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General Information

Full Name Liang Zhao
Degree Ph.D. in Informatics, SOKENDAI (September 2026)
Languages Chinese (native), English (fluent), Japanese (business level)

Education

  • 2020 - 2026
    Ph.D. in Informatics
    Graduate Institute for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI, Tokyo, Japan
    • Dissertation: Characterizing Global IPv6 Scanning Activities via Proactive Network Telescopes
    • Advisor: Prof. Kensuke Fukuda (National Institute of Informatics)
  • 2014 - 2018
    M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and Information Systems
    The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
    • Thesis: Bitrate Adaptation based on Available-Bandwidth Estimation in Video Streaming over NDN
    • Advisor: Prof. Hitoshi Aida
  • 2010 - 2014
    B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering
    The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Research Experience

  • 2022 - 2026
    Research Assistant, IPv6 Scanner Characterization with Proactive Network Telescope
    National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan
    • Designed and operated a proactive network telescope of paired darknets and honeynets, running controlled exposure experiments (DNS vs. NTP Pool) to observe how scanners discover fresh IPv6 prefixes
    • Built a data-driven classification of scanner behavior by target selection, protocol coverage, and temporal patterns
    • Compared the IPv4 and IPv6 scanning ecosystems under identical exposure conditions
  • 2018 - 2021
    Research Assistant, Age of Information aware IoT system
    National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan
    • Formulated joint transmission scheduling and cache replacement in a cache-enabled IoT pub/sub system to minimize weighted average Age of Information
    • Proposed low-complexity scheduling and caching heuristics

Honors and Awards

  • 2025
    • ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Student Travel Grant

Research Interests

  • Network Threat Defense
    • Deception technology (honeypots, darknets)
    • Proactive threat hunting
  • Network Measurement
    • IPv6/IPv4 scanning
    • Internet-scale traffic analysis
  • High-performance Networking
    • Programmable data plane (P4), RDMA, eBPF
    • Congestion control
  • Systems for AI
    • In-network gradient aggregation
    • KV-cache transport for LLM inference

Skills

  • Systems & Tooling: Linux toolchain (gcc / make / gdb), Docker, NS-3, Python, C++
  • Cloud: AWS EC2 (NTP server cluster operated across 7 regions)
  • Data: SQL, Elasticsearch / Arkime, Dagster
  • Machine Learning: clustering, anomaly detection for network traffic

Other Interests

  • Hobbies: Art museums, Movies, etc.