to a full 14 students, 10 courtesy of the REU site and the remaining through NSF REU support. While applications are closed for this year, check back at the end of the summer regarding progress reports for the various students.
April 2008	INFOCOM Demo	The code for our INFOCOM demo of RIPPS can be found here.
	Grant	We will be revamping our simulation testbed to fully fledged emulation suite together with a university-wide mesh network courtesy of a DURIP grant. (PI: Poellabauer, Co-PIs: Striegel, Laneman).
	Talks	A flurry of talks these past few weeks by Dr. Striegel at the University of Connecticut, Boston University, MIT, and the University of Kentucky. Talk abstracts / slides will be posted shortly to the wiki.
March 2008	REU Site	Our first round of admits for the NSF REU site are out. We will be doing a second round and will still be taking applicants for this second round for the site as well as project-specific REUs.
	Ph.D Defense	Congratulations to the soon to be Dr. Justin Wonziak on his successful Ph.D defense!
	Server Issues	Apologies to everyone who experienced issues with connectivity over the past week. We had a catastrophic disk failure on the previous Wiki server and are now running on the new AEG equipment.
	Journal Paper	Congratulations to Qi Liao on getting his most recent paper on botnet defense accepted to the Journal of Security and Networks.
February 2008	Papers Accepted	Two new papers accepted to the upcoming IEEE WoWMoM conference, one on wireless loss characteristics under 802.11 and another on the power/performance characteristics of USB flash drives.
January 2008	REU Site	NSF REU applications are now open. Information on the Experimental Research on Wireless Networking (ERWiN) REU site can be found here.
December 2007	Equipment Grant	Our lab has received a Sun Academic Excellence Grant (AEG) to support our work on Lockdown via SunRay thin clients and a new database / SunRay server. The new SunRay thin clients will also support our upcoming REU site.
	Ph.D Proposal	Congratulations to Mike Chapple on passing his Ph.D proposal defense!
November 2007	Downtime	The web server was temporarily out from Saturday late afternoon to early Monday morning due to a panic of the LOM processor. Hopefully, it is a one time occurrence.
	REU Site	Dr. Poellabauer and Dr. Striegel will be the new recipients of a NSF site REU. Registration information for prospective students will be posted shortly here and at the DARTS lab. We will be looking for 10 undergraduate (domestic only) students ranging from current freshman to current juniors. Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply.
	Course offering	Dr. Striegel will be offering an enhanced version of CSE 40422 (Computer System Design) in the spring with special opportunities for students to work on Wifi-enabled cell phones. Juniors and seniors in any field of engineering are welcome to take the course with the pre-requisite of operating systems being waived.
October 2007	Eye Candy	Our Lockdown software is now generating nightly graphs of our monitor pool that is displayed on the hallway propaganda monitor. Links to the nightly generated graphs are included as thumbnails.
October 2007
	Software	The first alpha code for the ScaleBox framework is now posted on-line here.
		Our newest acquisition in the lab is a set of Atmel NGW100 network gateway reference boards. We are looking to see if we can get RIPPS and ScaleBox to run at reasonable speeds for these boards. Features of the boards include dual Ethernet adapters with native microcontroller support, a working Linux kernel pre-installed, and a free developer environment (AVRStudio32).
	Search	The search bar and change list are fixed now. The Solaris version of egrep and fgrep were causing problems with TWiki. Various user tools for account maintenance and RSS feeds should also be functional as well.
September 2007	Stats	Browse the stats for our web server here. External dynamic access is disabled but enjoy the wonder that is awstats
	Conference panel	Slides from the panel Dr. Striegel spoke on at IEEE BroadNets concerning the encroachment of Ethernet into the MAN (Metro Area Network) and WAN
	Talk	Talk at NC State on ScaleBox by Dr. Striegel
August 2007	Undergraduate research	Undergraduate research opportunities for the fall semester are listed on the flyer here
	Masters Defense	Congratulations to Qi Liao who successfully defended his Master's Thesis entitled "Improving Network Insight Through Local Context Gathering and Analysis".
	Operations	The NetScale wiki has now migrated to its official home on http://netscale.cse.nd.edu. Please update your bookmarks accordingly although re-direction will be enabled for the foreseeable future from the old site.
	Accepted Poster	IEEE BroadNets 2007 - Improving Medium-Sized Media Clip Distribution Through Transparent Tail Synchronization
July 2007	Project Highlight	Transparent Bandwidth Conservation - Tap analysis results for inbound UDP traffic to wireless network hosts offers peak savings approaching 80%
July 2007
	Accepted Journal	ACM CCR - JumboGen: Dynamic Jumbo Frame Generation for Network Performance Scalability
	Project Highlight	Check out the user and application chaining graphs generated as part of the visualization for the Lockdown project.

		Students: Andrew Blaich, Qi Liao, Greg Allan, Brian Sullivan
	Travel Grant	Andrew Blaich received a student travel grant to attend USENIX Security 2007 in August. He will be presenting our poster on LockDown.
	Software	The initial version (1.0) of RIPPS as used for our upcoming ACM TISSEC paper is now available for download. Look for new revisions near the end of the month.