On internet networks and CS diversity, for this researcher, it’s all about access

Ten years ago, Alex Gamero-Garrido had little reason to assume he would be any sort of computer scientist.

He was working as a positioning engineer on a seismic streamer vessel surveying the oceans. His upbringing screamed “policy” while his undergraduate degree read “electronics engineering.” And for a gay Hispanic man, the predominantly white and straight CS field was not the obvious path.

Fast forward to 2022, and it’s clearly been the right one. In addition to his Northeastern Future Faculty Fellowship and Microsoft Dissertation Grant, the Khoury College of Computer Sciences postdoctoral researcher was recently selected for the prestigious Ford Foundation Fellowship, which strives to boost faculty diversity at American universities. It’s all validation, he says, that he truly belongs.

The Ford Foundation Fellowship recognizes those who “demonstrate academic excellence, a commitment to pluralism, and a strong interest in teaching and research.” Let’s go one by one.

Academic excellence

“It was definitely a journey to computer science,” Gamero-Garrido said with a knowing laugh. After signing off the steamer ship, he pivoted first from electronics engineering to a master’s degree in tech and policy. Then, after a fellow tech-and-policy-focused MIT student introduced him to traditional computing methods, Gamero-Garrido pivoted again.

Now, “in general, I study access networks. That’s the common denominator,” he said. “When you look at how access networks connect to the rest of the world, you get a sense of who information is exposed to, who is compromised, and who can harm users.”

Despite his CS pursuit, the son of a community college professor and a financial regulator never strayed far from public service and policy. For his doctoral thesis, Gamero-Garrido examined the internet infrastructure of numerous countries to identify which ones were most vulnerable to privacy infringements via transit networks, which are internet providers that connect other networks (rather than consumers) to the internet. Potential infringements like large-scale government surveillance, selective censorship, or foreign espionage are all the more concerning since transit networks are often unknown and unaccountable to consumers. Gamero-Garrido’s conclusion: most at risk were African and Latin American countries — including his native Venezuela — with centralized telecommunications infrastructure. Overlooked by existing research, these countries are greatly exposed to privacy infringements because network traffic primarily flows through a few transit networks in its journey between providers and users.

“When networks connect to each other in the United States or Europe, they primarily have direct agreements, and there are many connections between network operators. No individual link becomes a tapping point for the entire country,” Gamero-Garrido explained. “For these [African and Latin American] countries, there is typically one large network that every other network needs to transit through.”

An added bonus: as he was becoming the first in his family to earn a doctorate, Gamero-Garrido presented his results at the Latin American and Caribbean Network Operators’ Group in his native Spanish. It was a welcome development for a rising researcher in a field where diversity is lacking.

A commitment to pluralism

For Gamero-Garrido, diversity extends beyond inclusivity for inclusivity’s sake. It’s also about producing better scholarship.

“There are technical problems and research questions that would not be asked if the field didn’t have diversity,” he said, noting CS’s paucity of female workers and students relative to many other fields. “There is a good amount of evidence that diversity leads to more creative solutions and investigating previously unknown or overlooked problems. The field is now pushing for diversity for this purpose rather than just for representation, equity, and justice, which are of course also important.”

As a gay Hispanic computer scientist, Gamero-Garrido lives at the intersection of two underrepresented identities, and has found nearly no space that caters to both. But he also knows that he’s privileged to be in the field’s gender majority, and has worked to promote inclusion through mentorship and service. He served on the board of Graduate Women in Computing during his doctoral days and has attended several women in STEM events, finding them among the most inclusive CS communities he has encountered.

“As a Hispanic gay man who faces a very different set of challenges, getting involved with these groups has given me a much broader perspective of why inclusion is important and who is harmed when it doesn’t happen,” Gamero-Garrido said.

A strong interest in teaching and research

Upon completing his PhD, Gamero-Garrido joined Khoury College as a postdoctoral researcher under the mentorship of David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute and member of the Mon(IoT)r Lab. Gamero-Garrido had dealt with privacy implications for his doctoral thesis, but now, under one of the country’s leading privacy experts, he joined the CPI and Mon(IoT)r Lab, learned about browser measurements, and figured out how to get effective proxy data for user behavior. He also started paying the mentorship forward.

“From the start, Alex has been a generous and active mentor to several Northeastern students, helping them to engage in research and contribute to our projects,” Choffnes said. “One of his mentees is starting his PhD at USC this fall, in no small part due to Alex’s guidance.”

When he’s not mentoring students or working as a TA for networks courses as a precursor to his desired tenure-track professorship, Gamero-Garrido is hard at work on his policy- and privacy-themed network research. Right now, he’s using internet measurements to determine how well companies comply with privacy laws that restrict data transfers between Europe and the US.

As the summer winds down, Gamero-Garrido expects to complete that project and pick up the one at the heart of his Ford Fellowship. Like his doctoral thesis on large-scale network resilience, this new research addresses a confluence of understudied networking access issues.

Many rural communities in the United States struggle with subpar internet connectivity, and slowed economic growth as a result. Public discussion has rightly pinpointed deficiencies in the “last mile” access networks that connect the users themselves to the internet. But Gamero-Garrido cautions that fixating only on the components that users interact with omits less visible inequities in connectivity, reliability, and resilience elsewhere in the chain. The internet’s “backbone” and the transit providers that connect the networks to that backbone can house inequity too. This variance in connection strength and routing diversity means that an internet user can be doubly advantaged or doubly disadvantaged.

In this way, rural American regions experience the same vulnerability as the countries Gamero-Garrido studied for his thesis: low routing diversity that makes an internet connection more prone to failure or attack. This is especially vital for K-12 schools, where unreliable connection quality and stability can lead to a poorer education.

“If you are a fourth grader in a rural town, even in a place like Massachusetts, you’re probably receiving internet access from a network operator that itself is connected to only one other network,” in contrast with more connected networks in urban areas, Gamero-Garrido said. “There’s a centralized link that, should it fail, then you lose internet connection.”

For the next year, Gamero-Garrido will quantify the routing diversity of the wide area networks that serve US students, determine how often underserved users get content through networks with low routing diversity, and study correlations between routing diversity and network speed. He’ll also identify networks owned and operated by schools and examine the routes that school content takes. Because the agreements governing these networks are secret, he’ll need to jump through numerous technical hoops to identify the schools and reveal the fabric that connects them to the rest of the internet.

“We hope to highlight that it’s not enough to invest in the access networks. You need to ensure that the end-to-end connection is robust,” Gamero-Garrido said.

The goal is to identify inequality to inform policy — where regulators allocate subsidies, which underserved institutions get broadband funds, what infrastructure network operators deploy, and which actions education advocates demand. Not a bad research niche for a policy wonk who originally didn’t see himself in CS at all.

“When I entered computing, I felt like I had a very soft focus and a very soft set of skills. I don’t know if it was internal or the environment, but that was the perception I had,” Gamero-Garrido recalled. “I spent a lot of time trying to make myself into a traditional computing person, and the reality is that I can’t, because there’s a perception that computer scientists are of a certain identity that I don’t belong to.

“So I think getting this award has given me some validation in bringing this broader emphasis of policy. It has provided me some relief that I do bring value to the field as a computer scientist from a non-traditional background.”

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