On June 26, Facebook hosted a Networking and Communications Faculty Summit for 25 academic researchers and PhD students with backgrounds ranging from routing design, video streaming, host networking, to wireless networks. The agenda included talks from Facebook engineers across the team as well as our research award winners from last year’s call for proposals. We also invited a few of our Facebook Fellows to talk about their current work in networking topics as well.

“Facebook Networking and the research community have a strong connection because we have a wide range of networking challenges and we focus on evaluation of ideas and deployment of systems within our production context. The Facebook Networking team has a long history of working with larger networking ecosystems to advance the state-of-the-art in networking: for example, with the Open Compute Project (OCP) on designs such as F16/Minipack; with the open source community on software such as Open/R; and with the research community on collaborations that have resulted in publications and data sharing,” said Omar Baldonado, Engineering Director, in his talk, “Networking Research at Facebook.”

James Zeng and Ying Zhang from Facebook’s Networking group pulled together the agenda of internal and external speakers, and Zeng kicked off the day with a retrospective of past Faculty Summits and an overview of Facebook Networking’s recent research collaborations, grants, and awardees. The summit also featured four talks about Facebook researchers’ work on data center networks, routing and traffic engineering, large-scale network reliability, and L4/L7 load balancing from Facebook Engineers Alex Eckert, Petr Lapukhov, Justin Meza, and Nikita Shirokov.

Presentations from the research award winners included Mohammad Alizadeh (MIT), Olivier Bonaventure (Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve), Rashmi Vinayak (CMU), Simon Peter (University of Texas at Austin), and Mark Santolucito (Yale University). Two of the 2019 Fellows, Tingjun Chen (Columbia University) and Ranysha Ware (CMU), presented their current work.

“Continued engagement with the academic community is important for our teams,” said Sharon Ayalde, Research Program Manager, Academic Relations. “We have great programs to help support faculty projects or PhD students, but these types of collaborative events—bringing everyone together to discuss challenges and provide feedback—is just as important.”

We look forward to continued collaboration with the academic community, whether through internships, faculty awards, research awards, visiting researchers or postdocs, or research collaborations.

For our recent publications and news, visit our Systems and Networking research page.