Xiaowei Yang, Duke's newest assistant professor of computer science, sees the web as a stodgy old aunt vulnerable to being burgled and ill prepared for the latest fashions. As a graduate of top schools in China and the United States, Yang has made it her task to set things right.
"The importance of the Internet is obvious to everyone," she said. "But it was designed in old times as an academic curiosity. Basically, a bunch of researchers wanted to hook computers together and share information. However, because it was not designed for commercial use on a global scope, it has a lot of vulnerabilities."
Presently, information is routed around cyberspace in pieces. It is first broken up into data "packets" that can avoid Internet logjams before finally being reassembled at its destination.
That's fine for individual e-mail packets, which "can stall for a few seconds to bypass failures without affecting users that much," she said. However, recent applications such as online gaming and video streaming break down under such delays. "If I don't see part of an Olympic game, that's very bad," she said.
"The Internet has never figured out a way to charge for new services, because it was not designed for commercial use," she said. "There are many bottlenecks, such as resolving how to reserve a certain amount of bandwidth temporarily for a conference at an affordable cost. It's not that we technically don't know how to do it. The current Internet just doesn't provide the right infrastructure."
Another issue is security. Yang said the Internet is not programmed to say no. "They are designed to move packets forward as fast as possible over a wire," she said. "But the Internet doesn't have a mechanism to stop that traffic." That gives "bad guys" inroads to flood the Internet with malicious traffic.
"There's no way I can say 'I don't want to hear from you,'" she quipped.
Yang is working on solutions for all these challenges. To curb malicious traffic, for example, there are various ways to require the recipient's permission before a packet is shipped, she said. One scenario would require each packet to bear virtual "tokens" validating that the information is appropriate and wanted.
The daughter of Chinese engineers, Yang graduated at the top of her class at Tsinghua University, "the MIT of China," she said. The real Massachusetts Institute of Technology then "invited her" to get her Ph.D. there. After graduating from MIT in 2004, she became an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California at Irvine.
Duke beckoned, and she relocated to Durham last summer. "Duke is a better school for me," she said. "UC-Irvine is a great place, but I didn't find many people to collaborate with there. Here I can work with a bunch of young, energetic researchers who share similar interests. Also, here there are senior faculty who understand what I'm doing, which is important in tenure review."
She also cites the proximity of the Pratt School's electrical and computer engineering department, which has "networking people with similar interests," she said. "I think people are probably the number one factor that made me move."
Yang plans to teach a computer science graduate course in networking and distributing systems next spring.
Her husband, Daniel Jiang, left Google to start his own company in California and is now pursuing that goal here.
Away from Duke, she says they are enjoying opportunities to hike on the abundant local nature trails. "That's actually another reason we really love this area," she said. "California was all brown."