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
Output(s): Improvements and additional features integrated into IODA’s UI
Link(s): https://github.com/InetIntel/ioda-ui

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
Output(s): Automated workflows/scripts that populate a table for outage investigators to review

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.
Output(s): Scripts that collect power outage information; scripts that convert raw data to a standardized format that is easier to use in power outage analysis and research

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
Output(s): Improved measurement methodologies for detecting traffic throttling; analysis workflows for analyzing Internet measurement data to detect Internet throttling

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.