Projects   |   Publications   |   Teaching   |   Press

Alan Mislove Assistant Professor College of Computer and Information Science Northeastern University 360 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115 Office: 250 West Village H +1 617 373 7069 (p) +1 617 373 5121 (f) amislove (at) ccs (dot) neu (dot) edu Note: I do not check my voicemail; email is the best way to reach me.

Bio

Alan Mislove is an Assistant Professor at the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. He was recently a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems In the summer of 2005, he was an intern at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, working with Antony Rowstron and Miguel Castro. In the fall of 2005, he moved with Peter Druschel to found the new Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, in Saarbruecken and Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Alan received a Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department at Rice University in May 2009, under the direction of Peter Druschel and Krishna P. Gummadi. He was the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award in January 2011.

His research interests currently lie in the area of social networks, distributed systems, and network measurement tools.

Updates

• 02/08/13  Our paper on web search personalization was accepted at WWW 2013 — congrats to Ancsa, Piotr, Arash, Bala, David, and Christo!
• 02/08/13  Our Iolaus paper on strengthening online content rating sites was also accepted at WWW 2013 — congrats to Arash and Chloe!
• 01/08/13  Our Maygh paper on building CDNs from web browsers was accepted at EuroSys 2013 — congrats to Liang, Fangfei, and Ravi!
• 09/15/12  Our Genie paper was accepted to ACM CoNEXT 2012 — congrats to Mainack, Bimal, Allen, Peter, Krishna, and Ansley!
• 02/28/12  Our paper on correlating weather and mood on Twitter was accepted to ICWSM 2012.
• 01/08/12  Our paper on scaling up Sybil defenses was accepted to EuroSys 2012. Congrats to Bimal, Mainack, Krishna, and Ansley!
• 11/30/11  Google has awarded us a research grant to study new techniques for mitigating Sybils. Thanks for the support!
• 08/24/11  Check out our analysis and video of the tweets that immediately followed the recent East Coast earthquake.
• 12/07/10  Our Bazaar paper was accepted to NSDI 2011 — congrats to Ansley and Vijit!
  
• 07/22/10  Our Twitter study receives wide media coverage, including CBS Evening News, BBC, New York Times, and many others.
  

Projects

Current:

• Online Social Networks: Online social networks are emerging as an important medium for exchanging information. We conducted a large-scale measurement study of the structures of several online social network graphs, i.e., the network graphs formed by users connecting with their friends. We are currently investigating the dynamic evolution of these social network graphs and the ways in which information propagates over them. In the PeerSpective project, we explored how social networks could be used to improve Internet search. Our Ostra project shows how the implicit trust in social networks could be leveraged to prevent unwanted communication. Finally, our Twitter mood project demonstrated how social media can be used as a new tool to collect large-scale population demographics.

Previous:

• Glasnost: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are increasingly deploying a variety of middleboxes (e.g., firewalls, traffic shapers, censors, and redirectors) to monitor and to manipulate the performance of user applications. Most ISPs do not reveal the details of their network deployments to their customers. We believe that this knowledge is important to help users make a more informed choice of their ISP. Further, such knowledge is also useful for researchers designing protocols and systems that run on top of these networks. To improve network transparency, we are building online tools that allow users to easily detect traffic manipulation by their ISPs.

• ePOST: Traditional collaborative applications are almost exclusively based on centralized servers, a fact which fundamentally limits their fault tolerance. POST presents an alternative base for such applications, and provides massive scalability and fault tolerance. ePOST is a backwards-compatible POST-based email service which provides better security, reliability, and durability guarantees than existing email systems. Based on the FreePastry peer-to-peer overlay, the ePOST deployment served as a proving group for the Glacier backup system and automatically scoped data placement.

Teaching

• CS3600 Systems and Networks, Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013

• CS4700/CS5700 Fundamentals of Computer Networks, Fall 2009, Spring 2011

• CS5600 Computer Systems, Fall 2010

• CS7780 Topics in Networks, Spring 2010

Students

I'm thrilled to be working with a number of talented students:

• Ancsa Hannak

• Arash Molavi Kakhki

• Yabing Liu

• Bimal Viswanath (co-advised with Krishna P. Gummadi)

• Liang Zhang

Publications

• Measuring Personalization of Web Search
  Aniko Hannak, Piotr Sapieżyński, Arash Molavi Kakhki, Balachander Krishnamurthy, David Lazer, Alan Mislove, and Christo Wilson
  To appear in Proceedings of the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'13), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2013.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Iolaus: Securing online content rating systems
  Arash Molavi Kakhki, Chloe Kliman-Silver, and Alan Mislove
  To appear in Proceedings of the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'13), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2013.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Measurement Data]

• Maygh: Building a CDN from client web browsers
  Liang Zhang, Fangfei Zhou, Alan Mislove, and Ravi Sundaram
  To appear in Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'13), Prague, Czech Republic, April 2013.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Defending against large-scale crawls in online social networks
  Mainack Mondal, Bimal Viswanath, Allen Clement, Peter Druschel, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove, and Ansley Post.
  In Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT'12), Nice, France, December 2012.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• WebCloud: Recruiting social network users to assist in content distribution
  Fangfei Zhou, Liang Zhang, Eric Franco, Alan Mislove, Richard Revis and Ravi Sundaram.
  In Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA'12), Cambridge, MA, August 2012.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Tweetin' in the Rain: Exploring societal-scale effects of weather on mood (Poster Paper)
  Aniko Hannak, Eric Anderson, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Sune Lehmann, Alan Mislove, and Mirek Riedewald.
  In Proceedings of the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM'12), Dublin, Ireland, June 2012.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Simplifying Friendlist Management (Demo Paper)
  Yabing Liu, Bimal Viswanath, Mainack Mondal, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Alan Mislove.
  In Proceedings of the 21st International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'12), Lyon, France, April 2012.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Canal: Scaling social network-based Sybil tolerance schemes
  Bimal Viswanath, Mainack Mondal, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove, and Ansley Post.
  In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'12), Bern, Switzerland, April 2012.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Exploring the design space of social network-based Sybil defenses (Invited Paper)
  Bimal Viswanath, Mainack Mondal, Allen Clement, Peter Druschel, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove, and Ansley Post
  In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Communication Systems and Networking (COMSNETS'12), Bangalore, India, January 2012.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Analyzing Facebook privacy settings: User expectations vs. reality
  Yabing Liu, Krishna P. Gummadi, Balachander Krishnamurthy, and Alan Mislove.
  In Proceedings of the 11th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'11), Berlin, Germany, November 2011.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)]

• Defending against large-scale crawls in online social networks
  Mainack Mondal, Bimal Viswanath, Allen Clement, Peter Druschel, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove, and Ansley Post
  Technical Report 2011-006, MPI-SWS, November 2011.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Understanding the Demographics of Twitter Users (Poster Paper)
  Alan Mislove, Sune Lehmann, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, and J. Niels Rosenquist.
  In Proceedings of the 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM'11), Barcelona, Spain, July 2011.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Bazaar: Strengthening user reputations in online marketplaces
  Ansley Post, Vijit Shah, and Alan Mislove
  In Proceedings of the 8th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'11), Boston, MA, March 2011.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)] [Talk Video]

• Addressing the Privacy Management Crisis in Online Social Networks (Position Paper)
  Krishna P. Gummadi, Balachander Krishnamurthy, and Alan Mislove
  In Proceedings of the IAB Workshop on Internet Privacy, Boston, MA, December 2010.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• An Analysis of Social Network-based Sybil Defenses
  Bimal Viswanath, Ansley Post, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Alan Mislove
  In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM'10), New Delhi, India, August 2010.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)]

• You are who you know: Inferring user profiles in Online Social Networks
  Alan Mislove, Bimal Viswanath, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Peter Druschel
  In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference of Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'10), New York, NY, February 2010.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)] [Talk Video]

• On the Evolution of User Interaction in Facebook
  Bimal Viswanath, Alan Mislove, Meeyoung Cha, and Krishna P. Gummadi
  In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Social Networks (WOSN'09), Barcelona, Spain, August 2009.
  Note: The original version contained a few inaccurate statistics on the size of the data set, this has been corrected in the updated paper below.
  [PDF] [Original PDF (with errata)] [Errata Note] [BibTeX] [Measurement Data]

• Online Social Networks: Measurement, Analysis, and Applications to Distributed Information Systems
  Alan Mislove
  Doctor of Philosophy Thesis, Rice University, May 2009. Advised by Peter Druschel and Krishna P. Gummadi.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Measurement Data]

• A Measurement-driven Analysis of Information Propagation in the Flickr Social Network
  Meeyoung Cha, Alan Mislove, and Krishna P. Gummadi
  In Proceedings of the 18th Annual World Wide Web Conference (WWW'09), Madrid, Spain, April 2009.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Measurement Data]

• Detecting BitTorrent Blocking
  Marcel Dischinger, Alan Mislove, Andreas Haeberlen, and Krishna P. Gummadi
  In Proceedings of the 6th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'08), Vouliagmeni, Greece, October 2008.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Homepage]

• Growth of the Flickr Social Network
  Alan Mislove, Hema Swetha Koppula, Krishna P. Gummadi, Peter Druschel, and Bobby Bhattacharjee
  In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Social Networks (WOSN'08), Seattle, WA, August 2008.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)] [Measurement Data]

• Characterizing Social Cascades in Flickr
  Meeyoung Cha, Alan Mislove, Ben Adams, and Krishna P. Gummadi
  In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Social Networks (WOSN'08), Seattle, WA, August 2008.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Ostra: Leveraging trust to thwart unwanted communication
  Alan Mislove, Ansley Post, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Peter Druschel
  In Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'08), San Francisco, CA, April 2008.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)]

• Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks
  Alan Mislove, Massimiliano Marcon, Krishna P. Gummadi, Peter Druschel, and Bobby Bhattacharjee
  In Proceedings of the 5th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'07), San Diego, CA, October 2007.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)] [Measurement Data]

• Exploiting Social Networks for Internet Search
  Alan Mislove, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Peter Druschel
  In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets'06), Irvine, CA, November 2006.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)] [Software]

• Experiences in building and operating ePOST, a reliable peer-to-peer application
  Alan Mislove, Ansley Post, Andreas Haeberlen, and Peter Druschel
  In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the European Professional Society for Systems (EuroSys'06), Leuven, Belgium, April 2006.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)] [Software]

• Fallacies in evaluating decentralized systems
  Andreas Haeberlen, Alan Mislove, Ansley Post, and Peter Druschel
  In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'06), Santa Barbara, CA, February, 2006.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Consistent Key Mapping in Structured Overlays
  Andreas Haeberlen, Jeff Hoye, Alan Mislove, and Peter Druschel
  Technical Report TR05-456, Department of Computer Science, Rice University, August 2005.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• ePOST
  Alan Mislove, Andreas Haeberlen, Ansley Post, and Peter Druschel
  Chapter in Peer-to-Peer Systems and Applications, LNCS 3485, Spring-Verlag Publishers, Heidelberg. Ralf Steinmetz and Klaus Wehrle, Eds. August 2005.
  [Book] [BibTeX] [Homepage] [Software]

• Glacier: Highly durable, decentralized storage despite massive correlated failures
  Andreas Haeberlen, Alan Mislove, and Peter Druschel.
  In Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'05), Boston, MA, May 2005.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Software]

• Sharing micronews with peer-to-peer event notification
  Dan Sandler, Alan Mislove, Ansley Post, and Peter Druschel
  In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'05), Ithaca, NY, Feburary 2005.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Software]

• POST: A Decentralized Platform for Reliable Collaborative Applications
  Alan Mislove
  Master of Science Thesis, Rice University, December 2004. Advised by Peter Druschel.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• AP3: Cooperative, decentralized anonymous communication
  Alan Mislove, Gaurav Oberoi, Ansley Post, Peter Druschel, and Dan S. Wallach
  In Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop (SIGOPS-EW'04), Leuven, Belgium, September 2004.
  [PDF] [BibTeX]

• Providing Administrative Control and Autonomy in Peer-to-Peer Overlays
  Alan Mislove and Peter Druschel
  In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'04), San Diego, CA, Feburary 2004.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)] [Software]

• POST: A Secure, Resilient, Cooperative Messaging System
  Alan Mislove, Ansley Post, Charles Reis, Paul Willmann, Peter Druschel, Dan S. Wallach, Xavier Bonnaire, Pierre Sens, Jean-Michel Busca, and Luicana Arantes-Bezerra
  In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS'03), Lihue, HI, May 2003.
  [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides (PDF)] [Software]

Talk Slides

• Systems challenges in online social media
  At the 7th Annual Top-IX Conference, Turin, Italy, December 2011.
  [Slides (PDF)] [Talk Video]

• Analyzing Facebook privacy settings: User expectations vs. reality
  At the 11th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'11), Berlin, Germany, November 2011.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• Bazaar: Strengthening user reputations in online marketplaces
  At the 8th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'11), Boston, MA, March 2011.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• Social Media and Networks
  At the International School and Conference on Network Science (NetSci'10), Boston, MA, May 2010.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• You are who you know: Inferring user profiles in Online Social Networks
  At the 3rd ACM International Conference of Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'10), New York, NY, February 2010.
  [Slides (PDF)] [Talk Video]

• Communities as a first-class abstraction for information sharing (work-in-progress)
  At the 8th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'08), San Diego, CA, December 2008.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• Growth of the Flickr Social Network
  At the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Social Networks (WOSN'08), Seattle, WA, August 2008.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• Ostra: Leveraging Trust to Thrwart Unwanted Communication
  At the 5th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'08), San Francisco, CA, April 2008.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• Structure and Growth of Online Social Networks
  At the Microsoft Research Workshop on Online Social Networks, Cambridge, UK, December 2007.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks
  At the 5th ACM/USENIX Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'07), San Diego, CA, October 2007.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• Ostra: Leveraging Trust To Thrwart Unwanted Communication (work-in-progress)
  At the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'07), Stevenson, WA, October 2007.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• Exploiting Social Networks for Internet Search
  At the 5th Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets'06), Irvine, CA, November 2006.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• Experiences in building and operating ePOST, a reliable peer-to-peer application
  At the 1st Conference of the European Professional Society for Systems (EuroSys'06), Leuven, Belgium, April 2006.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• Providing Administrative Control and Autonomy in Peer-to-Peer Overlays
  At the 3rd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'04), San Diego, CA, Feburary 2004.
  [Slides (PDF)]

• POST: A Secure, Resilient, Cooperative Messaging System
  At the 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS'03), Lihue, HI, May 2003.
  [Slides (PDF)]

Press

Coverage of the PeerSpective project has appeared in New Scientist, MIT Technology Review (Germany), and again in New Scientist. Articles on our Glasnost ISP transparency project have appeared in the New York Times, PC World, the Washington Times, and Ars Technica. Our social network privacy study was described in Miller-McCune and covered on Slashdot. I was quoted in a New Scientist article concerning false Facebook profiles, and in another New Scientist article about predicting the popularity of items in online social networks. Finally, I was interviewed about privacy in online social networks by news@Northeastern. Our Twitter mood study has received wide media coverage, including CBS Evening News, BBC, New York Times, New Scientist, la Repubblica, and Slashdot.

Funding

Our research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Reseach Office, Google, and Amazon.

Vita

My curriculum vitae is available in PDF format.