About Me
I am an Associate Professor/Reader in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. I am also Co-founder and CEO of Net AI, a university spin-out whose mission is to put mobile network management on autopilot in the cloud.
I lead the Mobile Intelligence Lab and the Informatics Internet of Things research programme. I am a member of the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture (ICSA) and I am also affiliated to the Security & Privacy group.
Before joining Edinburgh, I was a research fellow at the Hamilton Institute of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Between 2007–2011 I was a research assistant at IMDEA Networks (Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Networks). I held visiting research positions at the University of Brescia (2017, 2015), Northeastern University (2016), Technical University Darmstadt (2016), and Rice University (2010).
I hold a Ph.D. and an M.Sc. in Telematics Engineering from University Carlos III of Madrid, and a Dipl.Eng. degree from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
My research seeks to bridge the gap between fundamental mathematical models and real-world applications of networked systems. I focus on problems related to artificial intelligence in mobile networks, traffic analytics, performance optimisation, security and privacy, prototyping and test beds.
News
9 March, 2021 – The CoronaSurveys team has received an honorable mention in the XPRIXE Pandemic Response Challenge, ranking in top-10 out of 104 teams that made it into the semifinals.
25 January, 2021 – The CoronaSurveys team made it into the finals of the XPRIXE Pandemic Response Challenge.
19 January, 2021 – The IoT Education Kit I compiled last year is now available via the Arm University Program. The Informatics Comms team wrote about this here.
17 December, 2020 – Work with my undergraduate student Jorge Sanz Maroto documenting a security analysis of the m-tickets App presented at ISC 2020. The recording of Jorge's talk is available here. The Data-Driven Innovation programme wrote this piece about our work.
5 December, 2020 – The "Adaptive Clustering-based Malicious Traffic Classification at the Network Edge" paper with my student Alec Diallo was accepted at IEEE INFOCOM.
2 December, 2020 – Our work "CloudLSTM: A Recurrent Neural Model for Spatiotemporal Point-cloud Stream Forecasting" was accepted at AAAI-21.
26 November, 2020 – Invited talk at Huawei's DataCom "Global Connect 2020".
21 October, 2020 – Delighted to have been appointed the leader of SICSA's Networking and Systems Research Theme.
12 October, 2020 – Work with my former students Chaoyun Zhang and Rui Li and colleagues at ETRI on driver behaviour recognition using CNNs was accepted for publication in IEEE Access.
1 October, 2020 – Alexis Duque has joined my team. He will be deeply involved in the development of the Net AI spin-out.
28 September, 2020 – Speaking at the AI UK | Smart Cities event organised by The Alan Turing Institute.
21 September, 2020 – Video presentations of our Microscope work presented at ACM MobiCom 2020 are available on YouTube in short (5-min) and long (20-min) formats.
Media
Monitoring Covid-19 Incidence via Open Surveys
Work with the CoronaSurveys team on monitoring and forecasting the incidence of Covid-19 using open surveys was featured in Business Wire, Bloomberg, BioSpace, Science X, Datanami, La Razon, Republica, Tele Madrid, Madri+d, Cope, Ambientum, Catalunya Vanguardista, Leganes Activo, Globo Rural, Publico Surgiu, RedibInforma, and Liverpool Noise.
Deep learning in mobile networks
Our survey of deep learning in mobile and wireless networks has been picked up by Chinese media and was covered in The Heart of the Machine, Tencent, NetEase, SINA, and Sohu.com.
Smart-home security
Our security and privacy investigation of the Belkin WeMo ecosystem featured in The National, The Herald, Phys.org, Technology.org, ECN Mag, tekk.tv, qianjia.com, The Edinburgh Reporter, Edinburgh Live, Scottish Construction Now, Scottish Housing News. Forth Radio also ran a short interview with me about this work.
Wearable IoT security
Our research on the vulnerabilities of fitness trackers featured in The Times, The Telegraph, International Business Times, Huffington Post, New York Post, The Scotsman, STV News, Yorkshire Post, The Northern Echo, Channel News, Market Watch, SC Magazine, The Inquirer, CORDIS News, Homeland Security News Wire, China Press, Xinhua News, China Industrial Control Network, Shenzhen News Network, Photoelectric News Network, Hong Kong News, Indo-Asian News Service, The Economic Times, The Hindu, Businessworld India, The New Indian Express, The Pioneer, domain-b.com, HackRead, Techworm, V3, texnologia.net, Gears of Biz, Infosecurity Magazine, Third Age, Phys.org, ECN Mag, Digtial Journal, Gadgets & Wearables, DIGIT, EurekAlert!
The BBC Radio 4 Extra's Newsjack show mentioned us in their satire on fitness tracking (season 17, episode 2).
I also gave an interview about our research to BBC Radio Scotland for the Newsdrive show (12/04/2019).
Publications
A. Diallo and P. Patras, "Adaptive Clustering-based Malicious Traffic Classification at the Network Edge", to appear in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM 2021.
C. Zhang, M. Fiore, I. Murray, and P. Patras, "CloudLSTM: A Recurrent Neural Model for Spatiotemporal Point-cloud Stream Forecasting", in Proc. AAAI 2021.
J. Sanz Maroto, H. Liu, and P. Patras, "On the Struggle Bus: A Detailed Security Analysis of the m-tickets App", in Proc. ISC 2020.
C. Zhang, X. Costa-Perez, and P. Patras, "Tiki-Taka: Attacking and Defending Deep Learning-based Intrusion Detection Systems", ACM CCSW 2020.
C. Zhang, M. Fiore, C. Ziemlicki, and P. Patras, "Microscope: Mobile Service Traffic Decomposition for Network Slicing as a Service", ACM MobiCom 2020.
O. Ojo, A. Garcia-Agundez, B. Girault, H. Hernandez, E. Cabana, A. Garcia, P. Arabshahi, C. Baquero, P. Casari, E. J. Ferreira, D. Frey, C. Georgiou, M. Goessens, A. Ishchenko, I. Sikorsky, E. Jimenez, O. Kebkal, R. Lillo, R. Menezes, N. Nicolaou, A. Ortega, P. Patras, J. C. Roberts, E. Stavrakis, Y. Tanaka, and A. Fernandez Anta, "CoronaSurveys: Using Surveys with Indirect Reporting to Estimate the Incidence and Evolution of Epidemics", KDD Humanitarian Mapping Workshop 2020.
M. Cominelli, P. Patras, and F. Gringoli, "One GPU to Snoop Them All: a Full-Band Bluetooth Low Energy Sniffer," IEEE MedComNet 2020.
C. Fiandrino, C. Zhang, P. Patras, A. Banchs, and J. Widmer, "A Machine Learning-based Framework for Optimizing the Operation of Future Networks," in IEEE Communications Magazine (Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for Communications Series), vol. 58, no. 6, June 2020.
M. Cominelli, F. Gringoli, M. Lind, P. Patras and G. Noubir, "Even Black Cats Cannot Stay Hidden in the Dark: Full-band De-anonymization of Bluetooth Classic Devices," IEEE S&P 2020.
Conferences/Workshops
IEEE WCNC 2021 - The IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (29 March - 1 April 2021, Nanjing, China).
EuroMLSys 2021 - The First Workshop on Machine Learning and Systems co-located with EuroSys '21 (26 April 2021, virtually in Edinburgh, UK).
EuroSys 2021 - The European Conference on Computer Systems (25-28 April 2021, virtually in Edinburgh, UK).
WoWMoM 2021 - the 22nd IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (7-11 June 20201, Pisa, Italy).
IWNTA 2021 - The 1st International Workshop on Network Traffic Analytics (in conjunction with MobiSPC 2021, 9-12 August 2021, Leuven, Belgium).
5G-MeMU 2021 - The ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Workshop on 5G Measurements, Modeling, and Use Cases (in conjunction with ACM SIGCOMM 23-27 Aug 2021, virtual event).
ISWCS 2021 - The 17th International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (6-9 September 2021, Berlin, Germany).
ITC 33 - The International Teletraffic Congress (31 August - 3 September, Avignon, France).
TMA 2021 - The 5thNetwork Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (13-15 September 2021, virtual event).
MobiCom 2021 - The 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (25-29 October 2021, New Orleans, USA).
TEAM
Alexis Duque(Research Associate, 2020–)
Alexis is deeply involved in developing the Microscope technology developed by the Net AI spinout. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Lyon.
Alec Diallo (PhD student, 2019–2023)
Alec is harnessing Artificial Intelligence to build automatic network threat detection and counteraction mechanisms. He is supported by arm.
Yini Fang (MPhil student, 2019–2021)
Yini is investigating mobile traffic analysis problems by applying a range of machine learning techniques, including reinforcement learning. She is supported by Cisco.
Haoyu Liu (PhD student, 2019–2023)
Haoyu's research focuses on developing machine learning tools for Internet of Things (IoT) and Network Security. He is supported by arm and CENSIS.
Previous Students
Chaoyun Zhang (PhD), The University of Edinburgh, 2020. (now at Tencent)
Rui Li (PhD), The University of Edinburgh, 2019. (now at Samsung AI Centre Cambridge)
Interns
Luyang Xu, Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nov. 2020 –Oct. 2021.
Stephen Waddell, University of Edinburgh, June–Aug. 2019.
Marco Cominelli, University of Brescia, July–Dec. 2018
Adela Rotar, University of Edinburgh, May–July 2018.
Haoyu Liu, University of Edinburgh, June–Sept. 2018.
Ayush Bhardwaj, IIT Roorkee, June–Aug. 2018.
Daniel Licciardello, University of Catania, Mar. 2016–May 2016.
Chiara Capretti, University of Brescia, Sept. 2015–Dec. 2015.
Nicolo Facchi, University of Brescia, Sept. 2014–Feb. 2015.
Prospective Students
Students interested in undertaking a PhD under my supervision may find this advice helpful.
COURSES
Internet of Things Systems, Security, and the Cloud (IoTSSC, 2018–now)
The course gives students theoretical and practical grounding in IoT, covering systems architecture, hardware platforms, embedded programming and debugging, networking paradigms for IoT, secure operation, cloud integration, and simple data analytics.
Computing in the Classroom (CiC, 2019–20)
The course offers an in-depth, sustained experience in the classroom to fourth-year students contemplating a career in education.
Computer Science Large Practical (CSLP, 2014–16)
The course exposed students to the problems that arise with the design and implementation of large scale computer systems, and to methods of coping with such problems.
Undergraduate Research Practical (URP, 2015)
This course allowed undergraduate students to participate in a research project in collaboration with a member of staff or a research group.
Computer & Communications Networks (CCN, 2013)
This course introduced the principles of computer networking using a top down approach, from the application layer and working down toward the physical layer (delivered at Maynooth University).
Network Infrastructure (NI, 2008–09)
This course covered advanced concepts, principles and theory related to network-centred computing (delivered at University Carlos III of Madrid).
Things
Random things I (re)tweet.
Thoughts on science and technology I (occasionally) share(d) on my blog.
Topics I follow and questions I answer(ed) on Quora.
(Some of) my photos on Flickr and 500px.
Music I listened to before Spotify became a thing.
If you are into chess, you can challenge me on gameknot.
Contact Me
EMAIL: paul [dot] patras [at] ed.ac.uk
PHONE: +44 (0)131-650-4408
ADDRESS: Room 1.22A, Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, UK.
