Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

• BetterNet (Inria Project Lab): An observatory to measure and Improve Internet Service Access from User Experience. Project Coordinator: Isabelle Chrisment, Partners: Inria teams Spirals, Diana, Muse, Dionysos and Madynes, Inria Chile

BetterNet intends to build and deliver a scientific and technical collaborative observatory to measure and improve the Internet service access as perceived by users. We will propose new original user-centered measurement methods, which will associate social sciences to better understand Internet usage and the quality of services and networks. Our observatory can be defined as a vantage point, where:

• tools, models and algorithms/heuristics will be provided to collect data,

• acquired data will be analyzed, and shared appropriately with scientists, stakeholders and civil society, and

• new value-added services will be proposed to end-users.

This project will also allow Inria to become a key reference in the digital field, not only for scientist researchers but also for policy makers, rulers, and, for citizens in general, by giving them a more accurate and reliable basis for decisions making at an individual scale (privacy strategies) or at a collective scale (legal norms). An originality of our proposal is to ensure that researchers from different disciplines (exact sciences, applied sciences and social sciences) will collaborate in the design of this observatory, in the dissemination of results for the research community, executives and public at large.

• Princeton (Prof. Nick Feamster): We have a long-term collaboration on measuring the performance of residential broadband Internet access networks and more recently on home network diagnosis.

• ICSI (Dr. Srikanth Sundaresan, Dr. Christian Kreibich, Dr. Robin Sommer): With C. Kreibich, we have been developing Fathom, a browser-based network measurement platform. We are now adding home network diagnosis capabilities to Fathom. We are collaborating with S. Sundaresan on detecting last-mile bottlenecks. In addition, with Robin Sommer we are working on the potential of matching the profiles of a user across multiple online social networks.

• Northwestern University (Prof. Fabian Bustamante and his doctoral student Zachary Bischof): we are working on identifying user activity from network traffic.