The NetDB@Penn research group is led by Professor Boon Thau Loo. Our group applies data-centric techniques and formal methods to the design, analysis, and implementation of distributed systems. We are currently interested in the development of new programming tools and analysis techniques that improve the process of designing, implementing, verifying, and securing large-scale distributed systems. We take an inter-disciplinary approach, combining ideas from databases, networking, programming languages, and formal methods.

Given the inter-disciplinary nature of our work, we have published across a wide range of conferences, including databases (SIGMOD, VLDB, CIDR, ICDE, SOCC), networking (SIGCOMM, TON, HotNets, CoNEXT, ICNP, COMSNET), security (NDSS), systems (SOSP, USENIX ATC), and formal methods (TACAS, PPDP, FMOODS, TPHOLs). We strive towards open-source releases of our research prototypes, demonstrated at major conferences such as SIGMOD and SIGCOMM.

To learn more about our work, please refer to our research and teaching statements.

Recent news:

• 7 May '12: Mengmeng Liu will be joining @WalmartLabs.
• 25 Apr '12: Changbin Liu will be joining AT&T Labs Research as a full-time researcher.
• 24 Apr '12: Wenchao Zhou will be joining Georgetown University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor.
• 3 Apr '12: NSF Expeditions on Computer-assisted Programming funded! See press release.
• 27 Mar '12: TROPIC paper on transactional cloud orchestration accepted at Usenix ATC'12.
• 13 Feb '12: Cologne declarative constraint optimization accepted at VLDB'12.
• 13 Feb '12: Declarative networking book published by Morgan & Claypool.
• 21 Jan '12: FSR paper accepted at IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.
• 19 Jan '12: DMF's transactional task management framework is highlighted in AT&T's new cloud initiative based on OpenStack. See blog and blueprint for more details.
• 13 Jan '12: Prof. Loo receives the 2012 AFOSR Young Investigator Award for research work on formally verifiable routing.
• 16 Dec '11: BGP reduction paper accepted at TACAS 2012.
• 11 Nov '11: Invited paper and keynote speech at PADL'12 on Recent Advances on Declarative Networking.
• 10 Nov '11: PUMA paper accepted at COMSNETS'11.
• 18 Aug '11: Wenchao Zhou received 2nd place for the ACM Student Research Competition at SIGCOMM'11 for the FSR demonstration.
• 16 Aug '11: DAWN paper accepted by IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN).
• 16 Aug '11: MOSAIC paper accepted by Elsevier Computer Networks.
• 15 Aug '11: Awarded NSF grants CNS-1065130, CNS-1117052, and CNS-1117185.
• 9 Aug '11: FVR website is launched.
• 8 Aug '11: Secure Network Provenance paper accepted at ACM SOSP 2011.
• 12 Jul '11: Declarative Automated Cloud orchestration paper accepted at ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC) 2011.
• 9 Jun '11: PUMA website is launched.
• 6 Jun '11: FSR demonstration accepted at SIGCOMM 2011.
• 4 June '11: CIS 533 course projects to be presented at SIGCOMM Education workshop 2011.
• 29 Mar '11: Prof. Loo is the PC co-chair of the inaugural International Workshop on Rigorous Protocol Engineering (WRiPE 2011), co-located with ICNP 2011. Do submit a paper there!
• 29 Mar '11: Sandy Sun (undergraduate researcher in the NetTrials project) received the 2011-2012 Microsoft Undergraduate Scholarship.
• 14 Feb '11: NetTrials demonstration and Datalog tutorial accepted at SIGMOD'11.
• 2 Jan '11: Release of CIS 553 course projects based on ns-3.
• 15 Dec '10: Launch of SAFEST project, funded under the DARPA SAFER program.
• 24 Oct '10: A3 source code release.
• 26 Aug '10: Nebula NSF Future Internet Architecture (FIA) grant award.
• 4 Aug '10: Veracity source code release.
• 30 Apr '10: Micah Sherr received Penn's Rubinoff award. This award is given to CIS graduating PhDs "whose dissertation has resulted in or could lead to innovative applications of computer technology."
• 9 Apr '10: RapidNet v0.3 with support for Network Provenance.
• 28 Mar '10: Micah Sherr will be joining Georgetown University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2010.
• 6 Feb '10: Network Provenance and SecureBlox accepted at SIGMOD'10.
• 10 Dec '09: RapidNet v0.2 with support for Secure Network Datalog.
• 12 Nov '09: Application-aware Anonymity (A3) paper accepted at NDSS'10.
• 9 Nov '09: Declarative networking paper published in the 11/09 issue of CACM.
• 21 Oct '09: Recursive View Maintenance paper accepted at TKDE Journal (special issue on best papers of ICDE 2009).
• 15 Sept '09: Formally Verifiable Networking paper accepted at HotNets '09.
• 7 Sept '09: RapidNet v0.1 released.
• 4 Sept '09: Doctoral student Rafi Rubin received the 08-09 Teaching Practicum Award in Prof. Loo's CIS 505 course on Software Systems.
• 1 Sept '09: Prof. Loo is co-chairing NetDB 2009 (14 Oct '09) co-located with SOSP 2009.
• 18 Aug '09: RapidNet toolkit demonstrated at SIGCOMM 2009.
• 24 Jul '09: Declarative Policy-based Adaptive MANET Routing paper accepted at ICNP 2009.
• 9 Jul '09: RapidMesh paper accepted at Mobicom/WinTECH 2009.
• 8 Jul '09: Micah Sherr successfully defends his dissertation, Coordinate-Based Routing for High Performance Anonymity.
• 1 Jul '09: Group members and Penn undergraduate alumni Andrew Mao and Bill Marczak are pursuing their Ph.D. in Computer Science at Harvard University and UC Berkeley respectively.