Despite significant increases in availability of Internet connectivity globally, hundreds of millions of people today are unable to access the Internet, the consequences of which have come into sharp focus in recent years. This talk will present research building systems to provide communications service effectively and sustainably to underserved communities, with examples from deployments in rural areas of the Philippines and Indonesia. By focusing on the “edge cases” left unserved by traditional approaches, this work demonstrates how work on rural connectivity carries important lessons for next-generation access networks.

Bio:

Shaddi Hasan is an assistant professor of computer science at Virginia Tech. His research interests lie at the intersection of networking, human-centered computing, and information and communication technologies for development (ICTD). His current research centers on developing infrastructure technologies for historically underserved communities, with a focus on Internet access. Prior to Virginia Tech, he was a software engineer at Facebook Connectivity, and a co-founder at Endaga, a startup building tools for community-run cellular networks. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2019, and his BS from UNC Chapel Hill in 2010.