Rachee Singh Travels to Google Networking Research Summit

Thanks to the support of Women for UMass Amherst, we have awarded out first Travel Grant! Rachee Singh received $500 to cover the costs of her visit to Google Networking Research Summit. Below is her impression of the event.

This February, Google organized a Networking Research Summit to engage with academics performing research in various areas of computer networking. My PhD advisor, Dr. Phillipa Gill, was invited to attend the summit to present recent work from our lab, Calipr at UMass Amherst. Google also invited a few PhD students and on my advisor’s nomination I received an invite to attend the Networking Research Summit at Google Mountain View!

The summit was a congregation of very well known and accomplished networking researchers. The discussion began with an outline of milestones in the development of Google’s networking infrastructure and the open challenges that they face. This spurred an engaging discussion where academics asked questions and gave ideas to solve the open problems. This style of understanding the practical problems and proposing solutions was the overall theme of the entire summit.

In the next two days, the essence of the bleeding edge of networking research was presented to an audience comprising of students, professors and Googlers through a series of talks and panel discussions. Talks by Google engineers and scientists were interspersed among talks by professors from various universities in the world.

The coffee breaks offered a great opportunity to meet Googlers who gave us a peek into the kind of problems they work on. I found this perspective unique and thought provoking. Also, being fairly new to the networking research community, I got the chance to interact with many PhD students from other institutions. Google had also organized a poster session for PhD students. I presented our work on PathCache, a network path prediction toolkit. People had great suggestions and feedback for us that we are actively working on.

The event was enjoyable and beneficial to me and I hope Google continues to organize it. I am also thankful to Women for UMass Amherst and CSWomen group for providing their generous financial support. It helped cover some of the travel expenses to attend this wonderful event!