Last Wednesday, 11 December, we held the 2024 Pulse Research Review webinar (watch the recording below) to showcase the work achieved by this year’s researchers, including our 2024 Pulse Research Fellows.
Here is a snapshot of the program and its outputs.
157 Applications from 52 Countries > 4 Fellows
For the second edition of the fellowship, we received 157 applications from 52 countries. Fourteen proposals were considered in the next round, during which candidates had to provide detailed project proposals.
Our criteria for selection were:
- Relevance to Internet Society Pulse focus areas
- Quality of the application
- Whether or not the project has some potential, either as a research study, a novel technique, or a new product
All 14 shortlisted projects were very high quality and relevant to Pulse’s four focuses: measuring and tracking Internet shutdowns, Internet enabling technologies, Internet resilience, and market concentration.
Below is a list of the eventual 2024 Pulse Research Fellows and their project outcomes.
Yasir Haq, PhD Student at the University of Twente, Netherlands
Project title: DNS Maturity for National Cyber Resilience
This project aimed to evaluate the resilience of the Domain Name System (DNS), which is essential for the reliable functioning of the Internet.
Outcomes:
- Performed an analysis to assess the infrastructure maturity of all ccTLDs and the top 1,000 most popular websites by country.
- Developed a risk framework to evaluate the maturity of the DNS ecosystem based on a set of defined metrics and best practices.
Further reading: Evaluating the Technical Environment of ccTLDs
Slides [PDF]
James Madeley, PhD Researcher at Loughborough University, UK
Project title: Measuring Content Locality
James aimed to develop tools to measure content locality in this project based on the top 1,000 most popular websites by country. It used different geolocation techniques to infer the presence of local in-country caches.
Outcomes:
- Developed a tool to identify the usage of hosting providers for the top 1k websites from Google CruX.
- Performed measurements from local vantage points in more than 170 countries using residential proxies.
- Published a paper at the Applied Networking Research Workshop 2024.
Further reading: Where Are Your Country’s Most Popular Websites Hosted?
Slides [PDF]
Jan Marius Evang, Senior Research Engineer at SimulaMet, Norway
Project title: The Fractured Web: Evaluating Mutal Trust and Sovereignty on the Modern Internet
Jan sought to collect long-term data and analyze the evolution of the autonomy, self-governance, and international trust between nations regarding Internet operations.
Outcomes:
- Developed a data collection system that evaluates key autonomy, self-governance, and international trust metrics.
- Performed a comparative analysis between 2023 and 2024
Further reading: The Fractured Web: Evaluating Mutual Trust and Sovereignty on the Modern Internet
Slides [PDF]
Mike Vandersanden, PhD Student at Hasselt University, Belgium
Project title: A Holistic Approach to Investigating Internet Outages
Mike’s objective was to develop a measuring system that uses a holistic approach to analyzing and understanding Internet outage data by combining various data sources that measure the Internet differently, giving numerous perspectives and data points that describe the same entity.
Outcomes:
- Developed a tool to merge multiple heterogeneous datasets about Internet outages.
- The system automatically retrieves the outage events from annotated data sources.
- The system allows users to choose which data sources to use for anomaly detection and shows where anomalous behaviors occur in the time series.
Further reading: Developing a Holistic Approach to Measuring Internet Outages
Slides [PDF]
Fellows Aren’t the Only Ones Doing Research
The Pulse team has also been collaborating with academic institutions and researchers on two other ongoing projects in 2024, including:
- Estimating the network benefits of peering on local networks and developing a dashboard (IXPert) to visualize key performance metrics when connecting to an IXP. The latter has required building a data pipeline using real-world data from IXP-looking glasses. [Slides]
- Conducting a comprehensive analysis of the geopolitical dynamics influencing Internet interconnectivity in Kazakhstan, particularly about its neighboring countries. [Slides]
Join us as a Research Fellow or Mentor in 2025
As a reminder, the submission deadline for next year’s intake is Monday, 23 December 2024. Apply now!