About

Life in academia is too much fun to discard easily. There’s a never-ending spectrum of ideas to explore. You’re also interacting with people smarter than yourself, more often than not, or at least more often than in other places — which can only be good.

I spent 10 wonderful years at UCL EEE working with a team of extremely talented students, PhDs, postdocs and academics. My research interests focused largely on Information-Centric Networks (ICN), Distributed Ledger Technologies and Decentralised Internet Services, Edge and Fog Computing.

Highlights of my academic journey include:

• 5 best paper awards: ACM ICN 2018, ACM MobiArch 2016, IEEE LANMAN 2016, IFIP Networking 2012 and 2015.
• Papers in the field’s top conferences, magazines and journals: ACM SIGCOMM, IEEE INFOCOM, ACM ICN, ACM HotNets, IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Spectrum, IFIP Networking, IEEE/ACM ToN, IEEE TPDS, IEEE JSAC, IEEE TNSM, Elsevier Computer Networks.
• Our paper on “Probabilistic In-Network Caching ” was a runner up for the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time award.
• Technical Programme Committee of the field’s top conferences: ACM CoNEXT 2019, ACM ICN 2015–2019, IEEE INFOCOM Global Internet Symposium 2014–2017, IFIP Networking 2009, 2012–2016, 2019, IEEE GLOBECOM 2009–2019, among several others.
• TPC chair and keynote speaker at several conferences and workshops.
• £2.5M in funding for my team from the European Commission, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Innovate UK and others.

A part of this work translates to the citations my work has received , for which I am very proud and grateful.

None of it was mine alone — I worked with students and academics I learned from, and several of the students I supervised now hold positions I’d be proud of myself.

The industry comes with a different set of challenges, but also opportunities. Shorter-term thinking and planning, but experience and data from live networks. Protocol changes affect the performance of the network directly and visibly — exciting, and different to the longer-term, often hypothetical work of the research domain.

At Protocol Labs I led many research initiatives as a Research Scientist , before transitioning to an Engineering Manager role: leading teams through tight deadlines and challenging network upgrades, while keeping the team spirit and culture healthy.

Credit for the work below, and plenty that isn’t listed, goes to the team. As a Research Scientist, I led the research behind it, as an Engineering Manager, the teams that shipped it.

Highlights of my work at Protocol Labs include:

• Protocol optimisations that made the network 10x faster .
• A re-think of how DHTs operate, with mechanisms that cut node overhead by more than 95%.
• Emergency response on failures that were hard even to identify.
• Millions saved in infrastructure costs, by shutting down carefully what the network could do without .
• Protocols redesigned from scratch that now run under major blockchains, securing billions in value.
• “Why the Internet Needs the InterPlanetary File System ”, by invitation, in IEEE Spectrum.
• How IPFS works , explained to the research community at ACM SIGCOMM.

Network measurement was always something I wanted to get involved in as an academic, but I never got the time. Through measurement you get visibility into what is actually happening in the network, and can put attention where it is most needed.

ProbeLab was born as one of my initiatives within Protocol Labs in June 2022 . It was an effort to provide visibility into what’s happening in the network, and it paid off by a large margin. We initially focused on the libp2p-based networks run and operated by Protocol Labs: IPFS, Filecoin, drand.

As Protocol Labs broke into an ecosystem of companies in early 2024, ProbeLab became a boutique consultancy shop. We work with blockchain foundations and companies that operate P2P cryptocurrency networks, and we are very proud to have assisted teams such as the Ethereum Foundation, Celestia, Gnosis, Base and Parity Polkadot.

Although huge steps have been made, cryptocurrency networks are still in their infancy. As they become more widely used, data and metrics on the networks’ health, resilience, performance and security will be critical. That is what ProbeLab provides — see probelab.io , and get in touch if you need help navigating the ecosystem.