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Jensen, Levine, and Alumni to Receive the 2017 IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Award

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CICS professors David Jensen and Brian Levine and alumni John Burgess and Brian Gallagher will receive a 2017 IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Award for their 2006 paper, "MaxProp: Routing for Vehicle-Based Disruption-Tolerant Networks."

The paper presents the design and evaluation of MaxProp, a routing protocol for Disruption-Tolerant Networks. Such networks are able to deliver messages among peers that are limited to only intermittent connections between each other. Users in the network leverage their own mobility to store, carry, and forward messages to a destination or an intermediary. MaxProp determines the priority of messages to transfer during the limited window of radio connectivity between two fast-moving peers.

The winning paper is notable in part for its description of DieselNet, which was an experimental mobile system testbed deployed for the paper on 40 Pioneer Valley Transit Authority buses that roamed the surrounding county. Each bus powered a small computer with an attached Wi-Fi access point for passengers and passersby. A second wireless card constantly scanned the surrounding area for open Wi-Fi networks and other buses' Wi-Fi. Each bus also carried GPS device attached to record its current location. The network was used to evaluate MaxProp performance in situ, and was expanded and used as the basis of many research grants, contracts, and papers, for almost a decade.

Each year, this award recognizes papers from the IEEE INFOCOM proceedings from the prior 10 to 12 years. Within that window, the papers that have been most cited and widely recognized to have a significant impact on the research community are selected as the winners. This year, papers published in the 2005-2007 proceedings were eligible. To date, the MaxProp paper has been cited over 2,000 times since its publication. The paper was cited more times in 2015 than in any previous year since its publication.

Jensen specializes in machine learning and data science for analyzing large social, technological, and computational systems. Currently, he is focusing on methods for constructing accurate causal models from observational and experimental data, with applications to social science, fraud detection, security, and systems management.

Levine's main areas of interest are in networking and security. His current research is focused on security, privacy, and forensics in the context of mobile systems, cellular networks, and the Internet.

John Burgess (BS '04, MS '06) is now on the technical staff at ViaSat, Inc. and Brian Gallagher (MS '04) is currently a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

Burgess, Jensen, and Levine will be on hand to accept the award at IEEE INFOCOMM 2017 in Atlanta, GA, May 1-4, 2017.