IODA Research Projects

Description: The Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) dashboard is used globally and provides open source data on connectivity of global Internet. Frontend development support is needed by the Internet Intelligence Lab to support the update and development needs across for the IODA (Internet Outage Detection and Analysis) project.
Skills: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, React, Redux

Description: The IODA outage dataset is a curated dataset of outages used by the Internet Intelligence Lab and others to conduct research (eg Destination Unreachable) and used by global advocacy groups and coalitions to report on government-directed shutdowns (eg Keep It On Coalition’s 2024 report). The goal of this project will be to use the IODA Outages API to create a more automated process to document IODA outages so that they IODA team can maintain an up-to-date investigated outages pipeline
Skills: Python

Description: The IODA project monitors the Internet 24/7 to detect and visualize large connectivity outages in realtime. Many outages picked up by IODA are caused by power outages. For this project we will collect power outage data by scraping websites of electric utility companies in 3-4 different countries where data is available. We will develop an automated process that scrapes and visualizes this data and we will conduct analysis of this data.
Skills: Python, Docker. Experience with writing scrapers/web crawling using tools like Selenium, Scrapy, and/or REST APIs is a plus.

Throttling Detection Data Science

Description: The events detected by IODA are typically the result of complete disruptions to Internet connectivity. However, many of the censorship events reported around the globe involve throttling traffic to such an extreme that network application performance degrades significantly, often to the point of being (nearly) unusable. This project will involve digging into IODA’s measurement data and conducting analysis to see if it is possible to identify throttling events reported by other groups.
Skills: Data analysis, Python

Description: One of IODA’s measurements to monitor Internet connectivity involves running high-frequency traceroute measurements (one traceroute per BGP prefix every 30 minutes). The goal for this project will be to develop a workflow to analyze traceroute data collected by IODA and investigate how and to what extent different network events (e.g., submarine cable cuts) are observed by IODA’s traceroute measurements.
Skills: Familiarity with network data (traceroute), data analysis

Description: Government-ordered shutdowns impact more than 1 billion of the world's Internet users globally. Since 2018, the IODA team has been documenting outages observed on the IODA platform. Through collaboration with political scientists and merging of IODA's outage database with Access Now's #KeepItOn STOP shutdown database, we conducted the first longitudinal analysis of government-ordered Internet shutdowns and spontaneous outages (i.e., disruptions not ordered by the government). The purpose of this project will be to update the datasets and output of the 2023 paper. And produce a data visualization of the data.
Skills: Python (familiarity with R is also a plus, but not required)