Fulvio Risso

Office hours and appointments for students

I do not schedule fixed office hours. If you need an appointment, please check my calendar and follow the suggestions on that page.

Research interests

My main research activities started with high-speed packet processing (i.e., 10Gbps and beyond), while maintaining flexibility. With some of my best students, we designed several components that can be used to achieve this vision, from the NetPDL language, the NetVM virtual machine, and their integration in the NetBee library. I also tried to apply these technologies to the problem of Traffic Classification, hence I spent some time on that topic too. With some very smart PhD student we had a look at the word of network processors and multicore/graphical CPU for networking; an interesting result was the iNFAnt pattern matching engine on nVidia graphics cards.

With the advent of cloud and virtualization technologies, I realized that my efforts to create programmable network services were actually converging on that area. Hence, Cloud and Virtualization become my new research interest. As usual, I started some nice open-source projects as well, such as the FROG (Flexible and pROGrammable network device), CrownLabs, to deliver remote computer labs in the months of COVID-19 pandemia, and the new Liquid Computing (Liqo) project, with the ambition to create a computing continuum in which we do no longer care where our applications will be executed. But I did not give up to my original passion, networking: starting in 2017, I began to have fun with the eBPF technology, which enables lightweight network services that are executed directly in the Linux kernel. The (ongoing) result can be seen in the Polycube software framework.

Particularly, Liqo and Polycube may represent a breakthrough in their respective fields and I am eager to see them growing and getting increasingly adopted by a wider community.

Some of my past research activities included Quality of Service in Packet Switched Networks, Scheduling Algorithms (particularly Class Based Queuing), Scheduling, Voice over IP, management of resources in peer-to-peer networks.

Some more pointers:

• Computer Networks Research Group (NetGroup)

• Proposals for MSc student theses

• My publications on the University institutional repository

• A more detailed list of research papers, talks and open-source projects

Recently, I also started to made some videos about the projects I am working on. If you are curious, here there is my playlist.

Something about me

Born in Saluzzo (Cuneo, Italy), 15 november 1971. The same day Intel announced the 4004 chip.

BSc in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino in July 1995.

PhD in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino in January 2000.

Full Professor (tenure track) at Politecnico di Torino. Responsible for students and staff mobility with the Department of Computer and Control Engineering. Responsible for the Network and Multimedia Lab at Dept. of Control and Computer Engineering. Representative for Politecnico di Torino in the EIT Digital association.

Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at ArubaKube, a spin-off of Politecnico di Torino.

Married with Daniela (2000), one son (Francesco, 2001), one daughter (Valentina, 2006) and a little puppy, Whisky (2016).

Interests: history; travelling, particularly with my RV, and taking care of some fruit trees, on the hills near Rossana.