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Christoph Neumann

Publications and source records attributed to Christoph Neumann.

18 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2021

The Graph Neural Networking Challenge: A Worldwide Competition for Education in AI/ML for Networks

During the last decade, Machine Learning (ML) has increasingly become a hot topic in the field of Computer Networks and is expected to be gradually adopted for a plethora of control, monitoring and management tasks in real-world deployments. This poses the need to count on new generations of students, researchers and practitioners with a solid background in ML applied to networks. During 2020, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has organized the "ITU AI/ML in 5G challenge'', an open global competition that has introduced to a broad audience some of the current main challenges in ML for networks. This large-scale initiative has gathered 23 different challenges proposed by network operators, equipment manufacturers and academia, and has attracted a total of 1300+ participants from 60+ countries. This paper narrates our experience organizing one of the proposed challenges: the "Graph Neural Networking Challenge 2020''. We describe the problem presented to participants, the tools and resources provided, some organization aspects and participation statistics, an outline of the top-3 awarded solutions, and a summary with some lessons learned during all this journey. As a result, this challenge leaves a curated set of educational resources openly available to anyone interested in the topic.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2020

DiagNet: towards a generic, Internet-scale root cause analysis solution

Diagnosing problems in Internet-scale services remains particularly difficult and costly for both content providers and ISPs. Because the Internet is decentralized, the cause of such problems might lie anywhere between an end-user's device and the service datacenters. Further, the set of possible problems and causes is not known in advance, making it impossible in practice to train a classifier with all combinations of problems, causes and locations. In this paper, we explore how different machine learning techniques can be used for Internet-scale root cause analysis using measurements taken from end-user devices. We show how to build generic models that (i) are agnostic to the underlying network topology, (ii) do not require to define the full set of possible causes during training, and (iii) can be quickly adapted to diagnose new services. Our solution, DiagNet, adapts concepts from image processing research to handle network and system metrics. We evaluate DiagNet with a multi-cloud deployment of online services with injected faults and emulated clients with automated browsers. We demonstrate promising root cause analysis capabilities, with a recall of 73.9% including causes only being introduced at inference time.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2019

PnyxDB: a Lightweight Leaderless Democratic Byzantine Fault Tolerant Replicated Datastore

Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant (BFT) systems are rapidly emerging as a viable technology for production-grade systems, notably in closed consortia deployments for nancial and supply-chain applications. Unfortunately, most algorithms proposed so far to coordinate these systems suffer from substantial scalability issues, and lack important features to implement Internet-scale governance mechanisms. In this paper, we observe that many application workloads offer little concurrency, and propose PnyxDB, an eventually-consistent Byzantine Fault Tolerant replicated datastore that exhibits both high scalability and low latency. Our approach is based on conditional endorsements, that allow nodes to specify the set of transactions that must not be committed for the endorsement to be valid. In addition to its high scalability, PnyxDB supports application-level voting, i.e. individual nodes are able to endorse or reject a transaction according to application-defined policies without compromising consistency. We provide a comparison against BFTSMaRt and Tendermint, two competitors with different design aims, and show that our implementation speeds up commit latencies by a factor of 11, remaining below 5 seconds in a worldwide geodistributed deployment of 180 nodes.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2016

Line Shape of the Raman 2D Peak of Graphene in Van Der Waals Heterostructures

The Raman 2D line of graphene is widely used for device characterization and during device fabrication as it contains valuable information on e.g. the direction and magnitude of mechanical strain and doping. Here we present systematic asymmetries in the 2D line shape of exfoliated graphene and graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition. Both graphene crystals are fully encapsulated in van der Waals heterostructures, where hexagonal boron nitride and tungsten diselenide are used as substrate materials. In both material stacks, we find very low doping values and extremely homogeneous strain distributions in the graphene crystal, which is a hall mark of the outstanding electronic quality of these samples. By fitting double Lorentzian functions to the spectra to account for the contributions of inner and outer processes to the 2D peak, we find that the splitting of the sub-peaks, $6.6 \pm 0.5$ cm$^{-1}$(hBN-Gr-WSe2) and $8.9 \pm 1.0$ cm$^{-1}$ (hBN-Gr-hBN), is significantly lower than the values reported in previous studies on suspended graphene.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗
arXiv2015

Probing electronic lifetimes and phonon anharmonicities in high-quality chemical vapor deposited graphene by magneto-Raman spectroscopy

We present a magneto-Raman study on high-quality single-layer graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) that is fully encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride by a dry transfer technique. By analyzing the Raman D, G, and 2D peaks, we find that the structural quality of the samples is comparable to state-of-the-art exfoliated graphene flakes. From B field dependent Raman measurements, we extract the broadening and associated lifetime of the G peak due to anharmonic effects. Furthermore, we determine the decay width and lifetime of Landau level (LL) transitions from magneto-phonon resonances as a function of laser power. At low laser power, we find a minimal decay width of 140 1/cm highlighting the high electronic quality of the CVD-grown graphene. At higher laser power, we observe an increase of the LL decay width leading to a saturation with the corresponding lifetime saturating at a minimal value of 18 fs.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗
arXiv2015

Spatial control of laser-induced doping profiles in graphene on hexagonal boron nitride

We present a method to create and erase spatially resolved doping profiles in graphene-hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) heterostructures. The technique is based on photo-induced doping by a focused laser and does neither require masks nor photo resists. This makes our technique interesting for rapid prototyping of unconventional electronic device schemes, where the spatial resolution of the rewritable, long-term stable doping profiles is only limited by the laser spot size (~600 nm) and the accuracy of sample positioning. Our optical doping method offers a way to implement and to test different, complex doping patterns in one and the very same graphene device, which is not achievable with conventional gating techniques.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗
arXiv2015

Low B Field Magneto-Phonon Resonances in Single-Layer and Bilayer Graphene

Many-body effects resulting from strong electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions play a significant role in graphene physics. We report on their manifestation in low B field magneto-phonon resonances in high quality exfoliated single-layer and bilayer graphene encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride. These resonances allow us to extract characteristic effective Fermi velocities, as high as $1.20 \times 10^6$ m/s, for the observed "dressed" Landau level transitions, as well as the broadening of the resonances, which increases with Landau level index.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗
arXiv2014

Raman spectroscopy as probe of nanometer-scale strain variations in graphene

Confocal Raman spectroscopy is a versatile, non-invasive investigation tool and a major workhorse for graphene characterization. Here we show that the experimentally observed Raman 2D line width is a measure of nanometer-scale strain variations in graphene. By investigating the relation between the G and 2D line at high magnetic fields we find that the 2D line width contains valuable information on nanometer-scale flatness and lattice deformations of graphene, making it a good quantity for classifying the structural quality of graphene even at zero magnetic field.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗
arXiv2014

An empirical study of passive 802.11 Device Fingerprinting

802.11 device fingerprinting is the action of characterizing a target device through its wireless traffic. This results in a signature that may be used for identification, network monitoring or intrusion detection. The fingerprinting method can be active by sending traffic to the target device, or passive by just observing the traffic sent by the target device. Many passive fingerprinting methods rely on the observation of one particular network feature, such as the rate switching behavior or the transmission pattern of probe requests. In this work, we evaluate a set of global wireless network parameters with respect to their ability to identify 802.11 devices. We restrict ourselves to parameters that can be observed passively using a standard wireless card. We evaluate these parameters for two different tests: i) the identification test that returns one single result being the closest match for the target device, and ii) the similarity test that returns a set of devices that are close to the target devices. We find that the network parameters transmission time and frame inter-arrival time perform best in comparison to the other network parameters considered. Finally, we focus on inter-arrival times, the most promising parameter for device identification, and show its dependency from several device characteristics such as the wireless card and driver but also running applications.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2014

DNStamp: Short-lived Trusted Timestamping

Trusted timestamping consists in proving that certain data existed at a particular point in time. Existing timestamping methods require either a centralized and dedicated trusted service or the collaboration of other participants using the timestamping service. We propose a novel trusted timestamping scheme, called DNStamp, that does not require a dedicated service nor collaboration between participants. DNStamp produces shortlived timestamps with a validity period of several days. The generation and verification involves a large number of Domain Name System cache resolvers, thus removing any single point of failure and any single point of trust. Any host with Internet access may request or verify a timestamp, with no need to register to any timestamping service. We provide a full description and analysis of DNStamp. We analyze the security against various adversaries and show resistance to forward-dating, back-dating and erasure attacks. Experiments with our implementation of DNStamp show that one can set and then reliably verify timestamps even under continuous attack conditions.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2014

Playing jeu de taquin on d-complete posets

Using a modified version of jeu de taquin, Novelli, Pak and Stoyanovskii gave a bijective proof of the hook-length formula for counting standard Young tableaux of fixed shape. In this paper we consider a natural extension of jeu de taquin to arbitrary posets. Given a poset P, jeu de taquin defines a map from the set of bijective labelings of the poset elements with $\{1,2,...,|P|\}$ to the set of linear extensions of the poset. One question of particular interest is for which posets this map yields each linear extension equally often. We analyze the double-tailed diamond poset $D_{m,n}$ and show that uniform distribution is obtained if and only if $D_{m,n}$ is d-complete. Furthermore, we observe that the extended hook-length formula for counting linear extensions on d-complete posets provides a combinatorial answer to a seemingly unrelated question, namely: Given a uniformly random standard Young tableau of fixed shape, what is the expected value of the left-most entry in the second row?

math.CO↗
arXiv2013

Cache policies for cloud-based systems: To keep or not to keep

In this paper, we study cache policies for cloud-based caching. Cloud-based caching uses cloud storage services such as Amazon S3 as a cache for data items that would have been recomputed otherwise. Cloud-based caching departs from classical caching: cloud resources are potentially infinite and only paid when used, while classical caching relies on a fixed storage capacity and its main monetary cost comes from the initial investment. To deal with this new context, we design and evaluate a new caching policy that minimizes the overall cost of a cloud-based system. The policy takes into account the frequency of consumption of an item and the cloud cost model. We show that this policy is easier to operate, that it scales with the demand and that it outperforms classical policies managing a fixed capacity.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2013

Local transport measurements on epitaxial graphene

Growth of large-scale graphene is still accompanied by imperfections. By means of a four-tip STM/SEM the local structure of graphene grown on SiC(0001) was correlated with scanning electron microscope images and spatially resolved transport measurements. The systematic variation of probe spacings and substrate temperature has clearly revealed two-dimensional transport regimes of Anderson localization as well as of diffusive transport. The detailed analysis of the temperature dependent data demonstrates that the local on-top nano-sized contacts do not induce significant strain to the epitaxial graphene films.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗
arXiv2013

A complexity theorem for the Novelli-Pak-Stoyanovskii algorithm

We describe two aspects of the behaviour of entries of Young tableaux during the application of the Novelli-Pak-Stoyanovskii algorithm. We derive two theorems which both contain a generalized version of a conjecture by Krattenthaler and M\"uller concerning the complexity of the Novelli-Pak-Stoyanovskii algorithm as corollary.

math.CO↗
arXiv2013

Probing relaxation times in graphene quantum dots

Graphene quantum dots are attractive candidates for solid-state quantum bits. In fact, the predicted weak spin-orbit and hyperfine interaction promise spin qubits with long coherence times. Graphene quantum dot devices have been extensively investigated with respect to their excitation spectrum, spin-filling sequence, and electron-hole crossover. However their relaxation dynamics remain largely unexplored. This is mainly due to challenges in device fabrication, in particular regarding the control of carrier confinement and the tunability of the tunnelling barriers, both crucial to experimentally investigate decoherence times. Here, we report on pulsed-gate transient spectroscopy and relaxation time measurements of excited states in graphene quantum dots. This is achieved by an advanced device design, allowing to tune the tunnelling barriers individually down to the low MHz regime and to monitor their asymmetry with integrated charge sensors. Measuring the transient currents through electronic excited states, we estimate lower limit of charge relaxation times on the order of 60-100 ns.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗
arXiv2011

Pretty Private Group Management

Group management is a fundamental building block of today's Internet applications. Mailing lists, chat systems, collaborative document edition but also online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter use group management systems. In many cases, group security is required in the sense that access to data is restricted to group members only. Some applications also require privacy by keeping group members anonymous and unlinkable. Group management systems routinely rely on a central authority that manages and controls the infrastructure and data of the system. Personal user data related to groups then becomes de facto accessible to the central authority. In this paper, we propose a completely distributed approach for group management based on distributed hash tables. As there is no enrollment to a central authority, the created groups can be leveraged by various applications. Following this paradigm we describe a protocol for such a system. We consider security and privacy issues inherently introduced by removing the central authority and provide a formal validation of security properties of the system using AVISPA. We demonstrate the feasibility of this protocol by implementing a prototype running on top of Vuze's DHT.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2011

Constructing highly arc transitive digraphs using a layerwise direct product

We introduce a construction of highly arc transitive digraphs using a layerwise direct product. This product generalizes some known classes of highly arc transitive digraphs but also allows to construct new such. We use the product to obtain counterexamples to a conjecture by Cameron, Praeger and Wormald on the structure of certain highly arc transitive digraphs.

math.CO↗