Ahmed Helmy
Professor & Graduate Director
Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Department
Founder and Director: Mobile Networking Laboratory (NOMADS group)
College of Engineering, University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611
email: helmy at ufl.edu

Current Students - Nomads Alumni - Researcher of the Year (Nomads Hall of Fame)

Current Students

Ph.D. Students

1. Mimonah Qathrady (Started Summer '14). Topic: "Crowd Sourced Tracking and Prediction in P2P Mobile Networks: the i-Hospital case study" (tentative).
2. Roozbeh Ketabi (Started Fall '14). Topic: "Modeling Vehicular Mobility and Networks" (tentative).
3. Babak Alipour (Started Spring '15). Topic: "Mobile Networks Benchmarking" (tentative).

Nomads Alumni

Ph.D. Students

1. Fan Bai, Ph.D., USC, Summer 2005 (IEEE Fellow 2016)[Now at General Motors Research Labs].
   Topic: "Mobility Modeling and Analysis in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks".
2. Karim Seada, Ph.D., USC, Summer 2005 ['05 Smart Dust, '05-'11 Nokia Research Labs, '11- Huawei Innovation Center, Santa Clara].
   Topic: "Robustness of Geographic Protocols in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks".
3. Debojyoti Dutta, Ph.D., USC, Summer 2004 [Now at Cisco](co-supervised with Ashish Goel and John Heideman).
   Topic: "Low-state Mechanisms to Protect the Network from Greedy and Malicious Agents".
4. Narayanan Sadagopan, Ph.D., USC, Summer 2005 [Now at Yahoo! Search Optimization Division](co-supervised with Bhaskar Krishnamachari).
   Topic: "Mathematical Techniques for Optimizing Data Gathering in Sensor Networks".
5. Kitae Nahm, Ph.D., USC, Spring 2005 ['05-'08 Samsung, '08- Microsoft](co-supervised with C.-C. Jay Kuo).
   Topic: "On the Scale of Probe Traffic for Transport Protocols".
6. Yongjin Kim, Ph.D., USC, Summer 2006 [Now at QualComm].
   Topic: "Traceback for DoS Attack Detection using Small Worlds in Mobile Adhoc Networks"
7. Jabed Faruque, Ph.D., USC, Spring 2007 [Now at Cisco].
   Topic: "Gradient-based Routing in Sensor Networks"
8. Sapon Tanachaiwiwat, Ph.D., USC, Fall 2007 [Now at Innovative Scheduling].
   Topic: "Analysis of Worm Propagation and Interactions in Wired and Wireless Networks"
9. Shao-cheng Wang, Ph.D., UF, Summer 2008 ['08-'11 Intel, '11- Broadcom, Sunnyvale].
   Topic: "A Unified Framework For Performance Analysis Of Contention-based Wireless MAC: Case Studies on QoS, Heterogeneity and Rate-adaptation In 802.11"
10. Wei-jen Hsu, Ph.D., UF, Summer 2008 [Now at Cisco].
    Topic: "Behavioral Analysis, User Modeling, and Protocol Design based on Large-scale Wireless Network Traces"
11. Shamim Begum, Ph.D., USC, Spring 2009 [Intel internship].
    Topic: "Error-oriented Test Generation for Wireless MAC Protocols"
12. Shirin Ebrahimi, Ph.D., USC, Spring 2009 [Now at Microsoft].
    Topic: "Systematic Performance and Robustness Testing Framework for Transport Protocols with Congestion Control"
13. Ganesha Bhaskara, Ph.D., USC, Fall 2009.
    Topic: "Systematic Testing of Protocols using Automatic Stress Topology Synthesis"
14. Sungwook Moon, Ph.D., UF, Fall 2011 [Now at Microsoft].
    Topic: "Mobile Encounters: Pattern Analysis and Profile-based Mobile Networking Testbeds".
15. Saeed Mughaddam (Graduated Fall '12. Now at Samsung Research Labs, San Jose, CA). Topic: "Big Data Mining of Mobile On-line Activity and Network Traffic in Behavior-aware Protocol Design"
16. Gautam Thakur (Graduated Fall '12. Now at Oak Ridge National Research Labs, ORNL, Oak Ridge, TN). Topic: "Data-Driven Pedestrian and Vehicular Mobility Modeling in Large Mobile Networked Systems".
17. Udayan Kumar (Graduated Fall '12. Now at Motorola Mobility (Google), Chicago, IL). Topic: "Trust, Privacy and Behavior Mining in Mobile Networks".
18. Jeeyoung Kim. (Graduated Summer '13. Now at Samsung, Korea) Topic: "Predictability and Evolution of User Mobility in Wireless Networks".

(Mentor to) Master's Students

• With Thesis:
  1. Ganesha Bhaskara, M.S. with thesis, USC, Summer 2002 (finished Ph.D., USC)
  2. Rohan Chitradurga, M.S. with thesis, USC, Fall 2004
  3. Vishal Sankhla, M.S. with thesis, USC, Fall 2004 (Now entrepreneur in network security, Silicon Valley)
  4. Udayan Kumar, M.S. with thesis, UF, Summer 2008 (now Ph.D. student, UF)
  5. Yibin Wang. Topic: "Ranking the Mobile Society". (Finished MS Spring 2014)
  6. Guliz Seray Tuncay. Topic: "Profile-cast based Participatory Sensing and Networking". (Finished MS Fall 2013. Continuing Ph.D. at UIUC)
• Without Thesis:
  • - Jigyasa Yadav, M.S., UF. Project: Trust & SOS (now at Qualcomm).
  • - Radhika Apte, M.S., UF. Project: Trust & SOS.
  • - Upanita Goswami, M.S., UF. Project: Aware & Trust. (now at RIM)
  • - Marco Zuniga, M.S., USC. Project: Realistic Geographic Routing (finished Ph.D. with Prof. Krishnamachari, USC. '06-'08 Xerox research, '08-'10 post-doc DERI, '10-'12 researcher Univ. Duisburg-Essen, '12- Assistant Prof. at TU (Technology Univeristy) Delft-Netherlands)
  • - Meeta Sharma, M.S., USC. Project: STRESS (continued Ph.D. at Harvard)
  • - Shyam Kapadia, M.S., USC. Project: MILMAN, Vehicular networking (finished Ph.D. with Prof. Krishnamachari & Ghandeharizadeh, USC. Now at Cisco)
  • - Karthik Dantu, M.S., USC. (finished Ph.D. with Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme, USC. Was PostDoc at Harvard. Now Assistant Prof. at the State University of New York (SUNY) - Buffalo)
  • - Alberto Cerpa, M.S., USC. Project: STRESS (continued Ph.D. at UCLA. Now Assoc. Prof. at University of California (UC) - Merced)
  • - Ojiakonobi Udezue, M.S., USC. Project: STRESS (now at Microsoft)
  • - Tarik Khan, M.S., USC. Project: STRESS (finished Ph.D. from Arizona)
  • - Prachi Jain, M.S., USC. Project: STRESS.

[I have also advised and supervised many other students at the MS and undergrad levels. Check C.V. for more details.]

Researcher of the Year (Nomads Hall of Fame)

• 2002:
  • - Debojyoti Dutta (Researcher of the Year): "For his work on stateless packet markers (with Abhimanyu Das), which won the best paper award in IEEE/IFIP MMNS 02, and later was published in IEEE Infocom 05 and IEEE Comm Letters."
  • - Ganesha Bhaskara (Jr. Researcher of the Year): "For his work on multicast-based mobility (M&M) architecture and analysis which was published in ACM CCR and then IEEE JSAC. He also has over 50 citations of his work on Google scholar (Sep '08)."
• 2003:
  • - Fan Bai (Researcher of the Year): "For his high impact work on mobility modeling (with Narayanan Sadagopan), through the IMPORTANT and PATHS studies that were published in IEEE Infocom, ACM MobiHoc, IEEE JSAC and ElSevier AdHoc Networks Journal, two book chapters, among others. Also for his mobility simulation tool that was (and is still being) used by many reputable groups. He has overall close to 600 citations on Google scholar for his work (Sep '08)."
  • - Narayanan Sadagopan (Researcher of the Year): " "For his high impact work on mobility modeling (with Fan Bai), through the IMPORTANT and PATHS studies that were published in IEEE Infocom, ACM MobiHoc, IEEE JSAC and ElSevier AdHoc Networks Journal, among others. Nara also contributed the "Acquire" work which was published in Computer Networks Journal and became an NSF funded project. He has close to 700 citations for his work (Sep '08)."
• 2004:
  • - Karim Seada (Researcher of the Year): "For his high impact work on robust geographic routing with location errors and lossy links; namely the systematic 'face routing' and the 'black-listing' studies that were published in ACM SenSys, IEEE/ACM IPSN, ACM Transactsions on Sensor Networks, Adhoc Networks Journal - Elsevier, and two book chapters, among others. He also published earlier work on reliable multicast Stress in IEEE JSAC. His work on geographic routing re-opened the door for research in that area. His work has inspired follow on works by reputable groups at Stanford, UC-Berkely among many others. He has over 330 citations for his work (Sep '08)."
• 2005:
  • - Kitae Nahm (Researcher of the Year): "For his work on cross-layer analysis of TCP behavior in ad hoc networks which was published in ACM Mobihoc '05, and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), among others. He got over 75 citations for that work (as of Nov '08) on Google scholar."
  • - Karim Seada (Researcher of the Year): "For his work on geographic services protocols, namely robust goecast (published in IEEE WCNC and Computer Communications Journal - Elsevier) and geographic rendezvous (R2D2) (published in IEEE/ACM IPDPS, Wireless Comm. & Mobile Computing (Wiley) and in a book chapter)."
  • - Shirin Ebrahimi (Honorable mention): "For her work on TCP vs. tcp, published at IEEE INFOCOM '05."
• 2006:
  • - Wei-Jen Hsu (Researcher of the year): For his work on wireless networks measurements and trace analysis, namely the IMPACT study published in IEEE Winmee 06 (as two papers for individual and group behavior analyses), as posters at Infocom & Mobihoc, a book chapter, and a journal paper (submitted). Also for establishing and maintaining the MobiLib library, the traces from which has been analyzed by hundreds of users. His earlier work was also published in ACM MC2R (WWP model) and IEEE Secon. He has over 125 citations for his work on Google scholar so far (Nov. '08).
  • - (Alum of the year) TBA
• 2007:
  • - (Researcher of the year) TBA
  • - (Jr. Researcher of the year) TBA
  • - (Alum of the year) TBA