Assistant Professor Nick Feamster of the School of Computer Science has been recognized by Technology Review magazine as one of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35 for his research in computer networks.

Selected from more than 300 nominees by a panel of expert judges and the editorial staff of Technology Review, the TR35 is an elite group of accomplished young innovators who exemplify the spirit of innovation. Their work–spanning medicine, computing, communications, nanotechnology, and more–is changing our world.

See Technology Review coverage of Feamster here, and a full press release here.

Ph.D. student Valas Valancius has been developing the Transit Portal, software that gives services hosted on cloud infrastructures like Amazon EC2 direct control over inbound and outbound traffic.  Different services may have different service requirements: some services may require connectivity that satisfies strict performance requirements (e.g., interactive services or gaming may require low latency or packet loss), while other services might wish to simply use the least expensive connectivity.  Unfortunately, today’s cloud providers select the same routes for every service hosted on the cloud infrastructure (effectively doing “one size fits all” routing for all hosted services).

The Transit Portal allows each service hosted in a cloud to perform its own Internet routing.  For more information on Transit Portal, see the full paper, or check out the following articles:

• Technology Review
• IEEE Network

Professor Nick Feamster also blogged about the Transit Portal here.  Lots of information about Transit Portal, including information about how to install a Transit Portal yourself, is available on the GENI project wiki for Transit Portal.

Ph.D. student Sam Burnett developed Collage, a tool that relies on user-generated content sites like Flickr to help citizens in countries oppressed by censorship communicate more openly.  The basic idea is to hide censored content in seemingly innocuous photos that are hosted on user-generated content sites like Flickr.  Below is a conceptual diagram explaining how Collage works:

For more information about how Collage works, please see the full paper.  For more information, and to contribute to or download the code, please see the Collage project home page.

You can also read about Collage in various trade articles:

• New Scientist
• GigaOM
• Ars Technica
• Network World

Colalge also appeared on Slashdot twice; Professor Feamster also recently blogged about Collage, here.