Publications (84)
Should AI Become an Intergenerational Civil Right?
Jon Crowcroft, Rute C. Sofia, Dirk Trossen +1
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a foundational layer of social, economic, and cognitive infrastructure. At the same time, the training and large-scale deployment o…
Partisan Sharing: Facebook Evidence and Societal Consequences
Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft
The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people seek out information that supports their views and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negat…
Differentiated End-to-End Internet Services using a Weighted Proportional Fair Sharing TCP
Jon Crowcroft, Philippe Oechslin
In this document we study the application of weighted proportional fairness to data flows in the Internet. We let the users set the weights of their connections in order to maximis…
Aggregate Cyber-Risk Management in the IoT Age: Cautionary Statistics for (Re)Insurers and Likes
Ranjan Pal, Ziyuan Huang, Xinlong Yin +6
In this paper, we provide (i) a rigorous general theory to elicit conditions on (tail-dependent) heavy-tailed cyber-risk distributions under which a risk management firm might find…
Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box
Hamed Haddadi, Heidi Howard, Amir Chaudhry +3
We propose there is a need for a technical platform enabling people to engage with the collection, management and consumption of personal data; and that this platform should itself…
Data Analytics Service Composition and Deployment on Edge Devices
Jianxin Zhao, Tudor Tiplea, Richard Mortier +2
Data analytics on edge devices has gained rapid growth in research, industry, and different aspects of our daily life. This topic still faces many challenges such as limited comput…
User-centric Composable Services: A New Generation of Personal Data Analytics
Jianxin Zhao, Richard Mortier, Jon Crowcroft +1
Machine Learning (ML) techniques, such as Neural Network, are widely used in today's applications. However, there is still a big gap between the current ML systems and users' requi…
Rhythm and Randomness in Human Contact
Mervyn P. Freeman, Nicholas W. Watkins, Eiko Yoneki +1
There is substantial interest in the effect of human mobility patterns on opportunistic communications. Inspired by recent work revisiting some of the early evidence for a Lévy fl…
A Bibliometric Analysis of Publications in Computer Networking Research
Waleed Iqbal, Junaid Qadir, Gareth Tyson +3
This study uses the article content and metadata of four important computer networking periodicals-IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (COMST), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Netwo…
Blockchain And The Future of the Internet: A Comprehensive Review
Fakhar ul Hassan, Anwaar Ali, Mohamed Rahouti +8
Blockchain is challenging the status quo of the central trust infrastructure currently prevalent in the Internet towards a design principle that is underscored by decentralization,…
Is the EJRA proportionate and therefore justified? A critical review of the EJRA policy at Cambridge
Oliver Linton, Raghavendra Rau, Patrick Baert +9
This paper critically evaluates the HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) Data Report for the Employer Justified Retirement Age (EJRA) Review Group at the University of Cambrid…
Recommending Investors for Crowdfunding Projects
Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft
To bring their innovative ideas to market, those embarking in new ventures have to raise money, and, to do so, they have often resorted to banks and venture capitalists. Nowadays,…
Exploiting the power of multiplicity: a holistic survey of network-layer multipath
Junaid Qadir, Anwaar Ali, Kok-Lim Alvin Yau +2
The Internet is inherently a multipath network---for an underlying network with only a single path connecting various nodes would have been debilitatingly fragile. Unfortunately, t…
Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet
Anil Madhavapeddy, Sam Reynolds, Alec P. Christie +10
The Internet has grown from a humble set of protocols for end-to-end connectivity into a critical global system with no builtin "immune system". In the next decade the Internet wil…
Jointly Optimal Routing and Caching with Bounded Link Capacities
Yuanyuan Li, Yuchao Zhang, Stratis Ioannidis +1
We study a cache network in which intermediate nodes equipped with caches can serve requests. We model the problem of jointly optimizing caching and routing decisions with link cap…
Governing Well in the Algorithmic Age: The Foundations of Digital Statecraft
Zeynep Engin, Tim Gordon, Viviana Bastidas +13
The digital substrate of states -- data, algorithms, infrastructure, platforms, applications -- is being governed without adequate conceptual foundations. The ability and legitimac…
Perspectives on Negative Research Results in Pervasive Computing
Ella Peltonen, Nitinder Mohan, Peter Zdankin +6
Not all research leads to fruitful results; trying new ways or methods may surpass the state of the art, but sometimes the hypothesis is not proven or the improvement is insignific…
Federated Principal Component Analysis
Andreas Grammenos, Rodrigo Mendoza-Smith, Jon Crowcroft +1
We present a federated, asynchronous, and -differentially private algorithm for PCA in the memory-limited setting. Our algorithm incrementally computes local mod…
The Benefits of Deploying Smart Contracts on Trusted Third Parties
Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Ioannis Sfyrakis, Linmao Song +2
The hype about Bitcoin has overrated the potential of smart contracts deployed on-blockchains (on-chains) and underrated the potential of smart contracts deployed on-Trusted Third…
Edge Intelligence: Architectures, Challenges, and Applications
Dianlei Xu, Tong Li, Yong Li +5
Edge intelligence refers to a set of connected systems and devices for data collection, caching, processing, and analysis in locations close to where data is captured based on arti…
Differentially Private Health Tokens for Estimating COVID-19 Risk
David Butler, Chris Hicks, James Bell +2
In the fight against Covid-19, many governments and businesses are in the process of evaluating, trialling and even implementing so-called immunity passports. Also known as antibod…
Energy-Efficient MAC for Cellular IoT: State-of-the-Art, Challenges, and Standardization
Syed Waqas Haider Shah, Adnan Noor Mian, Adnan Aijaz +2
In the modern world, the connectivity-as-we-go model is gaining popularity. Internet-of-Things (IoT) envisions a future in which human beings communicate with each other and with d…
SoK: Beyond IoT MUD Deployments -- Challenges and Future Directions
Angelo Feraudo, Poonam Yadav, Richard Mortier +2
Due to the advancement of IoT devices in both domestic and industrial environments, the need to incorporate a mechanism to build accountability in the IoT ecosystem is paramount. I…
Redactable and Sanitizable Signature Schemes: Applications and Limitations for use in Decentralized Digital Identity Systems
Bryan Kumara, Mark Hooper, Carsten Maple +2
Redactable signature schemes and sanitizable signature schemes are methods that permit modification of a given digital message and retain a valid signature. This can be applied to…
Valorising the IoT Databox: Creating Value for Everyone
Charith Perera, Susan Wakenshaw, Tim Baarslag +7
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to generate large amounts of heterogeneous data from diverse sources including physical sensors, user devices, and social media platforms.…
Redactable Signature Schemes and Zero-knowledge Proofs: A comparative examination for applications in Decentralized Digital Identity Systems
Bryan Kumara, Mark Hooper, Carsten Maple +2
Redactable Signature Schemes and Zero-Knowledge Proofs are two radically different approaches to enable privacy. This paper analyses their merits and drawbacks when applied to dece…
An Impact and Risk Assessment Framework for National Electronic Identity (eID) Systems
Jide Edu, Mark Hooper, Carsten Maple +1
Electronic identification (eID) systems allow citizens to assert and authenticate their identities for various purposes, such as accessing government services or conducting financi…
Green: Towards a Pollution-Free Peer-to-Peer Content Sharing Service
Ruichuan Chen, Eng Keong Lua, Zhuhua Cai +2
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content sharing systems are susceptible to the content pollution attack, in which attackers aggressively inject polluted contents into the systems to reduce the…
Data Trading with a Monopoly Social Network: Outcomes are Mostly Privacy Welfare Damaging
Ranjan Pal, Junhui Li, Yixuan Wang +3
This paper argues that data of strategic individuals with heterogeneous privacy valuations in a distributed online social network (e.g., Facebook) will be under-priced, if traded i…
Toward Native Artificial Intelligence in 6G Networks: System Design, Architectures, and Paradigms
Jianjun Wu, Rongpeng Li, Xueli An +4
The mobile communication system has transformed to be the fundamental infrastructure to support digital demands from all industry sectors, and 6G is envisioned to go far beyond the…
Large-Scale Distributed Internet-based Discovery Mechanism for Dynamic Spectrum Allocation
Magnus Skjegstad, Brage Ellingsæter, Torleiv Maseng +2
Scarcity of frequencies and the demand for more bandwidth is likely to increase the need for devices that utilize the available frequencies more efficiently. Radios must be able to…
Effective Capacity Analysis of HARQ-enabled D2D Communication in Multi-Tier Cellular Networks
Syed Waqas Haider Shah, Muhammad Mahboob-ur-Rahman, Adnan Noor Mian +2
This work does the statistical quality-of-service (QoS) analysis of a block-fading device-to-device (D2D) link in a multi-tier cellular network that consists of a macro-BS (BSMC) a…
Extending programs with debug-related features, with application to hardware development
Nik Sultana, Salvator Galea, David Greaves +8
The capacity and programmability of reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs has improved steadily over the years, but they do not readily provide any mechanisms for monitoring or deb…
Phagocytes: A Holistic Defense and Protection Against Active P2P Worms
Ruichuan Chen, Eng Keong Lua, Jon Crowcroft +2
Active Peer-to-Peer (P2P) worms present serious threats to the global Internet by exploiting popular P2P applications to perform rapid topological self-propagation. Active P2P worm…
An in-depth characterisation of Bots and Humans on Twitter
Zafar Gilani, Reza Farahbakhsh, Gareth Tyson +2
Recent research has shown a substantial active presence of bots in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper we utilise our past work on studying bots (Stweeler) to comparativel…
Human-Data Interaction: The Human Face of the Data-Driven Society
Richard Mortier, Hamed Haddadi, Tristan Henderson +2
The increasing generation and collection of personal data has created a complex ecosystem, often collaborative but sometimes combative, around companies and individuals engaging in…
ConvXformer: Differentially Private Hybrid ConvNeXt-Transformer for Inertial Navigation
Omer Tariq, Muhammad Bilal, Muneeb Ul Hassan +2
Data-driven inertial sequence learning has revolutionized navigation in GPS-denied environments, offering superior odometric resolution compared to traditional Bayesian methods. Ho…
Federated Split GANs
Pranvera Kortoçi, Yilei Liang, Pengyuan Zhou +5
Mobile devices and the immense amount and variety of data they generate are key enablers of machine learning (ML)-based applications. Traditional ML techniques have shifted toward…
Exploring the Risks and Challenges of National Electronic Identity (NeID) System
Jide Edu, Mark Hooper, Carsten Maple +1
Many countries have embraced national electronic identification (NeID) systems, recognising their potential to foster a fair, transparent, and well-governed society by ensuring the…
Proof of Steak
Jon Crowcroft, Hamed Haddadi, Arthur Gervais +1
We introduce Proof-of-Steak (PoS) as a fundamental net-zero block generation technique, often accompanied by Non-Frangipane Tokens. Genesis cut is gradually heated and minted (usin…
A Novel Framework of Horizontal-Vertical Hybrid Federated Learning for EdgeIoT
Kai Li, Yilei Liang, Xin Yuan +4
This letter puts forth a new hybrid horizontal-vertical federated learning (HoVeFL) for mobile edge computing-enabled Internet of Things (EdgeIoT). In this framework, certain EdgeI…
Wi-Fi Wardriving Studies Must Account for Important Statistical Issues
Edward J Oughton, Julius Kusuma, Thibault Peyronel +1
Knowledge of Wi-Fi networks helps to guide future engineering and spectrum policy decisions. However, due to its unlicensed nature, the deployment of Wi-Fi Access Points is undocum…
The Algorithmic State Architecture (ASA): An Integrated Framework for AI-Enabled Government
Zeynep Engin, Jon Crowcroft, David Hand +1
As artificial intelligence transforms public sector operations, governments struggle to integrate technological innovations into coherent systems for effective service delivery. Th…
On the Impact of Guest Traffic in Open-Access Domestic Broadband Sharing Schemes
Sotiris Lenas, Vassilis Tsaoussidis, Srikanth Sundaresan +2
Open-access domestic broadband connection sharing constitutes a voluntary practice that is associated with societal, economic and public-safety benefits. Despite this fact, broadba…
TraceSecure: Towards Privacy Preserving Contact Tracing
James Bell, David Butler, Chris Hicks +1
Contact tracing is being widely employed to combat the spread of COVID-19. Many apps have been developed that allow for tracing to be done automatically based off location and inte…
SCDP: Systematic Rateless Coding for Efficient Data Transport in Data Centres (Complete Version)
Mohammed Alasmar, George Parisis, Jon Crowcroft
In this paper we propose SCDP, a general-purpose data transport protocol for data centres that, in contrast to all other protocols proposed to date, supports efficient one-to-many…
EIA-SEC: Improved Actor-Critic Framework for Multi-UAV Collaborative Control in Smart Agriculture
Quanxi Zhou, Wencan Mao, Yilei Liang +3
The widespread application of wireless communication technology has promoted the development of smart agriculture, where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a multifunctional role…
Probabilistic Sampling-Enhanced Temporal-Spatial GCN: A Scalable Framework for Transaction Anomaly Detection in Ethereum Networks
Stefan Kambiz Behfar, Jon Crowcroft
The rapid evolution of the Ethereum network necessitates sophisticated techniques to ensure its robustness against potential threats and to maintain transparency. While Graph Neura…
Large Language Models for Agentic NetOps and AIOps: Architectures, Evaluation, and Safety
Muhammad Bilal, Jon Crowcroft, Ruizhi Wang +2
Large language models are increasingly being used to support network operations (NetOps) and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), including incident investigation, ro…
Kadupul: Livin' on the Edge with Virtual Currencies and Time-Locked Puzzles
Magnus Skjegstad, Anil Madhavapeddy, Jon Crowcroft
Devices connected to the Internet today have a wide range of local communication channels available, such as wireless Wifi, Bluetooth or NFC, as well as wired backhaul. In densely…
An Email Attachment is Worth a Thousand Words, or Is It?
Gregory Tsipenyuk, Jon Crowcroft
There is an extensive body of research on Social Network Analysis (SNA) based on the email archive. The network used in the analysis is generally extracted either by capturing the…
On and Off-Blockchain Enforcement Of Smart Contracts
Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Ellis Solaiman, Ioannis Sfyrakis +2
In this paper we discuss how conventional business contracts can be converted into smart contracts---their electronic equivalents that can be used to systematically monitor and enf…
Distributed Consensus Network: A Modularized Communication Framework and Reliability Probabilistic Analysis
Yuetai Li, Zhangchen Xu, Yiqi Wang +3
In this paper, we propose a modularized framework for communication processes applicable to crash and Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols. We abstract basic communication…
Socially Beneficial Metaverse: Framework, Technologies, Applications, and Challenges
Xiaolong Xu, Xuanhong Zhou, Muhammad Bilal +4
In recent years, the maturation of emerging technologies such as Virtual Reality, Digital twins, and Blockchain has accelerated the realization of the metaverse. As a virtual world…
Eff the ineffable: on the uncommunicability of a conceptually simple contribution to HCI methodology
Helen Oliver, Richard Mortier, Jon Crowcroft
Given a simple concept that has the potential for a methodological contribution to the field of HCI, the constraints of submission conventions within the field may make it impossib…
SecureABC: Secure AntiBody Certificates for COVID-19
Chris Hicks, David Butler, Carsten Maple +1
COVID-19 has resulted in unprecedented social distancing policies being enforced worldwide. As governments seek to restore their economies, open workplaces and permit travel there…
Cloudrone: Micro Clouds in the Sky
Arjuna Sathiaseelan, Adisorn Lertsinsrubtavee, Adarsh Jagan S +2
Recent years have witnessed several initiatives on enabling Internet access to the next three billion people. Access to the Internet necessarily translates to access to its service…
Analysis of Information Propagation in Ethereum Network Using Combined Graph Attention Network and Reinforcement Learning to Optimize Network Efficiency and Scalability
Stefan Kambiz Behfar, Jon Crowcroft
Blockchain technology has revolutionized the way information is propagated in decentralized networks. Ethereum plays a pivotal role in facilitating smart contracts and decentralize…
Statistical QoS Analysis of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-assisted D2D Communication
Syed Waqas Haider Shah, Adnan Noor Mian, Shahid Mumtaz +3
This work performs the statistical QoS analysis of a Rician block-fading reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted D2D link in which the transmit node operates under delay…
An Interface between Legacy and Modern Mobile Devices for Digital Identity
Vasilios Mavroudis, Chris Hicks, Jon Crowcroft
In developing regions a substantial number of users rely on legacy and ultra-low-cost mobile devices. Unfortunately, many of these devices are not equipped to run the standard auth…
A Novel Defense Against Poisoning Attacks on Federated Learning: LayerCAM Augmented with Autoencoder
Jingjing Zheng, Xin Yuan, Kai Li +3
Recent attacks on federated learning (FL) can introduce malicious model updates that circumvent widely adopted Euclidean distance-based detection methods. This paper proposes a nov…
I(FIB)F: Iterated Bloom Filters for Routing in Named Data Networks
Cristina Muñoz, Liang Wang, Eduardo Solana +1
Named Data Networks provide a clean-slate redesign of the Future Internet for efficient content distribution. Because Internet of Things are expected to compose a significant part…
FairCache: Introducing Fairness to ICN Caching - Technical Report
Liang Wang, Gareth Tyson, Jussi Kangasharju +1
Information-centric networking extensively uses universal in-network caching. However, developing an efficient and fair collaborative caching algorithm for selfish caches is still…
Planet-scale Human Mobility Measurement
Pan Hui, Richard Mortier, Tristan Henderson +1
Research into, and design and construction of mobile systems and algorithms requires access to large-scale mobility data. Unfortunately, the wireless and mobile research community…
Diffusing Your Mobile Apps: Extending In-Network Function Virtualization to Mobile Function Offloading
Mario Almeida, Liang Wang, Jeremy Blackburn +2
Motivated by the huge disparity between the limited battery capacity of user devices and the ever-growing energy demands of modern mobile apps, we propose INFv. It is the first off…
C3PO: Computation Congestion Control (PrOactive) - an algorithm for dynamic diffusion of ephemeral in-network services
Liang Wang, Mario Almeida, Jeremy Blackburn +1
There is an obvious trend that more and more data and computation are migrating into networks nowadays. Combining mature virtualization technologies with service-centric net- worki…
Blockchain for Economically Sustainable Wireless Mesh Networks
Aniruddh Rao Kabbinale, Emmanouil Dimogerontakis, Mennan Selimi +4
Decentralization, in the form of mesh networking and blockchain, two promising technologies, is coming to the telecommunications industry. Mesh networking allows wider low cost Int…
Bringing Information Centric Networking to Challenged Environments: An overview of the Second Workshop on Future Internet Architecture for Developing Regions
Andrés Arcia-Moret, Ioannis Psaras, Jon Crowcroft
The 2nd workshop on Future Internet Architecture for Developing Regions (FI4D) took place on January 8th, 2017. The workshop was hosted by the 14th Annual IEEE Consumer Communicati…
Beyond COVID-19: Network science and sustainable exit strategies
James Bell, Ginestra Bianconi, David Butler +11
On May and , a two day workshop was held virtually, facilitated by the Beyond Center at ASU and Moogsoft Inc. The aim was to bring together leading scientists wi…
Crisis Analytics: Big Data Driven Crisis Response
Junaid Qadir, Anwaar Ali, Raihan ur Rasool +3
Disasters have long been a scourge for humanity. With the advances in technology (in terms of computing, communications, and the ability to process and analyze big data), our abili…
Towards real-time community detection in large networks
Ian X. Y. Leung, Pan Hui, Pietro Lio' +1
The recent boom of large-scale Online Social Networks (OSNs) both enables and necessitates the use of parallelisable and scalable computational techniques for their analysis. We ex…
Peer provided cell-like networks built out of thin air
Andres Arcia-Moret, Zafar Gilani, Arjuna Sathiaseelan +1
The success of Wi-Fi technology as an efficient and low-cost last-mile access solution has enabled massive spontaneous deployments generating storms of beacons all across the globe…
Towards Adaptive, Learning-Based Security in Decentralized Applications
Stefan Kambiz Behfar, Jon Crowcroft
Web3 systems expose a fundamentally different security landscape from centralized platforms, characterized by composability, pseudonymous identities, decentralized governance, and…
My Home is My Post-Office: Evaluation of a decentralized email architecture on Internet-of-Things low-end device
Gregory Tsipenyuk, Jon Crowcroft
Users predominantly access their email via mobile devices. This presents a two-fold challenge to the email applications. First, email's update from multiple devices has to be event…
You Really Need A Good Ruler to Measure Caching Performance in Information-Centric Networks
Liang Wang, Jussi Kangasharju, Jon Crowcroft
Information-centric networks are an interesting new paradigm for distributing content on the Internet. They bring up many research challenges, such as addressing content by name, s…
"Resource Pooling" for Wireless Networks: Solutions for the Developing World
Junaid Qadir, Arjuna Sathiaseelan, Liang Wang +1
We live in a world in which there is a great disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor. Technology offers great promise in bridging this gap. In particular, wireless tec…
Towards Smart Education through the Internet of Things: A Review
Afzal Badshah, Anwar Ghani, Ali Daud +3
IoT is a fundamental enabling technology for creating smart spaces, which can assist the effective face-to-face and online education systems. The transition to smart education (int…
Certified Closed-Loop Control for Packet Networks: A Compositional Certification Framework
Muhammad Bilal, Jon Crowcroft, Xiaolong Xu +1
Packet networks are controlled dynamical systems with discontinuities, delayed observations, and partial state information. Adaptive or learning-driven proposers can improve perfor…
Intelligent Slicing of Radio Resource Control Layer for Cellular IoT: Design and Implementation
Lian Cao, Rongpeng Li, Jon Crowcroft +2
The cellular internet of things (CIoT) has become an important branch to cater various applications of IoT devices. Within CIoT, the radio resource control (RRC) layer is responsib…
What if we could hot swap our Biometrics?
Jon Crowcroft, Anil Madhavapeddy, Chris Hicks +2
What if you could really revoke your actual biometric identity, and install a new one, by live rewriting your biological self? We propose some novel mechanisms for hot swapping ide…
Implementation of Smart Contracts Using Hybrid Architectures with On- and Off-Blockchain Components
Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Ioannis Sfyrakis, Ellis Solaiman +4
Recently, decentralised (on-blockchain) platforms have emerged to complement centralised (off-blockchain) platforms for the implementation of automated, digital (smart) contracts.…
If Multicast is the Answer -- What was the Question?
Dirk Trossen, Jon Crowcroft
Multicast is (almost) as old as the Internet, having become a tool for increasing network efficiency but also enabling destination discovery in a number of key use cases, although…
A Case for a Currencyless Economy Based on Bartering with Smart Contracts
Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Hazem Danny Al Nakib, Linmao Song +2
We suggest the re-introduction of bartering to create a cryptocurrencyless, currencyless, and moneyless economy segment. We contend that a barter economy would benefit enterprises,…
Taming Limits with Approximate Networking
Junaid Qadir, Arjuna Sathiaseelan, Liang Wang +1
Internet is the linchpin of modern society, which the various threads of modern life weave around. But being a part of the bigger energy-guzzling industrial economy, it is vulnerab…