Siva Kesava Reddy Kakarla

Siva Kesava Reddy Kakarla is a Senior Researcher in the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. His work focuses on high-performance network automation tools, integrating verification, testing, anomaly detection, algorithms, and automata theory to enhance robustness and efficiency in networking systems.

• Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA (2022), advised by Prof. Todd Millstein and Prof. George Varghese, with research on formal methods for DNS robustness and automated template inference for network misconfigurations.
• Bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) from IIT Kharagpur, advised by Prof. Sandip Chakraborty for his undergraduate thesis.

His research areas include Systems and Networking, Network Automation, and Formal Methods, often intersecting with Machine Learning for Systems. Recent work, such as his 2024 HotNets publication, explores gray-box performance analysis of learning-enabled systems, revealing critical underperformance gaps in traffic engineering pipelines.

The Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research serves as his primary affiliation, where he continues to innovate in network automation and robustness. His email contact is sivakakarla@microsoft.com, and he works in Microsoft Building 99, Redmond, WA.