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CV

Education

University of Wisconsin - Madison Sept 2015 - Present
MS/PhD, Department of Computer Sciences

Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi July 2008 - July 2013
B.Tech. & M.Tech., Computer Science & Engineering

Work Experience

Resarch Assistant, University of Wisconsin - Madison Sept 2016 - Present
WISR Group

Research Intern, Microsoft Research - Redmond June 2020 - Aug 2020

Visiting Researcher, MIT CSAIL Sept 2019 - May 2020

Research Intern, Microsoft Research - Redmond May 2017 - Aug 2017
Mobility and Networking Group

Research Associate (Intern), Hewlett Packard Labs May 2016 - Aug 2016
Networking & Mobility Group

Software Engineer (Blue Scholar) July 2013 - July 2015
IBM Research - India
Data Center Networking Research Team

Intern, American Express May 2012 - July 2012
Big Data Labs Team

Research Intern, Avaya Labs May 2011 - July 2011
IP Communications Team

Publications

K. Mahajan, A. Balasubramanian, A. Singhvi, S. Venkataraman, A. Akella, A. Phanishayee, and S. Chawla. Themis: Fair and Efficient GPU Cluster Scheduling, NSDI 2020.

K. Mahajan, M. Chowdhury, A. Akella, and S. Chawla. Dynamic Query Re-planning Using QOOP, OSDI 2018.

K. Mahajan, D. Sharma, and V. Mann. ATHENA: Reliable Multicast for Group Communication in SDN-based Data Centers, COMSNETS 2017.

K. Mahajan, R. Poddar, M. Dhawan, and V. Mann. Jury: Validating Controller Actions in Software-Defined Networks, DSN 2016.

D. Sharma, R. Poddar, K. Mahajan, M. Dhawan, and V. Mann. Hansel: Diagnosing Faults in OpenStack, CoNEXT 2015.

M. Dhawan, R. Poddar, K. Mahajan, and V. Mann. SPHINX: Detecting Security Attacks in Software-Defined Networks, NDSS 2015.

K. Mahajan, D. Agarwal, and V.J. Ribeiro. QoS aware overlay MAC layer for Coexistence of Heterogeneous Networks over Whitespaces, COMSNETS 2014.

J. Buford, K. Mahajan, and V. Krishnaswamy. Federated Enterprise and Cloud-based Collaboration services, IMSAA 2011.

Patents

M. Dhawan, K.S. Mahajan, R. Poddar, and V. Mann. Securing of Software-Defined Network Controllers. US Patent 20,160,050,223. 2016.

M. Dhawan, K.S. Mahajan, R. Poddar, and V. Mann. Verifying Controller Actions in Software-Defind Networks with Controller Clusters. Filed August 2015. (IN920150132US1).

M. Dhawan, K.S. Mahajan, V. Mann, R. Poddar, and D. Sharma. Diagnosing Faults in Stateless Distributed Computing Platforms. Filed November 2015. (IN920150282US1).

Projects

Athena IBM Research 2015
Keywords: Multicast, Open Source, OpenStack VM provisioning.

  • Developed a reliable, tcp-friendly multicast scheme for SDN-based data centers.
  • Implementation touched upon several Open Source projects –
    • Introduced a nak-based rate-adaptive transport fabric in the openpgm library.
    • Implemented a reliable packet cache in the OpenDayLight controller.
    • Modified OpenStack Nova & Glance to integrate multicast for VM provisioning. Improvements of more than 2.5x achieved for typical workloads in a small data center.

Jury IBM Research 2014-15
Keywords: Distributed Controllers, Action validations.

  • Developed an out-of-band controller-agnostic consensus mechanism to validate actions taken by distributed controllers.
  • Evaluated against the ONOS & OpenDayLight controller.

Hansel IBM Research 2015
Keywords: OpenStack, Fault diagnosis.

  • Proposed the construct of an execution graph to track network-trace based operation lineage.
  • Modified the brocolli network monitor for realtime root-cause analysis of faults in OpenStack.

Sphinx IBM Research 2013-14
Keywords: OpenFlow, SDN, security analysis, threat detection

  • Exposed several threat vectors in popular OpenFlow SDN controllers.
  • Developed a controller-agnostic system for realtime security attack detection. Our system analysed control-plane traffic to construct incremental flow-graphs. Attack detection involved validation of invariants on the flow metadata and the graph-structure.

Coexistence of Heterogeneous Networks over Whitespaces IIT Delhi 2012-13
Keywords: TV Whitespaces, Coexistence, Layer 2 protocols

  • Proposed a minimal, overlay MAC layer to solve cross-technology interference issues.
  • Simulated this as a wrapper over 802.11 & 802.16 in the QualNet simulator.

Parallel Large Scale Feature Selection American Express 2012
Keywords: Hadoop, Map Reduce, Feature Selection, Logistic Regression, Big Data

  • Implemented an incremental forward feature selection technique using logistic regression.
  • The regression was approximated using Newton’s method to enhance the algorithm’s scale-out properties to gel well with Map Reduce framework. It was used on AmEx consumer risk datasets.

PintOS IIT Delhi 2011
Keywords: Operating Systems, PintOS

  • Implemented threads, processes, virtual memory and a file system on top of the bare bones PintOS.

Logisim at IITD IIT Delhi 2009-11
Keywords: Open Source, Simulator, Digital Logic Circuits, Architecture

  • Extended the Open Source Java Application, Logisim, to construct and simulate digital logic circuits. The extended feature set has intelligent auto-wire routing and floating point based arithmetic.
  • It is used in CSL211(Computer Architecture) as a framework to design & test student assignments.

Achievements

Selected at IBM Research - India as part of the elite Blue Scholar Program (2013-15).

Lead a team of IITD students to 3rd place out of 26 teams from 7 countries in the Cansat Competition hosted by AAS, AIAA & NASA (2012).

Selected by IITD Class of ’89 Innovation Award for being among the five most innovative projects for the project Expressive Text-to-Speech Synthesis System for Hindi using HNM and HMM (2012).

Awarded the IIT Delhi Institute Merit Award (2008-09).

Secured All India Rank 231 in the All India Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE 2008).

Stood 3rd & 4th in Regional Mathematics Olympiad from the Maharashtra & Goa Region – judged to be the toughest region in India (2008 & 2007).

Recipient of the National Talent Search Examination (NTSE) Scholarship (2006-07).