Laurent Mathy

Professor of Networked Systems

Email: laurent (at) comp.lancs.ac.uk
Tel: +44 1524 510385
Office: InfoLab21, D36		 Computing Department
InfoLab21
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4WA, UK


Research Interest

My team focuses on applied and experimental research in networking. We pursue three main themes of interest: protocol design, Internet architecture and design and optimization of networked systems.

Our protocol design work has largely focused on the design and operation of overlay networks, including application-level multicast, peer-to-peer systems and securing Internet Coordinate Systems.

We are active in the area of (future) Internet Architecture, where we study advanced intelligent control algorithms based on machine-learning, as well as network virtualization as an enabler for innovation in the Internet. Network programmability, with a view to make future Internet design agile and flexible to yet unforseen applications, also represents one of our major topic of interest in this space.

We also study the design and optimization of networked systems with a particular emphasis on programmable software virtual routers on modern commodity hardware. Networks have traditionally been built using custom hardware. Our work shows that by careful analysis and design it is possible to build high-performance network devices with commodity hardware (e.g. familiar, cheap, widely available boxes). These results open up exciting new ways to build networks, where the main paradigms are software and services, as opposed to purely technological advances.

We have established a world-wide network of collaborations within Academia, as well as Industrial Research Labs (e.g.. Intel Research, NEC Europe, Ericsson Eurolabs, T-Labs, etc).

Teaching

CSM032: Network and Distributed Systems Programming

Short Biography

Prof. Laurent Mathy graduated in Electrical Engineering (Computer Science) from the University of Liège, Belgium, in June 1993 and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Lancaster University, England, in January 2000.

In November 1993, he joined the Research Unit in Networking (RUN) of the University of Liège as a research engineer. From November 1995 till August 1996, he was a visiting researcher in the Center for Integrated Computer Systems Research (CICSR), the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He joined the Computing Department in Lancaster in September 1996, where he has since established a research group, and was awarded a Personal Chair, in Networked Systems.

Laurent was on sabbatical leave in 2006-2007, and spent time as a visiting research director at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, France, and as a visiting professor at the University of Liège and the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium.

He was the Director of Studies for the Advanced MSc Programme in Computer Science and the MSc in Networking and Internet Systems at Lancaster University, UK.

Laurent has many refereed publications and has extensively been serving the research community. In particular, he is a founding and steering committee member for the ACM CoNEXT conference, has served on the Technical Programme Committees (TPC) of top conferences in his field (e.g. ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE Infocom, ACM Multimedia, IFIP Networking, etc), and was the TPC co-chair for IMC 2009 and ICCCN 2010.

He has enjoyed many invitations to give seminars, talks and tutorials, and serve on expert panels, and was the recipient of the Young Researcher Award of CFIP'99.

Current professional activities includes:
Some past activities includes:

Amazing iCal bug (Snow Leopard)


Screenshot taken on Dec 8, 2009 at 2:42pm.
Patrick Crowley (WUSTL) can vouch that this is genuine: we both stared at this, completely bemused... and of course promptly proceeded to hypothize as to what might have been going on!