Stefan Birrer Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Northwestern University 2133 Sheridan Evanston, IL 60208 +1 (847) 491-7060 (Office) +1 (847) 491-5258 (Fax) s-birrer@northwestern.edu http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/sbirrer RESEARCH INTEREST My research interest spans the intersection between distributed systems and networking. My research model is mainly experimental - designing, building, testing and redesigning as a way of gaining further insights into complex systems. Recent projects address efficient overlay mechanism for group communication specifically focusing on highly dynamic heterogenous environments. Example applications, which benefit from this research, are online gaming, video conferencing and content distribution. PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, 2002-Present. Teaching Assistant Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, CS390/490: Distributed Systems (Winter 2003/04), CS343: Operating Systems (Fall 2004/05, Fall 2005/06) Teaching Assistant, University for Applied Science Aargau, Brugg-Windisch (Switzerland), 1999-2000. EDUCATION Ph.D. Computer Science, expected December 2007 Northwestern University. Advisor: FabiŽan E. Bustamante Topic: Efficient Overlay Group Communication M.S. Computer Science, June 2004, GPA 4.0/4.0 Northwestern University. B.S. Computer Science, December 2001 University for Applied Science Aargau, Brugg-Windisch (Switzerland). OTHER WORK EXPERIENCEi Research Intern, IBM Almaden Research, San Jose (USA), 2005. Explored resources tradeoffs of value-added services running on an enterprise storage server. In particular, running DB2 on AIX on a DS8000 storage system with transactional and decision support benchmarks. Software Engineer, Siemens Building Technologies, Zug (Switzerland), 2002. Evaluated and designed a web enabled management system. Learned about Microsoft state of the art technologies. Verified correctness with hundreds of reproducible test cases. Applied eXtreme Programming. Software Engineer, basoft ag, Dietikon (Switzerland), 2001 - 2002. Designed and developed a reusable components library. Learned about legacy systems and requirements engineering. Tested the system with reproducible test cases. Applied eXtreme Programming. Teacher, InovaTech, Strengelbach (Switzerland), 2001. Developed and taught an introductory course about the C programming language. Improved communication and presentation skills. Programmer, zeitgeist interactive GmbH, Baden-Dattwil (Switzerland), 2000-2001. Developed a web-based content management system. Designed and normalized the database model. PUBLICATIONS Refereed Conference/Workshop Publications Stefan Birrer and FabiŽan E. Bustamante, "The Feasibility of DHT-based Streaming Multicast", In Proc. of the IEEE Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS'05), Atlanta, GA, USA, September 2005. Stefan Birrer and FabiŽan E. Bustamante, "Magellan: Performance-based, Cooperative Multicast", In Proc. of the IEEE Tenth International Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution (IWCW'05), Sophia Antipolis, France, September 2005. Stefan Birrer, FabiŽan E. Bustamanta, Dong Lu, Peter A. Dinda and Yi Qiao, "FatNemo: Multisource Multicast Overlay Fat-Trees", In Proc. of the NSDI'05 Poster Session, Boston, MA, USA, May 2005. Stefan Birrer and FabiŽan E. Bustamante, "Bandwidth Intensive Application-layer Multicast in Dynamic Environments", In Proc. of the INFOCOM'05 Student Workshop, Miami, FL, USA, March 2005. Stefan Birrer and FabiŽan E. Bustamante, "Resilient peer-to-peer multicast without the cost", In Proc. of the 12th Annual Multimedia Computing and Networking Conference (MMCN'05), San Jose, CA, USA, January 2005. (Also published as Tech. Report NWU-CS-04-36) Stefan Birrer, Dong Lu, FabiŽan E. Bustamante, Yi Qiao and Peter Dinda, "FatNemo: Building a Resilient Multi-Source Multicast Fat-Tree", In Proc. of the Ninth International Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution (IWCW'04), Beijing, China, October 2004. Stefan Birrer and FabiŽan E. Bustamante, "Resilient Peer-to-Peer Multicast from the Ground Up", In Proc. of the 3rd IEEE International Symposium of Network Computing and Applications (NCA'04), Adaptive Grid Computing Workshop, Cambridge, MA, USA, August/September 2004. (Also published as Tech. Report NWU-CS-03-22) Non-Refereed Publications Stefan Birrer, FabiŽan E. Bustamante and Yan Chen, "Can We Trust ICMP-based Measurements?", Tech. Report NWU-CS-04-48, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, November 2004. Stefan Birrer and FabiŽan E. Bustamante, "The Costs of Resilience in Overlay Multicast Protocols", Tech. Report NWU-CS-04-50, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University, October 2004. PROJECTS Resilient Overlay Multicast Designed protocols for resilient overlay multicast in heterogenous environments. Nemo, FatNemo, Nice, Nice PRM, 19'528 SLOC, 2003 - 2004. Narada, 1'792 SLOC, 2003. Overcast, 1'870 SLOC, 2004. Ported Pastry/Scribe/SplitStream, 2'260 SLOC, 2004. FreePastry: minor modifications, 2004-2005. Scalable Overlay Network Simulator Designed and built a rich simulator for overlay networks. Spans, 27'337 SLOC, 2003 - 2005. Network Monitoring Monitoring and communication infrastructure for overlay networks. Heimdall, 21'585 SLOC, 2003 - 2004. Wide-area network path monitoring and overlay experimentation toolkit. Oasis, 17'784 SLOC, 2004. Video Streaming for Overlay Multicast A video streaming application on top of our resilient protocols. Video Streaming, ported to Nemo, 2005. PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES Member of the ACM and IEEE. SERVICE Reviewer for IEEE/ICC and IEEE/INFOCOM HONORS AND AWARDS Siemens Building Technologies Scholarship 2001 Muller Martini Foundation Award for Culture, Science and Education 1997 PERSONAL INFORMATION Swiss citizenship; F1 Visa. Fluent in English and German. Moderate in French.