Theophilus Benson
Postdoctoral Research Associate
- tbenson@cs.princeton.edu / tbenson@cs.duke.edu
- Mobile: (617) 642 6110
- Skype: theobenson
- 35 Olden Street, Princeton, NJ 08540
"Learn without satiety; and instruct others without being wearied."
--Confucius.
Presently, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher with Jennifer Rexford's group at Princeton University.
In July 2013, I will be joining Duke University as an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department. In July 2012, I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison with Aditya Akella. Before that, I was a back-end software engineer/release engineer for a start-up out of MIT media labs called Open Ratings.
My research interests include solving practical networking and systems problems, with a focus on Software Defined Networking, data centers, clouds, and configuration management. In the past, I've conducted large scale measurement studies of data centers and enterprise networks; and I've developed several networked and distributed systems -- one of which was recently acquired. I am looking for students that are similarly interested in working on practical and exciting networking problems.
Professional resources
- My academic vita
- Research statement
- My thesis:New Paradigms for Managing the Complexity and Improving the Performance of Enterprise Networks.
Awards
- IMC Best Paper Award, 2010.
- IBM Fellowship, 2009-2010.
- Top ranked paper at ACM SIGCOMM WREN Workshop, 2009.
- University of Wisconsin AOF Fellowship. 2006, 2011
Projects
- Data Center Measurements: Study of traffic in data centers. Data set available here.
- MicroTE: An online centralized approach to traffic engineering in data centers.
- CloudView: A study of the issues encountered by users of IaaS cloud platforms.
- ConfCap:An application for measuring the complexity involved in managing enterprise networks.Data set available here.
Professional Activities
Organizing Committee
- Publicity co-chair, ITC25 2013
Program Committee
- 2013: HotCloud
Publications
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Aaron Gember, Theophilus Benson, and Aditya Akella Challenges in Unifying Control of Middlebox Traversals and Functionality. [Proceedings of LADIS, Madeira, Portugal, July 2012] |
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Theophilus Benson, Ashok Anand, Aditya Akella, and Ming Zhang (Microsoft Research) MicroTE: The Case for Fine-Grained Traffic Engineering in Data Centers. [Proceedings of CoNEXT, Tokyo, Japan, Dec 2011] |
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Hyojoon Kim, Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella, Nick Feamster (Georgia Tech) Understanding the Evolution of Network Configuration: A Tale of Two Campuses. [Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Berlin, Germany, Nov 2011] |
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Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella, Anees Shaikh and Sambit Sahu (IBM Research) CloudNaaS: A Cloud Networking Platform for Enterprise Applications. [Proceedings of the Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), Cascais, Portugal, Oct 2011] |
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Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella and Aman Shaikh (AT&T Research) Demystifying Configuration Challenges and Trade-offs in Network-based ISP Services. [Proceedings of SIGCOMM, Toronto, Canada, Aug 2011] |
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Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella and David Maltz (Microsoft Research) Network Traffic Characteristics of Data Centers in the Wild Best Paper Award. [Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Melbourne, Australia, Nov 2010] |
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Theophilus Benson, Sambit Sahu (IBM Research), Aditya Akella, and Anees Shaikh (IBM Research) A First Look at Problems in the Cloud. [Proceedings of the USENIX HotCloud Workshop, Boston, MA, Jun 2010] |
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Theophilus Benson, Ashok Anand, Aditya Akella, and Ming Zhang (Microsoft Research) The Case for Fine-Grained Traffic Engineering in Data Centers. [Proceedings of the USENIX NSDI Workshop for Research on Enterprise Networks (WREN), San Jose, CA, Apr 2010] |
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Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella and David Maltz (Microsoft Research) Mining Policies From Enterprise Network Configuration. [Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Chicago, IL, Nov 2009] |
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Theophilus Benson, Ashok Anand, Aditya Akella, and Ming Zhang (Microsoft Research) Understanding Data center Traffic Characteristics. [Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop for Research on Enterprise Networks (WREN), Barcelona, Spain, Aug 2009] |
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Theophilus Benson, Aditya Akella, and David A. Maltz (Microsoft Research) Unraveling the Complexity of Network Management. [Proceedings of the USENIX Networked Systems and Design Implementation (NSDI), Boston, MA, Apr 2009] |
Work Experience
- May 2009 - Aug 2009: Research Intern,
IBM Research
Worked with Sambit Sahu, and Anees Shaikh - May 2008 - Aug 2008: Research Intern,
Microsoft Research
Worked with David Maltz - May 2007 - Aug 2007: Research Intern,
IBM Research
Worked with Sambit Sahu, and Anees Shaikh