We have two keynote speakers: Cristel Pelsser and Krishna Gummadi.

Keynote I (starting at 14:30, Monday, 29th March 2021)

• Title: Hidden broken pieces in the Internet: BGP lies and forwarding detours

• Bio: Cristel Pelsser received the PhD degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium. She spent nine years working for ISPs in Japan in their research labs. She is now a full professor at the University of Strasbourg (France) where she leads a team of researchers focusing on core Internet technologies. Her aim is to facilitate network operations, to avoid network disruptions and, when they occur, pinpoint the failure precisely in order to quickly fix the issue and understand it in order to design solutions to prevent recurrence.

• Abstract: The Internet is an interconnection of independent networks known as Autonomous Systems (ASes). Given that ASes are built on top of hardware and software operated by humans, the Internet is subject to some limitations. For example, humans are error-prone and eventually take arbitrary decisions, enterprises are generally greedy from a revenue point of view. Finally, hardware and circuits may fail, requiring maintenance or replacement. All these factors may lead the Internet to have broken pieces, i.e., malfunctioning components, networks facing limitations and even selfish networks prioritizing their own revenue rather than the better performance of the Internet. Much of my current work is on measuring the Internet to understand its vulnerabilities. In this talk, I’ll focus on two hidden broken pieces of the Internet. First, I’ll concentrate on the border gateway protocol (BGP), the routing protocol used on the Internet, and study whether ASes carry on BGP lies where the control plane and the data plane differs. After applying a sequence of filters to remove different artifacts, we find cases where the paths indeed mismatch. One cause for such discrepancy is the presence of detours. We then study how traffic flows inside ASes and focus on the detection of forwarding detours. In case of detours, the forwarding routes do not match the best available routes, according to the internal gateway protocol (IGP) in use. We reveal such forwarding detours in multiple ASes.

Keynote II (starting at 14:30, Tuesday, 30 March 2021)

• Title: Measuring Bias and Unfairness in Socio-technical Systems

• Bio: Krishna Gummadi is a scientific director and head of the Networked Systems research group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Germany. He also holds a professorship at the University of Saarland. Krishna’s research interests are in the measurement, analysis, design, and evaluation of complex Internet-scale systems. Krishna’s work on fair machine learning, online social networks and media, Internet access networks, and peer-to-peer systems has been widely cited and his papers have received numerous awards, including Test of Time Awards at ACM SIGCOMM and AAAI ICWSM, Casper Bowden Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) and CNIL-INRIA Privacy Runners-Up Awards, IW3C2 WWW Best Paper Honorable Mention, and Best Papers at NIPS ML & Law Symposium, ACM COSN, ACM/Usenix SOUPS, AAAI ICWSM, Usenix OSDI, ACM SIGCOMM IMC, ACM SIGCOMM CCR, and SPIE MMCN. He received an ERC Advanced Grant in 2017 to investigate “Foundations for Fair Social Computing”.

• Abstract: Over the past two decades, the Internet has enabled (and continues to enable) numerous disruptive socio-technical systems like BitTorrent, Facebook, Amazon, and Bitcoin that have transformed media landscape, personal and corporate communications, trade, and monetary systems. The scale and societal impact of these Internet systems raise fundamental questions about their transparency and potential for unfairness and bias against some of their users. Understanding these threats requires us to define measures and develop methods to quantify unfairness and bias, often via black-box auditing of opaque systems. In this talk, I will discuss some of our attempts to measure bias and unfairness in traffic shaping in the Internet, targeted ads on social media, product recommendations on e-commerce platforms, and transaction prioritization in blockchains. I will also touch upon the challenges with designing fair and unbiased socio-technical systems, while maintaining their innovative potential.