Members

Faculty

Athina Markopoulou joined the EECS faculty at UCI in Jan. 2006, where she is currently a Professor, Chancellor’s Fellow, and the Chair of the EECS department. She received her Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1996. She received her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, in 1998 and 2003 respectively. During her Ph.D., she had internships at Aloha Networks, Nokia Research Center, and Cisco Systems. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at Sprintlabs (2003) and at Stanford University (2004-2005), and a member of the technical staff with Arastra Inc. (2005). Her research interests are in the general area of computer networks, and include privacy, mobile and IoT devices, and network measurement. She received the NSF CAREER award in 2008. She is a Senior Member of IEEE. At UCI, she is affiliated with the EECS Dept. (where she currently serves as the Chair), the CS Dept (where she has a joint appointment), and the Networked Systems Program (where she previously was the Director).

Current PhD Students

Hao Cui received his B.Sc. degree in Geophysics (2017), B.Eng. degree in Computer Science (2017) and M.Eng. degree in Electronics & Communication Engineering (2020) from the University of Science and Technology of China. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Networked Systems program at UC Irvine. Hao’s current research focuses on privacy policy analysis using natural language processing (NLP). He previously also worked on image watermarking and deep learning security. For more information, please visit his personal page.

 

Jad Aaraj received his B.E. degree in Computer and Communications Engineering at the American University of Beirut (2020) and is now pursuing a Computer Engineering PhD at UCI, under the supervision of Prof. Athina Markopoulou. Jad interned at Cisco Systems in the Enterprise Networking CTO group and continued working on a part-time basis during his last year of studies at AUB. The project was in the area of Ontology-Based Data Access Systems. After graduation, he continued working with Cisco Systems for a few months on an Immersive Analytics project. His research interests are in the areas of privacy and networks.

Olivia Figueira received her BS in Computer Science and Engineering from Santa Clara University in 2021 and her MS in Computer Science from UCI in 2023. She is currently a PhD student in the Computer Science program at UCI, working with Prof. Athina Markopoulou and Prof. Scott Jordan. Olivia’s research interests are in the areas of privacy, policy, and human-computer interaction, with a focus on children’s and adolescents’ privacy and safety online. For more information, please visit her personal page.

Mengwei Yang received his B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University (China) in 2019, his M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Southern California in 2021. He is currently a PhD student in the Electrical Engineering program at the University of California, Irvine, working with Prof. Athina Markopoulou. Mengwei’s research interests are in the areas of Federated Learning, IoT, Privacy, and machine learning. For more information, please visit his personal page.

Ismat Jarin received her B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2017, her M.S. degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of Michigan-Dearborn in 2021. She is currently a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, working with Prof. Athina Markopoulou. Ismat’s research interests are in the areas of privacy preserving machine learning, differential privacy, federated learning, adversarial machine learning.

Yu Duan received her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from North China Electric Power University in 2019, her M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2021. She is currently a PhD student in the Networked System program at the University of California, Irvine, working with Prof. Athina Markopoulou. Yu’s research interests are in the areas of data privacy, network science and machine learning. For more information, please visit her personal page.

Current Researchers and Postdocs

Luca Baldesi is a project scientist in the EECS department at University of California, Irvine. His research interests are in the areas of networking, Internet-of-Things, privacy, and security.
He received a bachelor and a master degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Florence in 2011 and 2013, respectively, and the PhD. degree in Computer Science from the University of Trento in 2018. He completed his postdoc training in wireless Internet-of-Things at the Northeastern University and the Institute for the wireless Internet-of-Things, with a special focus on AI. Prior of joining UCI, he held R&D positions on Internet-of-Medical-Things in Mindmaze and Hamilton Medical. For more information, please visit his personal page. 

Tu Le received his B.S. degree in Computer Science (2018) from Portland State University and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (2023) from the University of Virginia. Currently, he is a Postdoc in the Networking Group at University of California, Irvine, working with Prof. Athina Markopoulou. His interests are in the areas of security and privacy, Internet of Things (IoT), and human-computer interaction with applications to Urban Systems and Public Policy. His research aims to bridge the gaps between IoT devices’ behaviors and users’ preferences, informing secure and privacy-respecting designs for future urban systems. For more information, please visit his personal page. 

Past Researchers

Rahmadi Trimananda (currently a researcher at Comcast Cyber Security Research) received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from University of Pelita Harapan, his M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Delft University of Technology, and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from University of California, Irvine. Currently, he was a Project Scientist in the Networking Group at University of California, Irvine, working with Prof. Athina Markopoulou and the awesome team of researchers. His interests are at a unique intersection of hardware (circuits and systems, VLSI designs, embedded systems, microcontrollers, microprocessors, etc.), and, more recently during his Ph.D. journey and beyond, software (software engineering, compilers, systems) focusing on security, privacy, and policy, especially for IoT devices. For more information, please visit his personal page.

Alumni

Hieu Le (currently a postdoc at the Univ. of Michigan) received his B.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering at UC Irvine. In 2022, he completed his Ph.D in Electrical Computer Engineering with a concentration on Computer Engineering. Prior to his PhD studies he worked with Prof. Athina Markopoulou as a technical consultant before joining her group. While at UCI, he was an elected officer for the Society of Graduate Electrical Engineers & Computer Scientist and previously completed undergraduate research with Prof. David Eppstein regarding “Watershed Extraction.” Hieu Le’s industry experience relates to government contracts and web development. For more information, please visit his personal page.

Janus Varmarken (currently with Juniper Networks) received his B.Sc. degree in Software Development (2013) and M.Sc. degree in Information Technology (2017) from the IT University of Copenhagen. In 2022, he received his Ph.D. in the Networked Systems program at the University of California, Irvine, working with Prof. Athina Markopoulou. During his studies, Janus has worked part time as a programmer for various institutions, including the IT University of Copenhagen, Calit2 and the Danish Maritime Authority. He received the Networked Systems fellowship (2017-2019) for his graduate studies. Janus is interested in mobile and pervasive computing, and in applications of wireless ad hoc networks. For more information, please visit his personal page.

Evita Bakopoulou  received her B.Sc. degree in Computer Science (2014) and her M.Sc. degree in Computer Science (2016) from Athens University of Economics and Business. She completed her Ph.D. in 2021 in the Networked Systems Program at UC Irvine, working with Prof. Athina Markopoulou. She has received the UCI Networked Systems Fellowship (2016-2018), H. Samueli Fellowship (2017-2018) and Broadcom Foundation Fellowship (2018-2019) for her graduate studies. Her research interests are primarily in the area of Machine Learning and Privacy. For more information, please visit her personal page.

 

Emmanouil Alimpertis (currently with Apple Inc.) received his M.Sc. and Diploma degrees in Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Crete, Greece, in 2012 and 2014 respectively. In 2020, he received his Ph.D. degree in the Networked System Program at the University of California, Irvine, working with Prof. Athina Markopoulou. He received Networked Systems fellowship for his graduate studies in 2014-15 as well as awards for his diploma/M.Sc. His research interests include network monitoring/measurements, cellular mobile systems, localization of RF devices in wireless environments and inference in communication systems. For more information, please visit his personal page.

 

Balint Tillman (currently with Google) received his B.Sc. degree in Business Information Technology from Corvinus University of Budapest (2012) and his M.Sc. degree in Software Development and Technology from IT University of Copenhagen (2014). He worked as an intern during his studies at Corvinno Technology Transfer (Budapest) and he served as a teaching assistant for algorithm classes at ITU. In 2019, he received his Ph.D.degree  in the Networked Systems at UC Irvine working with professor Athina Markopoulou. For more information, please visit his personal page.

 

Anastasia Shuba (currently with Broadcom Inc.)
Anastasia received her B.S. (2014), M.S. (2016), and Ph.D. (2019) degrees in Computer Engineering from UC Irvine. During her Ph.D., Anastasia has developed several tools for mobile privacy, namely AntMonitor and NoMoAds. For more information, please visit the respective project pages, or Anastasia’s personal page.

 

Minas Gjoka (currently with Google, Santa Monica)
Minas Gjoka received the Ph.D. (2010) and M.S. (2008) degrees in Networked Systems at the University of California, Irvine, and the B.S. (2005) degree in Computer Science at the Informatics Department of the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece. He has had summer research internships with AT&T Research Labs, Telefonica Research and CAIDA/UCSD. He also co-founded Adball – a startup that developed an online collaborative platform that crowdsources advertising campaigns. He graduated first in his undergraduate class and received the Networked Systems (2005-2007) and CPCC (2007-2008) fellowships for his graduate studies. His research interests are in the general areas of networking and distributed systems, with emphasis on online social networks, peer-to-peer systems, and network measurements. For more information, visit his personal page.

 

Blerim Cici (currently with Apple Inc.)
Currently I am a Ph.D. student in the Networked System program (joint program between the ICS and the EECS department) and I am working with professor Athina Markopoulou. I received my B.Sc from the department of Informatics at Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) and shortly after my graduation I became a member of Mobile Multimedia Laboratory, where I worked as a junior researcher on Clean Slate Publish/Subscribe Architectures.

 

Anh Le. Anh Le received a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at UC Irvine in June 2012, under the supervision of professor Athina Markopoulou. Prior to joining UC Irvine, Anh Le earned a Master of Mathematics degree at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Professor Raouf Boutaba and Professor Ehab S. Al-Shaer in September 2008. Before that, he got a Joint Computer Science – Mathematics Honours Bachelor degree at the University of Manitoba in May 2006, where he completed an Honour Research Project under the supervision of Professor Yanni Ellen Liu. In summer 2011 he was an intern at Google, in Fall 2012 he visited USC. He was the Co-Founder and CTO of Shoelace Wireless, a startup that was spawned off his research. His research interests are in Network Security, Machine Learning, Mobile Networks. here. For more information and publications, please visit his personal website.

 

Omer Nebil Yaveroglu (currently with Google, London).
Omer N. Yaveroglu received his Ph.D. degree (2014) in Computing at Imperial College, London and his M.S. (2010) and B.Sc. (2008) degrees in Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University. His main area of research is Computational Network Analysis with a specific focus on Network Topology Comparison and Modelling techniques and their applications on the analysis of Economic, Biological, Social and Technological networks. He first visited UCI during his Ph.D. studies (from Aug.2011 until Oct.2011). Since October 2013, he is working in collaboration with Prof. Natasa Przulj, Prof. Athina Markopoulou and Prof. Carter T. Butts on integrating the techniques for the analysis of biological networks and social networks. For more information, please visit here.

 

Abinesh Ramakrishnan.
Abinesh Ramakrishnan received his B.E. degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the Madras Institute of Technology, Anna University, India in 2008 and his Master’s degree from EECS department at the University of California, Irvine in 2010. He got is Ph.D. degree from EECS department at UCI in 2015 and is currently working at Huawei Innovations as a researcher. His research interests include network coding, information theory, interference alignment, index coding, distributed storage and content delivery networks. For more information, please visit his personal page.

 

Chun Meng (currently with Bloomberg).
Chun Meng received his B.S degree from the Department of Computer Science at Peking University, China in 1998. After graduation, he worked for 7 years as a network engineer and software designer. In 2009, he got his Master’s degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Beijing Univ. of Posts and Telecommunications. During the same year, he joined the EECS department with a major in Computer Network and Distributed Computing at UCI. He is now working towards his Ph.D. degree. His research interests include network coding, alignment, failure recovery, P2P and wireless ad hoc networks. Please visit my Personal Page

 

Pegah Sattari (currently with Apple Inc.)
Pegah Sattari received her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering, Communications, from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2006 and her M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Irvine in 2007. In June 2012, she received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and joined Jeda Networks. Her interests include network inference, network coding, network monitoring/measurements; storage networks and software defined networking. For more information, please visit her personal website.

 

Maciej Kurant (currently with Google, Zurich)
I received my M.Sc. in Telecommunication in Gdansk University of Technology, Poland, in 2002, and my Ph.D. degree at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2009. Currently, I am a postdoc at University of California, Irvine. My areas of research interest include the survivability in optical and P2P networks, the inference of large-scale complex networks (such as the human brain), sampling online social networks, and much more. You can find my publications here. I am also the founder and developer of AcronymCreator.net – a tool that helps you generate an acronym-like name for your new algorithm, system, product, etc.

Maciej visited UCI April-June 2009 and then joined as a postdoc from Sept. 2010 until Feb. 2012. He is currently a senior researcher at the Communication Systems Group, at ETH, Zurich. Here is his personal website.

 

Hulya Seferoglu (currently at UIC)
Hulya Seferoglu received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2003, and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2005. In Fall 2010, she completed her Ph.D. degree in EECS at the University of California, Irvine. She was a summer intern with Microsoft Research Cambridge, Docomo USA Labs, and AT&T Labs in 2007, 2008, and 2010, respectively. Her research interests include network coding, error correction codes, congestion control, and multimedia streaming.

After UCI, Hulya joined MIT as a postdoc. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information, visit her personal page.

 

Fabio Soldo (currently with Google, Mountain View)
Fabio got a Ph.D. in Networked Systems in summer 2011. His research interests include data mining and machine learning algorithms for large-scale system, design and optimization of network algorithms and network protocols, defense mechanisms against malicious traffic on the Internet.

He received a M.Sc. in Mathematical Engineering (summa cum laude) from both Politecnico di Torino and Politecnico di Milano in 2006. The same year he also graduated from Alta Scuola Politecnica, a school of excellence in Milan and Turin focused on innovation management. From March 2006 to September 2006 he was a visiting researcher at UCLA. From January 2007 to September 2007 he was a research assistant at Politecnico di Torino. He joined UCI as a PhD student in September 2007. During his PhD he had internships at Telefonica R&D, NTT Docomo Euro-Labs and Google Ad-Words. For more information, please visit his page.

 

MS Alumni

Stelios Stavroulakis received his Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (2019). His interest in Music Information Retrieval techniques during his studies led him to embrace Sequential Decision Making and Machine Learning. Stelios has worked on theory and applications of Reinforcement Learning, Combinatorial Optimization and Algorithms.His research interests mainly revolve around Game Theory and Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning.

 

Milad Asgari-Mehrabadi received his B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2016. Currently, he is in the MS/Ph.D. program of EECS department at the University of California Irvine, working with Prof. Athina Markopoulou. He received Computer Engineering fellowship for his graduate studies for 2016-18. His research interests include Mobile Data Analysis, Machine Learning, and Graph Analysis. For more information,  visit his personal page.

 

Giuseppe Valente (currently with Arista Networks)
Giuseppe is an Electrical Engineering Master of Science graduate from the Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Dept. of the Henry Samuely School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. During his MS, he mainly focused on digital communication and wireless systems. He also holds a Laurea in Computer Engineering (2003) and a Master in Internet Technologies (2004) both from the University of Pisa, during which he ended up focusing on the upper layers of the Internet protocol suite. Before college, he attended four years of high school in his home town Monopoli (Italy) and school year 1997/98 in Kelbra (Germany).

After graduating from UCI, Giuseppe worked at Cisco Systems. He is currently with Arista Networks. For more information, please visit his (website).

 

Nivedhita Sathyamurthy (currently with Facebook)

Past Visitors

Tianyue Chu received a double B.Sc degree in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics and Finance in 2014, and her M.SC degree in Statistics in 2017 from Shenzhen University. She is currently a PhD Student in Telematic Engineering at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and is a part of the Data Transparency Group working with Prof Nikolaos Laoutaris at the IMDEA Networks Institute. Her research interests are in the areas of Federated Learning, privacy preserving machine learning, privacy and security. 

Luca Baldesi is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) at the University of Trento, Italy. He received his Bachelor and Master degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Florence in 2011 and 2013 respectively. He visited the group from March 2016 to December 2016, working on the Online Social Networks project for synthetic graph generation and anonymization. Such work was published at IEEE INFOCOM 2018 with the title: “Spectral Graph Forge: Graph Generation Targeting Modularity”.

 

Simon Langhoff
Simon received his B.Sc. (2013) degree in Software Development at the IT University of Copenhagen under the supervision of Prof. Athina Markopolou. He is currently enrolled as a graduate student at the IT university of Copenhagen and pursuing a M.Sc. degree in Software Engineering. Besides studying, Simon has a part-time position as a programmer at Lindcom A/S. Simon is visiting the group from September 2014 to January 2015. During this period, Simon is working as a research assistant on a project in which the group attempts to create network fingerprints for Android applications.

 

Lorenzo Keller
Lorenzo is doing his PhD with the ARNI group, at EPFL Lausanne, under the supervision of Prof. Christina Fragouli. He visited UCI in May 2011 and in Oct. 2011. He is working on a cooperative scheme for video streaming on androids, using network coding.

 

Francesco Malandrino
Francesco is doing his Ph.D. at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He visited UCI from Sept.2010 until Feb.2011 and will come back for a short visit in June 2011. He is collaborating with us on mechanisms to support dissemination of OSN-generated content to mobile devices.

 

Alessandra Tripodi
Alessandra visited the group as an undergraduate researcher from January to June 2009. She worked on the “Pollution Attacks against Network Coding” project.