Flavio Esposito, Ph.D.

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Associate Professor


Highlights

Nov 2024: NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure Awarded: Compute-Campus: Modernizing Campus Cyberinfrastructure for AI-Enhanced Research and Education

Aug 2024: NSDI 2025 Paper accepted: L. Pappone, A. Sacco, and Flavio Esposito. ‘‘Mutant: Learning Congestion Control from Existing Protocols via Online Reinforcement Learning". in Proc. of USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2025.

This year I will be the Travel Grant Co-chair of ACM SIGCOMM 2025. I was the general co-chair of IEEE NetSoft 2024, the 10th IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization. A wonderful group of colleagues and I had fun hosting the conference in St.Louis last summer.

Current Openings

I have openings for PhD students, visiting researchers, and a postdoc to work on several cyber-physical systems: if you have expertise and interest in networks, learning, and edge computing, as well as applications of these fields to medicine and agriculture, please apply.

Check the HIRING webpage for details.

Entrepreneurship

Together with my former PhD student Alessandro Sangiorgi, I co-founded Spaghetti Code Labs. Our first product is a Cybersecurity educational mobile app WeeNet that has 5.7M+ downloads.

Office: ISE 234D

Research interests

Most of my research centers on cyber-physical systems and networked systems: network virtualization, network management, Software-Defined Networks (SDN), network architectures and wireless networks. I also enjoy working on interdisciplinary problems, for example, this one or this one.

Awards

  • In 2021, I received the Outstanding Graduate Mentoring Faculty Award from the School of Engineering, and I was a finalist for the Undergraduate Mentoring Award in the College of Arts and Sciences. I am grateful for all students that nominated and voted for me.

  • I am currently a Principal Investigator on the research awards listed below from the National Science Foundation (NSF). In the past, I have also received an NSF subaward from the University of Missouri, on an EPSCoR project, and a SLU intramural President's Research Fund Award. I have also received a COMCAST Innovation Fund Award in Jan 2020, and one 150K award from the International Center for Responsible Gaming (ICRG).

Short Bio

  • Oct 2013 - July 2016: Senior Software Engineer at Exegy Inc.

  • May 2007 - Aug 2007: Eurecom Institute, Sophia Antipolis, France (Research Internship)

  • Jan 2006 - Oct 2006: Alcatel-Lucent, Florence, Italy – now Thales (Permanent Contract)

Mentoring

I was a proud mentor for the McNair Program at SLU.

Current Students and Collaborators

In alphabetical order:

MS and PhD students

(I am hiring new PhD students)

  • Pappone, Lorenzo, Ph.D. student in CS at SLU

  • Pinto, Andrea, Ph.D. student in CS at SLU

  • Sangiorgi, Alessandro, Ph.D. student and co-founder of Spaghetti Code Labs, LLC

  • Sreenivasa Murthy, Shruthi, Ph.D. student and Assistant Director of Research Computing at SLU

Past Students and Collaborators

  • Ali, Wazma, MS student in AI at SLU

  • Alfauri, Haneen M.S. student at SLU (now Ph.D. student at Washington University of St.Louis)

  • Ahmad, Sadiya M.S. student at SLU

  • Alzadjali, Aziza visiting Ph.D, student from University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA.

  • Amoroso, Roberto, visiting MS student (now Ph.D. student at UNIMORE, Italy).

  • Bhavanasi, Sai Shreyas, MS student in AI at SLU

  • Berno, Michele, visiting Ph.D. student from University of Padova, Italy

  • Castellano, Gabriele, visiting Ph.D. student from Politechnic of Turin (now postdoc at Bell Lab)

  • Chemodanov, Dmitrii (Ph.D. student at UM, now at Google, CA)

  • Contoli, Chiara, Visiting Ph.D., now Assistant Professor at University of Urbino, Italy University of Bologna, Italy

  • Coral, Roberto M.S, now Software Engineer at Esri, USA

  • Davoli, Gianluca, visiting Ph.D student from University of Bologna, Italy

  • Flocco, Matteo, M.S. student at SLU (now at Reply, Italy)

  • Gaballo, Alessandro, Visiting Master Student from Eurecom, France, now Data Scientist at Ericsson, Sweden.

  • Gottsacker, Matthew, Undergrad at SLU (BS 2018). Now Ph.D. student at UCF

  • Hogan, Mary, (Research Assistant) SLU (BS 2017). Now Ph.D. student in CS at Princeton University

  • Khalid, Aman, M.S. student at SLU (now Ph.D student at Northwestern University, USA)

  • Gazze’, Sebastiano Visiting MS Student from Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy

  • Irakoze, Andy Florian, BS/MS in Computer Science at SLU

  • Muhammad, Waqar, M.S. student at SLU (Software Engineer)

  • Mushtaq, Maria, M.S. student at SLU (now Ph.D. student at University of Regina, Canada)

  • Okafor, Okwudilichukwu (Marshall), MS student in CS at SLU

  • Okorie, Princewill, M.S. in AI at SLU (Software Engineer)

  • Palumbo, Fabio visiting Ph.D. student from University of Napoli Federico II, Italy

  • Park, Hunter, undergraduate at SLU (Software Eng.)

  • Pasquesi, John, M.S. student at SLU (now Software Engineer at Boeing, St.Louis, MO)

  • Robinson, Wilfredo visiting M.S. student from Eurecom, France (now PhD student in Mechanical Eng. at SLU)

  • Felipe Sampaio Dantas da Silva, Ph.D. student at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, UFRN, Brasil.

  • Sacco, Alessio, visiting PhD student and visiting postdoc, now Assistant Professor at Politecnico of Torino, Italy

  • Samanta, Amit, Ph.D student at University of Utah, USA

  • Scalingi, Alessio, visiting M.S. student from University of Naples, Federico II (now Ph.D. student at IMDEA Networks, Spain))

  • Turina, Valeria, visiting M.S. student from Politecnico di Torino, Italy (now at Reply, Italy)

  • Ventrella, Agnese (now at Ericsson Research, Sweden)

  • Xu, Tao, Visiting Master Student from Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy Now Ph.D. student at UKY

  • Wang, Jiayi (Research Assistant) SLU (BS 2017). MS student in CS at Northwestern University

  • Zhang, Zongshun, Ph.D. student at Boston University

Past Undergraduate Student Collaborators

  • Kyle Coleman, SLU (BS 2017)

  • Samiksha Mailarpwar, SLU (BS 2018)

  • Emily Maxwell, undergraduate at SLU

  • Thomas Merod, SLU (BS 2018)

  • Meghan Pendyala, SLU (BS 2017)

Selected Service Activities