David Choffnes
Northeastern University, MA·Computer Science
The internet carries schoolwork, telehealth, remote jobs and much of our personal data. Yet the people who run it often cannot see or control how it behaves.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
Social Science
- Topics
internet routing
ingress routing
intent-based networking
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Design a system that lets network operators state routing goals, or intents, such as better performance or avoiding certain countries, and automatically configures routing announcements to control how traffic enters their network.
- Develop methods to predict the routes and performance resulting from a routing announcement, and to search efficiently through large numbers of possible configurations spanning multiple networks.
- Build an annotated map of the internet connections of public libraries, schools and hospitals and their providers, and measure how often these connections suffer outages using internet measurement methods.
- Determine whether anchor institution connections meet user needs by developing new ways to measure the bandwidth required for a mix of applications such as videoconferencing.
- Build and improve systems that measure how personal data is tracked and used to discriminate across web, mobile and Internet-of-Things devices, and that give users control over privacy-utility trade-offs.
- Develop verifiable Internet-of-Things designs that decentralize online advertising, and tools to audit and enforce privacy laws such as GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
More about the research
Three collaborative projects tackle this from different angles. One asks how network operators can control the paths that traffic takes into their networks. Another asks whether libraries, schools and hospitals have connections good enough for the people who depend on them. The third asks how personal data flows across websites, apps and smart devices, and how users and policymakers can gain transparency and control over it. All three rely on measuring real internet behavior and building systems that act on the results.
Why it matters
This work could help internet providers and cloud services keep service running during natural disasters, block attacks, and speed up services like telemedicine and online education. Measurements of library, school and hospital connections could guide broadband equity efforts for rural, tribal and low-income communities. Privacy tools and data could help users protect personal information and help policymakers write enforceable data-protection rules.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: NeTS: Medium: Intent-based Internet Ingress Routing
NSF · Aug 2025 – Jul 2029
Collaborative Research: NeTS: Medium: Measurement, Modeling and Analysis to Assess Network Connectivity and Performance at Anchor Institutions
NSF · Oct 2024 – Sep 2027
SaTC: Frontiers: Collaborative: Protecting Personal Data Flow on the Internet
NSF · Oct 2020 – Sep 2026
Closest labs
Lavanya Elluri
Texas A&M University-Central Texas, TX·Computer Science
Develop a technique to automatically extract rules from U.S. IoT cybersecurity laws, data protection regulations and NIST standards, and store them in semantically rich ontologies built with Semantic Web technologies.
David Kotz
Dartmouth College, NH·Computer Science
Develop methods that let smart-home occupants discover, identify and locate Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including non-cooperative ones, and reveal the information flows those devices produce.
Lixin Gao
University of Massachusetts, MA·Computer Science
Design and implement CIRCA, a logically centralized architecture that offloads BGP route computation from thin-client routers to a cloud service, and release it as an open-source prototype.
The school
Northeastern University: 27 labs on PI Pages, $347M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.