Page History

No intern has joined Wajahat's Lab. So there is not much progress. The students are away on summer vacation so no progress.

Wajahat proposes to get a list of the new Universities in Pakistan and contact them encouraging them to participate in PingER and set up MA. They have made a list of new university sites, communications networks, Labs in different regions of Pakistan (especially the remote regions) and will make contact.

• The list of new universities is ready. Just need resources to engage them. 
• Unsure how this is affected by lack of interns.

Discussion item:

Wajahat is hoping to get few students to work on Master thesis related to pinger data. If possible kindly share ideas related to data analytics which he can share with students. 

 Wajahat also asked last time:

•  “Has any work gone into to predicting the cause of failures(blackout, flood, coup (Turkey)) using pinger data?”
• Les> there have been several case studies looking at the impacts of failures, however nothing on predicting failures. I am not sure how one might use PinGER to predict the cause of a failure. For some cases (e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, flood, coup), it is unclear to me how Network performance monitoring could add to other means of predicting the cause.
• Wajahat's thinking is along the lines of "Regarding other sources, I was thinking, internet is the pulse of digital world. Other sources require additional setup that might not be a possibility in developing countries. Internet being a necessity and having other uses is still prevalent in these developing countries. Can it be used as a real time sensor."
• Again I am forwarding the question in case others in the team may have some suggestions?  Below are some responses:
  • Umar mentioned the use of dark fibre testing (e.g strain) and monitoring for earthquakes. There was a recent paper.
• Umar was thinking that using the PingER data to detect and log anomalies and create alerts might be interesting.  This would include triaging the logs into 3 tiers of alerts:
  • Low = Information; 
  • Medium = needs action but non-critical, create a ticket to be looked at later; 
  • Severe: e.g. wake someone up.
•  It requires hysteresis so one does not get continuous alerts for say something that has gone down. 
• This makes a lot of sense for say routers and switches which are usually very critical. 
• The PingER measurement script (pinger2.pl) has a lot of logs that are prioritized by severity (e.g. target not responding for various reasons for the last n runs of pinger2.pl.) 
• Tiering of events into alert levels would be the focus of the research
• PingER might be an interesting field to try out the marshaling of event events and categorizing into alert levels/tiering. 
  
• Possibly mine the data with say Splunk. 
  • Umar looked at this: Splunk would be useful for rudimentary for simple scenarios, but not for detailed work.
    
• Might be an interesting project for an MS or PhD student.
• For PingER it might include correlation with feeds from elsewhere (e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, social unrest)
• Prediction/tracking:
  • For unexpected events such as earthquakes/tsunamis, it is doubtful PingER data would be useful for predictions
  • For situations that are developing such as hurricanes, civil unrest: knowing roughly where it is developing might make it possible to temporarily increase the density of targets in the region. 
    • To do this would mean having a lot more targets available worldwide ready to be monitored.
    • One would need to be careful to ensure that the extra monitoring does not interfere with Internet access in the area.
  • This tracking might be very valuable for less developed areas where there may be few other (non-PingER) measurements available. However, it can be hard to find the coordinates of ping responding targets is such areas. This would need to be one of the tools developed.