Ahmed Helmy
Professor & Graduate Director
Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Department
Founder and Director: Mobile Networking Laboratory (NOMADS group)
College of Engineering, University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611
email: helmy at ufl.edu

  -  Biography:

Ahmed Helmy received Ph.D. in Computer Science '99 from the University of Southern California (USC), M.S. in Electrical Engineering (EE) '95 from USC, M.S. Eng. Math '94 & B.S. in EE '92 from Cairo University, Egypt. He was a key researcher in the Network Simulator NS-2 and Protocol-Independent Multicast (PIM) projects (with Prof. Deborah Estrin) at USC/ISI from '95-99. Before joining UF in '06, he was on the EE Dept faculty at USC starting Fall '99, where he founded and directed the Wireless & Sensor Networks Labs.

In '02, he received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his research on resource discovery and mobility modeling in large-scale wireless networks (MARS ['02-'08]). In '00 he received the Zumberge Award, and in '02 he received the best paper award from the IEEE/IFIP MMNS Conference. In '03 he was the EE nominee for the USC Engineering Jr. Faculty Research Award, and a nominee for the Sloan Fellowship. In '04 & '05 he got the best faculty merit ranking at the EE dept, USC. He was a winner in the ACM MobiCom '07 SRC, finalist in '08 and '12 SRC research competitions and winner in ACM MobiCom WiNTech demo '10. In '13 he received the best paper award from ACM SIGSPATIAL IWCTS. In '14 he was a winner in several competitions by ACM MobiCom. In '15 he was a recipient of the best paper award from the Internet Technical Committee (ITC), in '17 the best poster award from IEEE INFOCOM, and in '18 the best in-session presentation from IEEE INFOCOM. He is a leader of several NSF funded projects: MARS, STRESS, ACQUIRE, Aware, and MobiBench.

His research interests include design, analysis & measurement of wireless adhoc, sensor & mobile social networks, mobility modeling, multicast protocols, IP mobility & network simulation. He has published over 200 journal articles, conference papers and posters, book chapters & IETF RFCs/IDs. His research is (or has been) supported by grants from NSF, Intel, Cisco, DARPA, NASA, T-Labs, Nvidia, Nortel, HP, Pratt & Whitney, Siemens & Silicon Graphics.

Dr. Helmy is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) ('12-'17), area editor of the IEEE Computer ('10-'14), and the Adhoc Networks Journal - ElSevier ('04-'11). He is the Technical co-Chair of IEEE WONS '18, the finance chair of ACM MobiCom '13, the co-chair of ACM MobiSys HotPlanet '12, the general chair of ACM MSWiM '11, co-chair for ACM MobiCom CHANTS '11, honorary chair for IEEE IWCMC '11, co-chair for ICST AdHocNets '11, poster co-chair IEEE SECON '11, general chair for ACM IWCMC '10, track chair for IEEE MASS '10, track chair, poster & Ph.D. forum chair for IEEE ICNP '09, local arrangements chair for IEEE ICNP '08, IEEE Infocom Global Internet (GI) workshop '08, co-chair of IFIP/IEEE MMNS '06, and vice-chair for IEEE ICPADS '06, and IEEE HiPC '07. He was ACM SIGMOBILE workshop coordination chair (for MobiCom, Mobihoc, Mobisys, Sensys) ('06-'11). He served on numerous committees of IEEE & ACM conferences on networks.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE (IEEE-Computer Society), and a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM (ACM SIGCOMM, ACM SIGMOBILE)

- Publication Citations (H-index = 59, citations: 18,800+, Google Scholar).

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- Quick News & Links::

• - [* Spring '22] Course on Special Topics for Networking Analytics and (Applied) Machine Learning (more under Teaching).
• - Winner of the ACM SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award 2020, with the NS-2 original team, for “the development of a networking system that has had a significant impact on the world of computer networking.”
• - Named IEEE Fellow "for contributions to routing protocol design and mobility modeling"! Less than 0.1% of the IEEE voting members are selected for this grade. (more on IEEE website). This recognizes research work performed by the excellent students, collaborators and colleagues with whom I have been fortunate to work, and who have supported my work, over the past two decades. It is a testament to the great impact our work has had on the field of computer networks and mobile networking. (Department press release).
• - Congrats to Babak, Mimonah and Roozbeh on getting papers accepted to ACM MSWiM (2) and ACM SIGSPATIAL.
• - Congrats to Babak for getting a best presentation award from IEEE INFOCOM for the "Flutes vs Cellos" paper presentation!!
• - Grant from Nvidia for GPU deep learning research.
• - Updates to the MobiLib website are underway to include more datasets.
• - Website created for the NSF-funded MobiBench project.
• - Big congrats to Babak, Leonardo, Roozbeh and Aaron for paper accepted at IEEE INFOCOM 2018! Titled: "Flutes vs. Cellos: Analyzing Mobility-Traffic Correlations in Large WLAN Traces", this is the result of many years of data collection (over 30TB of data) and four years of international collaboration with TUM at Munich, Germany and Aalto U., Helsinki, Finland. The extended Technical Report for this paper is now available. Sample datasets and code/tools to be shared through the MobiLib website to facilitate reproducibility.
• - Served on a plenary panel at ACM MSWiM, "20 years of MSWiM history, and the coming 20 years!"
• - Congrats to Mimonah for getting her paper accepted at ACM MSWiM! Titled: "Improving BLE Distance Estimation and Classification using TX power and Machine Learning: A Comparative Analysis".
• - August-Wilhelm Scheer – Honorary Fellow of TUM Institute for Advanced Study, Techincal University of Munich (TUM), Germany, June – Aug 2017.
• - University of Florida (UF) Term Professor (Aug 2017 - Aug 2019).
• - Winner of the IEEE INFOCOM 2017 Best Poster Award for group's work on 'En Route'. Congrats to Roozbeh and Babak.
• - The "En-Route" paper for vehicular mobility simulations received all '5's in Infocom-SmartCity reivews. Congrats!
• - Had 5 presentations for the group at Infocom in Atlatna.
• - Two papers accepted at Infocom - SmartCity, congrats to Roozbeh, Babak and Mimonah.
• - Visited Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Lip6 - Paris 6 - Univ. of Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), summer 2016.
• - Fan Bai, my first PhD student ('05, USC), elevated to IEEE Fellow! Congrats, Fan!
• - Winner of the Best Paper Award of the Internet Technical Committee (ITC) for 2013 (announced June 2015). Selected from ~190 published papers in seven IEEE ComSoc conferences.
• - Inducted as ACM Distinguished Scientist, Nov. 2014. [Featured on ACM (Dec 4, 2014) - ACM announcement - ACM news release]
• - Winner (First place) in the Mobile App Competition, at the ACM MobiCom 2014. Runner-up (2nd place) in the Start-up Pitch Competition.
• - Best paper award at ACM SIGSPATIAL IWCTS (on Computational Transportation Science), November 2013.
• - Two newly funded projects by NSF (10/13-10/16) and KACST (02/14-02/16).
• - 15 new publications since summer '13 (2 book chapters, 2 journals, 11 conference papers), among others. (added to the yearly publications list).
• - Ended Spring '14 sabbatical semester visits (mainly to research groups at Bogazici University & Galatasaray University, Istanbul, Turkey), and Summer '13 visit to Aalto University, Finland.
• - Earlier Select Papers on Mobility Modeling & Networking:
  • - "Knowledge Discovery and Causality in Urban City Traffic: A study using Planet Scale Vehicular Imagery Data", In proceedings of ACM SIGSPATIAL IWCTS (Int'l workshop on Computational Transportation Science), November 2013. (Winner of The Best Paper Award).
  • - The TRACE framework for Mining Mobile User Behavior: - "Structural Analysis of User Association Patterns in University Campus Wireless LANs", IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), Vol. 11, No. 11, November 2012 (also ACM MobiCom 2007).
  • - Profile-cast: Mobile social networking: - "CSI: A Paradigm for Behavior-oriented Profile-cast Services in Mobile Networks", Ad Hoc Networks Journal - Elsevier, Vol. 10, Issue 8, November 2012.
  • - iTrust: Mobile (Android) app to augment user's awareness of their location, context, and the devices around them (using Bluetooth, WiFi scanning, and scoring filters for potential trustworthy devices). Paper: "Discovering Trustworthy Social Spaces", ACM SenSys - PhoneSense, Nov. 2012.
  • - SOM: "Multidimensional Modeling and Analysis of Wireless Users Online Activity and Mobility: A Neural-networks Map Approach", ACM MSWiM, November 2011 (earlier version in IEEE INFOCOM 2011).
  • - "BEWARE: Background Traffic-Aware Rate Adaptation for IEEE 802.11", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 19, Issue 4, August 2011 (also IEEE WoWMoM 2009).
  • - The IMPACT study on Nodal Encounter Patterns in WLAN Traces: - IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), Vol. 9, No. 11, November 2010.
  • - Mobile web usage co-clustering: "Data-driven Co-clustering Model of Internet Usage in Large Mobile Societies", ACM MSWiM, October 2010.
  • - "Extract: Mining Social Features from WLAN Traces: A Gender-Based Case Study", ACM MSWIM, October 2010.
  • - Time-variant Community (TVC) mobility model: - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), October 2009 (also IEEE INFOCOM 2007) , - mobility tool (.zip)
  • - The IMPORTANT mobility study: - IEEE INFOCOM 2003 , - Ad Hoc Networks Journal November 2003 , - mobility tool
  • - MobiLib wireless traces library.
  • - My research group: NOMADS lab; researching and designing Networks Of Mobile Adhoc Devices and Sensors.