Albert Gran Alcoz

I am a Networking Researcher specializing in High-Performance Networking, Network Security, Cloud, and AI.

I obtained my PhD in June 2024 under supervision of Prof. Laurent Vanbever, co-examined by Prof. Nick McKeown (Stanford University) and Prof. Mohammad Alizadeh (MIT).

My thesis, “In-Network Congestion Management for Security and Performance”, includes multiple first-author papers published at SIGCOMM, NSDI, and HotNets. Part of the work was funded by armasuisse and the Zurich Information Security & Privacy Center (ZISC).

In 2023, I had the opportunity to visit the Berkeley NetSys Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, under supervision of Prof. Sylvia Ratnasamy and Prof. Scott Shenker. Earlier, in 2016, I visited the BWNLab at GeorgiaTech, under the guidance of Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz.

I have industry experience in organizations like Cloudflare (2023), IBM (2017), and CERN (2015).

I also hold a Master’s Degree (2018) and a Bachelor’s Degree (2016) in Telecommunications Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona, Spain.

Talks

Aggregate-Based Congestion Control for Pulse-Wave DDoS Defense

SP-PIFO: Approximating Push-In First-Out Behaviors using Strict-Priority Queues

Publications

Albert Gran Alcoz, Balázs Vass, Pooria Namyar, Behnaz Arzani, Gábor Rétvári, and Laurent Vanbever
NSDI '25
Lloyd Brown, Albert Gran Alcoz, Frank Cangialosi, Akshay Narayan, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan, Eric Jon Friedman, Ethan B. Katz-Bassett, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Michael Schapira, and Scott J. Shenker
SIGCOMM '24
Lloyd Brown, Albert Gran Alcoz, Frank Cangialosi, Akshay Narayan, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan, Eric Friedman, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Michael Schapira, and Scott Shenker
SIGCOMM '24

Supervised Theses

Interactive Synthesis of Network Queries from Traffic Examples (MA)
Student: Félicité Lordon
Supervisors: Albert Gran Alcoz, Tibor Schneider, and Laurent Vanbever
PACKS: A Practical Abstraction for Programmable Packet Scheduling (SA)
Student: Nicole Wenzinger
Supervisors: Albert Gran Alcoz and Laurent Vanbever
O4: A Higher-level Data-plane Programming Language (MA)
Student: Eric Marty
Supervisors: Albert Gran Alcoz, Coralie Busse-Grawitz, and Laurent Vanbever
Boosting QoE in Internet Applications using Programmable Packet Scheduling (GA)
Student: Sharat Chandra Madanapalli
Supervisors: Albert Gran Alcoz, Alexander Dietmüller, and Laurent Vanbever
Self-protecting Networks from IoT-based Attacks (MA)
Student: Noa Melchior
Supervisors: Albert Gran Alcoz, Roland Meier, and Laurent Vanbever
Improving Performance with Network-aware Scheduling Algorithms (SA)
Student: Robin Berner
Supervisors: Albert Gran Alcoz, Alexander Dietmüller, and Laurent Vanbever
Traffic-analysis Attacks over Encrypted HTTP from the Data Plane (MA)
Student: Jan Müller
Supervisors: Albert Gran Alcoz, Roland Meier, and Laurent Vanbever