News

26 August, 2025 – Our work Efficient Sketching for Heavy Item-Oriented Data Stream Mining With Memory Constraints was accepted in IEEE Transactions on Computers.

26 August, 2025 – Our work ECHO: Effective coreset-driven learning via hierarchical optimizations was accepted at IEEE ICDM 2025.

5 August, 2025 – Our work Harmonia: A Swift and Accurate Approximate Data Structure for Real-Time Heavy Flow Detection in High-Speed Networks was accepted at ADMA 2025.

22 July, 2025 – Our work Pallas: A Data-Plane-Only Approach to Accurate Persistent Flow Detection on Programmable Switches in High-Speed Networks was accepted for publication at IEEE ICNP 2025.

30 April, 2025 – Our work Pontus: A memory-efficient and high-accuracy approach for persistence-based item lookup in high-velocity data streams was accepted for publication ath the ACM Web Conference 2025.

9 Jan, 2025 – Weihe Li's paper Pandora: An Efficient and Rapid Solution for Persistence-Based Tasks in High-Speed Data Streams will appear at ACM SIGMOD 2025.

15 May, 2024 – Our work Stable-Sketch: A Versatile Sketch for Accurate, Fast, Web-Scale Data Stream Processing received the Best Student Paper award at ACM Web Conference 2024.

Members

Paul Patras

Paul Patras leads the Mobile Intelligence Lab. He is a Full Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture (ICSA). He holds a Ph.D. in Telematics Engineering from University Carlos III of Madrid and is the first alumnus of the IMDEA Networks Institute. He held visiting research positions at the University of Brescia, Northeastern University, Technical University Darmstadt, and Rice University. His research bridges the gap between fundamental mathematical models and real-world applications of networked systems, focusing on problems related to artificial intelligence in mobile networks, performance optimisation, security and privacy, prototyping and test beds.

Alec Diallo

Alec Diallo is a postdoctoral research associated. His research crosses the boundaries between artificial intelligence, neural network explainability, computer networking, security and privacy.

Weihe Li

Weihe Li is a postdoctoral research associate. His research focuses on high-speed data stream processing using approximate data structures.

Rui Li

Rui Li is a researcher scientist at Samsung AI Cambridge, UK and an affiliated member of the Mobile Intelligence Lab. She graduated with a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2019, and her thesis was advised by Dr Paul Patras. Rui is interested in domain customisations of machine learning in mobile networks and wireless communications.

Past members

Haoyu Liu, PhD, 2019–2023 (now at Tencent)

Rupen Mitra, MPhil, 2021–2023 (now at Cambridge University)

Yini Fang, MPhil, 2019–2022 (now at Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Luyang Xu, Research Visitor, 2020 – 2021 (now with Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Alexis Duque, Post-doctoral Research Associate, 2020–2021 (now at Net AI)

Chaoyun Zhang, PhD, 2016–2020 (now at Microsoft Research Asia)

Media Coverage

Our research on the privacy of different Android distributions was featured in EuroNews, Hacker News, The Register, Yahoo News, Fox News, Voice of America, Help Net Security, The Irish Times, Belfast Telegraph, Irish Examiner, IT World Canada, Asia Financial, DIGIT, Science X, Techdirt, RT, Newsmax, Texplore, India Education Daily, Hypertext, 91mobiles, BGR, Techstory, Heise (DE), Tarnkappe.info (DE), Clubic (FR), ICTjournal (FR), OK Diario (ES), Gigazine (JP), CityPortal (GR), Fastweb (IT), IlCitadinoOnline (IT), TuttoAndroid (IT), Tiroler Tageszeitung (AT), Evenimentul Zilei (RO), GRYOnline (PL), Kallxo (XK), Diario Libre (RD), Droidsans (Th).

Our survey of deep learning in mobile and wireless networks has been picked up by Chinese media and was covered in The Heart of the Machine, Trencent, NetEase, SINA, and Sohu.com.

Our security and privacy investigation of the Belkin WeMo ecosystem featured in The National, The Herald, Phys.org, Technology.org, ECN Mag, tekk.tv, qianjia.com, The Edinburgh Reporter, Edinburgh Live, Scottish Construction Now, Scottish Housing News. Forth Radio also ran a short interview with me about this work.

Research

Deep Learning Powered Mobile Network Analytics

In-depth city-scale mobile network traffic analysis is essential for a range of network engineering, such as network slicing and anticipatory resources provisioning. Unraveling in real time the geographic distribution of data consumption and predicting future demands in real-time remains challenging, due to substantial measurements, storage and post-processing overheads. This project tackles these challenges by developing dedicated deep learning techniques that extract abstract features characteristic to mobile traffic, in order to serve intelligent resource management tools in future networks.

Automatic Threat Detection and Anomaly Counteraction in Home IoT

The number of Internet-connected devices is expected to reach 1 trillion by 2035 and a large fraction of these devices will become an integral part of households. This can improve the productivity and quality of life of their users, but also exposes them to new cyber security and privacy risks. This project focuses on designing intelligent algorithms that can detect and counteract cyber threats originating from or targeting Internet of Things (IoT) devices in user homes, without requiring manual intervention. We are also investigating novel mechanisms that can allow users to operate safely with potentially compromised gadgets, while ensuring such devices will not damage the networking infrastructure or the operation of other equipment.

Sponsors

The Mobile Intelligence Lab gratefully acknowledges the support of the following organizations.