Paul Barford

Paul Barford serves as Department Chair and Carl de Boor Professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he leads the networking research group and founded the Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory. His career uniquely bridges academic research and industry entrepreneurship, having spent eight years in technology development prior to academia.

He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University. His international academic engagement includes visiting professorships at the University of Cambridge (Computer Laboratory), Wolfson College fellowships, and scholarly work at the University of Oxford.

Prof. Barford's research centers on internet measurement and security, specializing in analysis of internet data, protocols, and topological structures. His current investigations explore fraud detection systems, traffic anomaly identification, and malicious attack mitigation, with recent work pioneering environmental sensing applications using existing fiber-optic infrastructure.

Analysis of his recent publications reveals three dominant research thrusts: (1) DNS infrastructure analysis through corpus construction and graph decomposition, (2) cloud networking optimization via peering strategies and topology programming, and (3) photonic sensing innovations leveraging commodity optical hardware for environmental monitoring.

His scholarly contributions are recognized through significant research funding and professional honors:

• EPSRC visiting fellowship at University of Cambridge
• Visiting fellowship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

Prof. Barford secures substantial research support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Army Research Office (ARO), Cisco, and Intel. His entrepreneurial impact includes founding Nemean Networks (acquired by Qualys) for intrusion detection and co-founding MdotLabs (acquired by comScore) for advertising fraud detection, translating academic research into commercial security solutions.

The Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory serves as his primary research hub, providing experimental infrastructure for internet measurement studies, security protocol validation, and photonic sensing development, with active collaborations across government and industry partners.