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

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