I am a research scientist at DFINITY interested in computer networks. My research is centered around assisting network operators in analyzing and running their networks and the underlying configurations. I build systems to understand a network's behavior and help the adoption of new analysis and synthesis tools.

About. In the fall of 2021, I completed my Ph.D. under the guidance of Laurent Vanbever and Martin Vechev at ETH Zürich in the Networked Systems Group and Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab. My dissertation was awarded the EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award.

Before starting my Ph.D., I earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from ETH Zürich. In the course of my studies at ETH, I spent six months as a visiting research student at Princeton University working with Nick Feamster and Arpit Gupta on Software-Defined Networks and programmable data planes. In addition, I completed the UNITECH International programme which augments the traditional engineering education with international academic, professional and intercultural experience.

Dissertation

Improving Network Understanding

ETH Zürich. Zürich, Switzerland (September 2021).
  • 2022 EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award
Publications

Snowcap: Synthesizing Network-Wide Configuration Updates

Tibor Schneider, Rüdiger Birkner, Laurent Vanbever
ACM SIGCOMM 2021. Online (August 2021).

Metha: Network Verifiers Need To Be Correct Too!

Rüdiger Birkner*, Tobias Brodmann*, Petar Tsankov, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev
USENIX NSDI 2021. Online (April 2021).
*These authors contributed equally to this work

Config2Spec: Mining Network Specifications from Network Configurations

Rüdiger Birkner, Dana Drachsler Cohen, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev
USENIX NSDI 2020. Santa Clara, CA, USA (February 2020).
  • 2021 IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize

Net2Text: Query-Guided Summarization of Network Forwarding Behaviors.

Rüdiger Birkner, Dana Drachsler Cohen, Laurent Vanbever, Martin Vechev
USENIX NSDI 2018. Renton, WA, USA (April 2018).

SDX-Based Flexibility or Internet Correctness? Pick Two!

Rüdiger Birkner, Arpit Gupta, Nick Feamster, Laurent Vanbever
ACM SOSR 2017. Santa Clara, CA, USA (April 2017).

Concise Encoding of Flow Attributes in SDN Switches

Robert MacDavid, Rüdiger Birkner, Ori Rottenstreich, Arpit Gupta, Nick Feamster, Jennifer Rexford
ACM SOSR 2017. Santa Clara, CA, USA (April 2017).
  • ACM SOSR 2017 Best Paper Award

Network Monitoring as a Streaming Analytics Problem

Arpit Gupta, Rüdiger Birkner, Marco Canini, Nick Feamster, Chris Mac-Stoker, Walter Willinger
ACM HotNets 2016. Atlanta, GA, USA (November 2016).

An Industrial-Scale Software Defined Internet Exchange Point

Arpit Gupta, Robert MacDavid, Rüdiger Birkner, Marco Canini, Nick Feamster, Jennifer Rexford, Laurent Vanbever
USENIX NSDI 2016. Santa Clara, CA, USA (March 2016).
  • USENIX NSDI 2016 Community Award
  • Selected in the "Best of the Rest" session at USENIX ATC 2016