Dr.-Ing. Istemi Ekin Akkus
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Nokia Bell Labs
I am a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (DMTS) at Nokia Bell Labs in Stuttgart, Germany. My research interests lie in the intersection of computer networks and distributed systems. Currently, I am working on edge/cloud computing, confidential computing and decentralization.
Previously, I was a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany. My advisor was Paul Francis. During my Ph.D., I had a research visit to the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley as well as an internship at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore.
Past projects
- KNIX is an open-source high-performance serverless computing platform with process-based lightweight function execution and container-based application isolation. I have been one of the main architects and developers. [code].
- Priv3+ is a (now defunct) Firefox [code] and Chrome [code] addon that prevents third party tracking via cookies, but enables social networking features on websites without requiring a blacklist. Priv3+ essentially emulated a fourth cookie policy that accepted third party cookies, but did not send them unless and until the user interacted with the third-party content. It was developed during my visit to the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley in 2014.
- Privacy-preserving digital assistants: During my internship Microsoft Research India, I worked with Saikat Guha on a personal and privacy-preserving (i.e., not talking with the cloud) digital assistant/recommendation system.
- Web privacy: During my Ph.D., I worked on various web privacy issues, mostly focusing preventing third-party tracking but still enabling functionality (e.g., obtaining web analytics in a non-tracking way, enabling social networking functionality without tracking).
Publications
Refereed publications
- Enabling scalable and adaptive machine learning training via serverless computing on public cloud. Ahsan Ali, Xiaolong Ma, Syed Zawad, Paarijaat Aditya, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Lei Yang, Feng Yan.
- duet: Combining a Trustworthy Controller with a Confidential Computing Environment. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ivica Rimac.
- PraaS: Verifiable Proofs of Property as-a-Service with Intel SGX. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ivica Rimac, Ruichuan Chen.
- Citadel: Protecting Data Privacy and Model Confidentiality for Collaborative Learning. Chengliang Zhang, Junzhe Xia, Baichen Yang, Huancheng Puyang, Wei Wang, Ruichuan Chen, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Paarijaat Aditya, Feng Yan.
- Lessons Learned from Migrating Complex Stateful Applications onto Serverless Platforms. Zewen Jin, Yiming Zhu, Jiaan Zhu, Dongbo Yu, Cheng Li, Ruichuan Chen, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Yinlong Xu.
- Efficient GPU Sharing for Serverless Workflows. Klaus Satzke, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Ivica Rimac, Manuel Stein, Andre Beck, Paarijaat Aditya, Manohar Vanga, Volker Hilt.
- Will Serverless Computing Revolutionize NFV?. (invited paper) Paarijaat Aditya, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Andre Beck, Ruichuan Chen, Volker Hilt, Ivica Rimac, Klaus Satzke, Manuel Stein.
- ApproxJoin: Distributed Approximate Joins. Do Le Quoc, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Pramod Bhatotia, Spyros Blanas, Ruichuan Chen, Christof Fetzer, Thorsten Strufe.
- SAND: Towards High-Performance Serverless Computing. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Ivica Rimac, Manuel Stein, Klaus Satzke, Andre Beck, Paarijaat Aditya, Volker Hilt.
- Towards Reliable Application Deployment in the Cloud. Ruichuan Chen, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Bimal Viswanath, Ivica Rimac, Volker Hilt.
- Sieve: Actionable Insights from Monitored Metrics in Distributed Systems. Joerg Thalheim, Antonio Rodrigues, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Pramod Bhatotia, Ruichuan Chen, Bimal Viswanath, Lei Jiao, Christof Fetzer.
- The Case for a General and Interaction-based Third-party Cookie Policy. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Nicholas Weaver.
- SplitX: High-Performance Private Analytics. Ruichuan Chen, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Paul Francis.
- Non-tracking Web Analytics. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Michaela Hardt, Paul Francis, Johannes Gehrke.
- Large-scale Incremental Data Processing with Change Propagation. Pramod Bhatotia, Alexander Wieder, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Umut A. Acar.
- Peer-to-peer Multipoint Video Conferencing with Layered Video. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Oznur Ozkasap, M. Reha Civanlar.
- Data Recovery for Web Applications. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ashvin Goel.
- Multi-objective Optimization for Peer-to-Peer Multipoint Video Conferencing Using Layered Video. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Oznur Ozkasap, M. Reha Civanlar.
- Peer-to-peer Multipoint Video Conferencing Using Layered Video. Istemi Ekin Akkus, M. Reha Civanlar, Oznur Ozkasap.
- Secure Transmission of Video on an End System Multicast using Public Key Cryptography. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Oznur Ozkasap, M. Reha Civanlar.
Elsevier Journal on Performance Evaluation, Volume 167, 2025. [pdf] [online]
[Best Paper with Artifacts Award]
Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on System Software for Trusted Execution (SysTEX), SysTEX 2024, Vienna, Austria, July 2024. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on System Software for Trusted Execution (SysTEX), SysTEX 2024, Vienna, Austria, July 2024. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, ACM SoCC2021, Seattle, WA, USA and Virtual, November 2021. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys), APSys 2021, Hong Kong, China, August 2021. [pdf]
Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on High Performance Serverless Computing, ACM HiPS2021, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2021. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the IEEE, doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2019.2898101, 2019. [pdf]
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, ACM SoCC2018, Carlsbad, CA, USA, October 2018. [pdf] [the morning paper] [code]
Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX ATC2018, Boston, MA, USA, Jul 2018. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, CoNEXT2017, Seoul/Incheon, South Korea, Dec 2017. [pdf]
Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware 2017, Middleware2017, Las Vegas, NV, USA, Dec 2017. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Web 2.0 Security & Privacy, W2SP2015, San Jose, CA, USA, May 2015. [pdf] [code (Firefox)] [code (Chrome)]
Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM2013, Hong Kong, China, August 2013. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS2012, Raleigh, NC, USA, October 2012. [pdf]
3rd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, HotCloud'11, Portland, OR, USA, June 2011. [pdf]
Journal of Network and Computer Applications, Volume 34, Issue 1, January 2011, pp. 137-150. (Extended version of ICIP2006 and PV2007 papers) [pdf]
Proceedings of the 40th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN2010, Chicago, IL, USA, June 2010. [pdf]
Proceedings of the 16th International Packet Video Workshop, PV2007, Lausanne, Switzerland, November 2007. [pdf]
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, ICIP2006, Atlanta, GA, USA, October 2006. [pdf]
International Workshop on Multimedia, Representation and Security, MRCS2006, Istanbul, Turkey, Sep 2006.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4105, pp. 603-610, Springer-Verlag Heidelberg. [pdf]
Technical Reports
- Cybercasing 2.0: You Get What You Pay For. Jaeyoung Choi, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Serge Egelman, Gerald Friedland, Robin Sommer, Michael Carl Tschantz, Nicholas Weaver.
- Formal Model and Verification of Privacy-preserving String Discovery for Mobile and Web Analytics. Istemi Ekin Akkus.
- String Discovery for Private Analytics. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Paul Francis.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.06584, November 2018. [pdf, arXiv]
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems Technical Report MPI-SWS-2014-006, September 2014. [pdf]
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems Technical Report MPI-SWS-2013-006, November 2013. [pdf]
Other
- Towards A Non-tracking Web. Istemi Ekin Akkus.
- Data Recovery for Web Applications. Istemi Ekin Akkus.
- Peer-to-peer Multipoint Video Conferencing Using Layered Video. Istemi Ekin Akkus.
Ph.D. thesis, Technical University of Kaiserslautern - Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Mar 2016. [pdf]
Master of Applied Science thesis, University of Toronto, Toronto ON, September 2009. [pdf]
Master of Science thesis, Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey, August 2007. [pdf]
Service
Program Committee- 2024: PAISE24
- 2023: PAISE23, IEEE EDGE 2023
- 2022: PAISE22, HiPS2022
- 2021: PAISE21, HiPS2021
- 2020: HotEdge20, SEC 2020
- 2019: HotEdge19, Middleware19 (external)
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Kaiserslautern and Saarbruecken, Germany
Sep 2010 - Mar 2016
Dissertation title: Towards A Non-tracking Web
Advisor: Professor Paul Francis
Master of Applied Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON Canada
Sep 2007 - Sep 2009
Thesis title: Data Recovery for Web Applications
Advisor: Professor Ashvin Goel
Master of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey
Sep 2005 - Aug 2007
Thesis title: Peer-to-peer Multipoint Video Conferencing Using Layered Video
Advisors: Professor M. Reha Civanlar, Professor Oznur Ozkasap
Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Engineering, Double Major
Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey
Sep 2000 - June 2005
Last modification November 25, 2024, 10:04 (CET).
