Internet Measurement And Political Science (IMAPS) Workshop: Network Outages

On Wednesday 1 October 2014, CAIDA hosted a small invitation only workshop that brought together researchers working on large-scale Internet outage detection and characterization with researchers from the political sciences with specific expertise in Internet censorship, political violence (including Internet connectivity disruption ordered by authoritarian regimes for censorship), and Internet penetration. Participants viewed a demonstration and discussed CAIDA's current data analysis platform for the exploration of historical and realtime Internet measurement data (named "Charthouse"), and possible extensions of the platform to support political science research related to macroscopic Internet outages.

Announcement

A primary use of our current platform is to detect/characterize large-scale Internet outages, i.e., entire regions or countries getting disconnected from the Internet for hours or days. We intend to extend the platform to enable more agile analysis, support larger datasets, improve geographic-based exploration and visualization, based on use case scenarios defined together with political scientists.

Agenda

10:00 - 10:30 Introduction
- Alberto Dainotti (CAIDA/UC San Diego), Welcome, purpose of the meeting, agenda
- kc claffy (CAIDA/UC San Diego), Introduction to CAIDA and its activities
10:30 - 13:30 Research Presentations
- Alberto Dainotti (CAIDA/UC San Diego), CAIDA's Research on Macroscopic Internet Outages
- Nils Weidmann (University of Konstanz), Empowering Activists or Autocrats? Why We Need More Research on the Political Impacts of ICT
- Molly Roberts (UC San Diego), Content Filtering and Internet Outages: Collaboration Potential
12:00 - 13:00 lunch
- Amitava Majumdar (San Diego Supercomputer Center), Data Enabled Scientific Computing (DESC) Division
13:30 - 14:30 Demos
- Vasco Asturiano (CAIDA/UC San Diego), Charthouse Demo
14:30 - 15:30 Data Collection and Extraction
- Alistair King (CAIDA/UC San Diego), Internet Garbage: From Bytes to Insights
15:30 - 16:00 Discussion
16:00 Adjourn

Workshop Summary

Discussions imagined the extension of the current platform for the exploration of historical and realtime Internet measurement data to support political science research related to macroscopic Internet outages.

The workshop also included experts from the San Diego Supercomputer Center's Data Enabled Scientific Computing Group, who provided valuable insights into methods for scalable analysis of large data sets requiring high performance computing platforms. We currently plan to implement part of the Charthouse platform using the Spark/Shark data analytics stack.

Additional Content

Internet Measurement And Political Science (IMAPS) Workshop: Network Outages: Participants

This page contains the list of participants of Internet Measurement And Political Science (IMAPS) Workshop on October 1, 2014.