News Monday Seminars

21.02.2012: Dr. Walter Willinger

© 2012 Faculté IC

21.02.12 - "Network Science and the Allure of Big Data: Internet Connectivity as a Case Study", by Dr. Walter Willinger, AT&T Labs Research - Hosted by Prof. Patrick Thiran.

Abstract
Network science prides itself on the fact that many of the new ideas that have contributed to its enormous popularity are based on (big) data and meticulous observations. Unfortunately, an inconvenient truth about most large-scale, real-world, and highly-engineered or highly-evolved systems is that the many things we can and do measure about these systems are generally not the quantities we want to measure. Largely unwilling to deal with this inconvenient truth, network science has more or less succeeded in making this discrepancy a non-issue by labeling scientific tasks such as assessing data quality or ensuring data hygiene as unnecessary, small-minded, and even counter-productive for scientific discovery.

The Internet is a prime example of a large-scale and highly-engineered real-world system where the available observations are everything but meticulous and where ignoring this inconvenient truth has resulted in new models, theories, and predictions that - despite their general appeal and headline-grabbing nature - have nothing to do with reality and quickly collapse when scrutinized with carefully vetted measurements and readily available domain knowledge. Using a number of widely-used and easily-available datasets of different types of Internet connectivity measurements, I will illustrate in this talk what it means to get to know your data (i.e., assessing its quality) and to develop a network science that is serious about big data and adamant about its proper use for scientific discovery.

Biography
Walter Willinger studied Mathematics at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of ORIE, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. For the last 15 years, he has worked at AT&T Labs - Research, the research arm of AT&T. Before that, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bellcore Applied Research (1986-1996), the research consortium that was jointly own by the 7 Baby Bells. He is a Fellow of ACM (2005), IEEE (2005), AT&T (2007), and SIAM (2009), and for his work on the self-similar (``fractal'') nature of Internet traffic, he received the 1996 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award from the IEEE Board of Directors, the 1994 W.R. Bennett Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society, and the 2006 "Test of Time" Paper Award from ACM SIGCOMM.