I am a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. My advisors are Krishna Gummadi and Alan Mislove. I received my M.S degree in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Madras where I was advised by Prof. C. Siva Ram Murthy. I completed my BTech from Govt. Model Engineering College, Kochi, Kerala.

I spent the summer of 2011 working with Alan Mislove at Northeastern University, Boston.

I spent the summer of 2010 as an intern at Microsoft Research, Redmond, working with Emre Kiciman and Stefan Saroiu.

Research:

My research interests broadly lie in the area of networked and distributed systems. At a high level, my current work focuses on understanding how large scale online social networks (OSNs) work, and leveraging OSNs to build better systems.  

Publications:

1. •Defending against large-scale crawls in online social networks (To appear)
   Mainack Mondal, Bimal Viswanath, Allen Clement, Peter Druschel, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove and Ansley Post
   In Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (ACM CONEXT), Nice, France, December 2012.
   

2.     [PDF][BibTex]
   

1. •Keeping Information Safe from Social Networking Apps
   Bimal Viswanath, Emre Kiciman and Stefan Saroiu
   In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN), Helsinki, August 2012.
   

2.     [PDF][BibTex]
   

1. •Simplifying Friendlist Management (Demo Paper)
   Yabing Liu, Bimal Viswanath, Mainack Mondal, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Alan Mislove
   In Proceedings of the World Wide Web (WWW’12), Lyon, France, April 2012.
   

2.     [PDF][BibTex]
   

1. •Understanding and Combating Link Farming in the Twitter Social Network
   Saptarshi Ghosh, Bimal Viswanath, Farshad Kooti, Naveen Kumar Sharma, Korlam Gautam, Fabricio Benevenuto, Niloy Ganguly, and Krishna P. Gummadi
   In Proceedings of the World Wide Web (WWW’12), Lyon, France, April 2012.
   

            [PDF][BibTex][Talk]

1. •Canal: Scaling social network-based Sybil tolerance schemes
   Bimal Viswanath, Mainack Mondal, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove, and Ansley Post
   In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys’12), Bern, Switzerland, April 2012.
   

            [PDF][BibTex][Talk]

1. •Exploring the design space of social network-based Sybil defenses
   Bimal Viswanath, Mainack Mondal, Allen Clement, Peter Druschel, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove, and Ansley Post
   In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS), Invited paper, Bangalore, India, January 2012.
   

           [PDF] [BibTeX]

1. •Defending against large-scale crawls in online social networks
   Mainack Mondal, Bimal Viswanath, Allen Clement, Peter Druschel, Krishna P. Gummadi, Alan Mislove, and      Ansley Post
   Technical Report 2011-006, MPI-SWS, November 2011.
   [PDF] [BibTeX]
   

1. •Sharing Social Networking Content from Home: A Measurement-driven Feasibility Study
   Massimiliano Marcon, Bimal Viswanath, Meeyoung Cha, and Krishna P. Gummadi
   In Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV), June 1-3, 2011, Vancouver, Canada.
   

           [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides(PPT)]

1. •An Analysis of Social Network-based Sybil Defenses
   Bimal Viswanath, Ansley Post, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Alan Mislove
   In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM'10), New Delhi, India, August 2010.
   [PDF] [BibTeX] [Slides(PPT)]
   

1. •You are who you know: Inferring user profiles in Online Social Networks
   Alan Mislove, Bimal Viswanath, Krishna P. Gummadi, and Peter Druschel
   In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference of Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'10), New York, NY, February 2010.
   [PDF] [BibTeX]
   Media Coverage
   On Facebook, You Are Who You Know (Miller-McCune)
   On Social Networks, You are Who You Know (Slashdot)
   

1. •On the Evolution of User Interaction in Facebook
   Bimal Viswanath, Alan Mislove, Meeyoung Cha, and Krishna Gummadi
   In Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Online Social Networks (WOSN), Barcelona, August 2009.
   Note: The original version contained a few inaccurate statistics on the size of the data set, this has been corrected in the updated paper below.
   [PDF] [Original PDF (with errata)] [Errata Note] [BibTeX] [Measurement Data]
   

 From my Master's thesis:

1. •A Markov Chain Model for TCP NewReno over Optical Burst Switching Networks
   Bimal Viswanath, T. Venkatesh and C. Siva Ram Murthy
   In Proceedings of the 50th IEEE Global Communications Conference, Washington D.C.,November 2007.