Rate My Professor Paul Barford

Paul Barford is the Department Chair and Carl de Boor Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has served since 2001, initially as Assistant Professor from 2001 to 2007 and later as Associate Professor from 2008 to 2011. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University. Before entering academia, Barford worked in industry for eight years, including as Senior Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation from 1987 to 1991 and Director of Planning and Research at DeGeorge Financial from 1991 to 1995. He is the founder and director of the Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory (WAIL) since 2001. Barford has founded several companies, including Nemean Networks LLC in 2007 (acquired by Qualys Inc. in 2010, where he served as Chief Scientist until 2011), MdotLabs LLC in 2013 (acquired by comScore Inc. in 2014, where he was Chief Scientist until 2018), ThousandX LLC in 2019 (Chief Executive Officer), and Terrace Networks LLC in 2024. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, Army Research Office, Cisco, and Intel. He has served as Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 2010, Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, University of Oxford in 2022, and held various editorial and conference leadership roles, including Program Committee Chair for ACM SIGCOMM in 2013.

Barford's research focuses on computer networking, with emphasis on measurement and analysis of Internet protocols, traffic characteristics, and topological structure; Internet security, including detection and identification of fraud, traffic anomalies, malicious attacks, and intrusions; and Internet data science, emphasizing large-scale analytics, data quality, mining, and modeling. He has received prestigious awards such as ACM Fellow in 2016, IEEE Fellow in 2018, ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2014, NSF CAREER Award in 2004, University of Wisconsin Chancellor’s Teaching Innovation Award in 2025, Fellow of the University of Wisconsin Teaching Academy in 2025, and multiple best paper awards including ACM SIGKDD Best Paper in 2012 and ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper in 2016. Key publications include “Take The Long Way Home - Distant Peering to the Cloud” (IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2025), “Clouds Are Where the (Security) Action Is: Have Honeypots Been Left in the Dust?” (IEEE Security & Privacy, 2025), “Assessing the Expansion of Ground Motion Sensing Capability in Smart Cities via Internet Fiber Optic Infrastructure” (Seismological Research Letters, 2024), “BigBen: Telemetry Processing for Internet-wide Event Monitoring” (IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2022), and “A Machine Learning Approach to TCP Throughput Prediction” (IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2010). Barford has advised numerous PhD students who have gone on to positions in academia and industry.