In a Nutshell

I received my PhD from MIT in Computer Science in 2005 under the supervision of Dave Clark, and continue to do research in the areas of game theory, networking, and distributed systems. If you are interested in my research, some of my publications can be found below.

I am currently the Chief Technology Officer at Akamai Technologies. If you are interested in contacting me for professional matters, please contact me there.

If you wish to contact me for matters regarding my research (or are a long-lost friend without another way to contact me), you can do so at [my lastname]@ alum [dot] mit [dot] edu .

Research Interests

My PhD thesis (below) examines the use of repeated game theory as an analytical tool for building real-world networked applications that are robust to user incentives.

More generally, I have done work and am interested in the following areas:

• Incentives in Networks -- from network formation to security
• Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs)
• Wireless Networks
• Peer-to-Peer Networks
• Large Scale Distributed Systems
• Effective Internet measurement and network diagnostic tools
• Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

PhD Thesis

Selected Publications

• Machine Learning for Efficient Neighbor Selection in Unstructured P2P Networks
  Robert Beverly and Mike Afergan
  Proceedings of USENIX Tackling Computer Systems Problems with Machine Learning Techniques (SysML 2007)
  
• Using Repeated Games to Design Incentive-Based Routing Systems
  Mike Afergan
  IEEE INFOCOM 2006, Barcelona, Spain, April 2006.
  
• Repeated-Game Modeling of Multicast Overlays
  Mike Afergan and Rahul Sami
  IEEE INFOCOM 2006, Barcelona, Spain, April 2006.
  
• Experience with some Principles for Building an Internet-Scale Reliable System
  Mike Afergan, Joel Wein, and Amy LaMeyer
  WORLDS '05, San Francisco, CA, December 2005.
• The State of the Email Address
  Mike Afergan and Rob Beverly
  ACM Computer Communications Review, Measuring the Internet's Vital Statistics, January 2005.
  
• On the Benefits and Feasibility of Incentive Based Routing Infrastructure
  Mike Afergan and John Wroclawski
  PINS '04, Portland, Oregon, August 2004.
  
• Applying Repeated Games to Networking Problems (extended abstract)
  Mike Afergan
  Poster Session at SIGCOMM, Portland, Oregon, August, 2004.
• Repeated Game Analysis of Internet Routing (extended abstract)
  Mike Afergan
  Technical Report and a poster at PODC, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada, July, 2004.

Other