(yes, this is the view from my office!
Click on the picture for the full size image)

Short CV

I am an associate professor at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione of the Università di Pisa, Italy. My research is in the area of computer networks, for the last part of last century mostly on multicast and multicast congestion control. Some of this work has been done with colleagues in the RMRG, funded by Cisco and Microsoft Research, and is lazily documented in my research page (or you can also lookup my name in the NEC Research Index). In fall 2000 I spent a few months at ACIRI/ICSI (now ICIR) in Berkeley, where I was again in fall 2001 and 2002. In fall 2003 and 2004 I have worked with the Intel Research Lab in Cambridge (UK) on a project for the Continuous Monitoring of IP networks.

I have been a member of COST 264 for which I organized NGC'99, and lately have been on the PC for a bunch of past (SIGCOMM, NGC, ICNP) and recent ( Networking 2002, PfHSN'02) conferences. I was co-editor of a special issue of JSAC on multicast.

I was the General Chair of the Sigcomm 2006 conference in Pisa in September 2006.

Over time, I ended up writing a few pieces of software, related (and sometimes not) to research and teaching, see the entries on the left column for some references. Some of these things (e.g. dummynet) have become widely used, and are now part of FreeBSD. Some of my code apparently has also made it into Windows XP (which incidentally is the reason I had to change my email address!).

Most recently, I have started working a lot on an open source PBX called Asterisk.

Why I had to change my email address ?

My email address happens to be in the RELNOTES.HTM file which is part of the Windows XP distribution, because of some software that i wrote and that apparently Microsoft used.

Because of this, since early 2002 I (and a few other lucky people) started receiving a lot of email, both direct spam/viruses and backscatter from mail programs and virus filters which fail to detect that the sender's address is forged. I got used to that, and with [quite] a bit of manual deletion and later the help of a few simple patterns in my mail reader's configuration file, i was able to cope with the moderate (some 200 messages a day -- did I say "a lot" earlier ? well, opinions change, read further) amount of spam I was receiving.

Unfortunately, on Aug.19th, 2003 the situation got out of control. The Sobig.F virus hit a number of machines on the net, and I started receiving tens of thousands of emails per day -- 35k on the 19th, over 50k on the 20th and 21th, until the syadmins on my website decided that this was too much load for their boxes (antiviruses have a lot of processing to do) and had to disable the old address.

Eventually I ended up using some bayesian email filter and pushed the processing of my email to a separate box, so I could re-enable the old email address, just in case some old friend tries to contact me. But filters are not perfect, and some false positives are unavoidable, occasionally causing mail to be lost. Unfortunately I cannot avoid using them -- even now, after nine months, I am still receiving between 20k and 50k messages per day (slightly more when a new virus strikes, slightly less when it settles down).