NSF Workshop on Emerging Research Opportunities at the Intersection of Statistics and Internet Measurement Final Report

Abstract

The Workshop on Emerging Research Opportunities at the Intersection of Statistics and Internet Measurement was held in January 2023 at Boston University. The goal of the workshop was to bring together Internet measurement researchers and statisticians/mathematicians to identify important and promising future research directions and exchanging research ideas that could lead to future collaborations. Forty-two scholars from academia, industry, and the NSF participated. The workshop agenda consisted of a series of 17 keynote talks interspersed by small group discussions. Talks and discussions addressed a wide range of topics including Internet traffic analysis, connectivity and topology analysis, application and user behavior, challenges and opportunities in Internet data collection and data processing, cutting-edge models, and methodologies in different areas of statistics, applied mathematics and data science. More specifically, talks discussed selection biases and qualifying biases in estimates from crowdsourced and other non-random samples, process monitoring, anomaly detection, adversarial risk analysis, data protection, models and methods for network and Internet traffic data collection and processing, and advanced and innovative statistical models, methods, algorithms, and tools that can be applied directly in Internet measurement research. The major outcomes from the workshop are twofold. First, the workshop was successful in facilitating introductions between participants from the Internet measurement and statistics/mathematics communities. Conversations in small group sessions were cordial and carried on beyond allotted times. Second, opportunities for future collaborations were clearly identified over the range of topics that were discussed from experimental design and data gathering to data analysis and modeling to data privacy and visualization. The possibility of holding this workshop again in the future to toward the goal of fostering new research and new collaborations was also discussed.