Fangfan Li
PhD Student
Education
- MS, Duke University
- BS, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China - China
About Me
- Hometown: Chongqing, China
- Field of Study: Computer Science
- PhD Advisor: David Choffnes
Biography
Fangfan is a PhD student studying systems and networks at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, advised by Professor David Choffnes. Before attending Northeastern, Fangfan earned his Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Electronic of Science and Technology in China and a Master of Science degree at Duke University.
What are the specifics of your graduate education (thus far)?
I started my PhD in 2015. Boston is a great city with many talented researchers and excellent restaurants, and these are the reasons that I am greatly enjoying my study at Northeastern so far.
What are your research interests?
At a high level, I want to understand the Internet’s infrastructure and the things happening in networks. The specific topics that interest me include traffic differentiation, network middle-box, network measurement, and algorithmic pricing.
What’s one problem you’d like to solve with your research/work?
Nowadays, your identity is stored in your laptops, your Facebook accounts, and your phone’s network traffic. I want to understand what the companies with access to this personal data are doing with this information.
What aspect of what you do is most interesting?
I like the process of making assumptions about how companies classify different users and types of traffic, then confirm my hypotheses through real world experiments. It might be surprising to Internet users that network neutrality, the principle of Internet service providers, is frequently broken by the Internet service providers (ISPs) themselves.
What are your research or career goals, going forward?
I would love to contribute my knowledge and skills to improve network conditions and the education of Internet users.
Where did you grow up or spend your most defining years?
I grew up in Chongqing, a city famous for fantastic food and breathtaking skylines, and among all the cities that I have visited so far, it is still the most attractive one to me.