Matthew Caesar

Matthew Caesar is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with affiliations in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Coordinated Science Laboratory, School of Information Sciences, and Information Trust Institute. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley (2007) and has over two decades of experience in networked systems research. His work focuses on improving network reliability and security through software-defined principles, formal verification, and AI-driven approaches. He co-founded Veriflow (acquired by VMware in 2019), leading to practical network verification systems.

Education:

• PhD, Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, 2007

Research Interests: Matthew’s research emphasizes robustness in distributed systems and networks, including network verification, SDN, IoT security, and cloud infrastructure. He explores formal methods to ensure safety properties in large-scale systems, with applications in disaster recovery and enterprise networks.

Key Contributions:

• Developed Veriflow, the first practical network verification system
• Co-founded the Networking Channel and chairs ACM SIGCOMM
• Recipient of NSF CAREER Award (2011), IEEE Fellow (2023), and multiple Best Paper Awards

Grants & Advising: Over $10M in research funding, including a $25M TSCP-DC project. Advises over 30 students, many now leading roles in industry and academia.

Labs/Teams: Principal Investigator at IARCS Singapore, involved in projects like FORTIFY and SMOG. Collaborates with industry partners like Microsoft and VMware on network security and verification.