Measuring network performance metrics such as latency and loss has become extremely important in emerging applications and architectures such as financial trading, high performance computing, content delivery networks, and data centers because network administrators need these measurements to proactively and reactively troubleshoot network performance problems and plan network upgrades. In the first part of my talk, I will present our work on passively measuring these network performance metrics with arbitrarily high accuracy. In the second part of my talk, I will present our work on RFID systems, which are a key component in enabling communication among devices in the Internet-of-Things infrastructure. More specifically, I will present our work on designing statistical algorithms and protocols for RFID systems to enable new applications in inventory control and supply chain management using the existing infrastructure of RFID systems. Examples of such applications include counting the number of products in a warehouse, identifying missing products, searching for specific products etc.

Muhammad Shahzad is a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, under the supervision of Dr. Alex Liu. His research interests lie in the design, analysis, measurement, and modeling of networking and security systems. He is especially interested in network performance measurement, RFID systems, and exploring new modalities to develop behavior based user authentication schemes. His research has been published in top tier conferences including SIGMETRICS, MobiCom, ICSE, and RAID and journals including Transactions on Networking and Journal of Information Science. Shahzad has served as technical program committee member for IEEE ICNP 2014 and ACM MobiCom Wokshop S3 2014 and is currently serving for ICCCN 2015. He has also served as EDAS Chair for IEEE ICNP 2014. He is the recipient of the Honda Shing Endowed Fellowship and is also one of the two recipients of the College of Engineering Graduate Fellowship at Michigan State University. He won the P@SHA ICT Award in Research and Development category, was runners up for the Human Competitive Award, and was a nominee for the Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Award.