Savvas V. Kastanakis

Latest News

• [Feb '26] Served as a TPC Member (TPC) for the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2026.
• [Feb ’26] Appointed as Publication Chair for the Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference 2026.
• [Jan ’26] Contributed as a co-author to joint AMS-IX–DE-CIX work on IRR data quality (RIPE Labs).
• [Dec '25] Paper accepted at the Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM) 2026.
• [Oct '25] Served as a TPC Member (TPC) for the Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM) 2026.
• [Sep '25] Three papers accepted at the Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM) 2025.
• [Aug '25] Received RACI funding to present Popular BGP Prefixes at RIPE 91 in Bucharest.
• [Aug '25] Served as a Peer Reviewer for the Elsevier Computer Networks Journal (COMNET) 2025.
• [Jul '25] Served as a Shadow TPC Member (STPC) for the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2025.
• [May '25] Invited at the 1st MANRS Community Meeting 2025 to present our work on Critical BGP Prefixes.
• [May '25] Presented at RIPE 90 in Lisbon, Portugal, supported by the RACI RIPE Fellowship.
• [Mar '25] Received RACI funding to present Critical BGP Prefixes: A Measurement-based Analysis on Critical Infrastructure Security at RIPE 90 in Lisbon.
• [Feb '25] Poster accepted at NWO ICT.OPEN 2025: Evaluating BGP Security in Dutch Critical Infrastructure.
• [Dec '24] Successfully defended Ph.D. thesis: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of BGP Routing Modeling: Confounding Factors, Selective Announcements, and Location-aware Simulations.
• [Nov '24] Poster accepted at ACCSS CSNG 2024: From Policy to Practice: A Research Agenda for Measurement-based BGP Risk Assessment.
• [Oct '24] Joined the University of Twente as a Postdoctoral Researcher under the NWO-funded UPIN project.
• [Jul '24] Presented accepted paper at ACM/IRTF ANRW: Investigating Location-aware Advertisements in Anycast IP Networks.
• [Jun '24] Published an invited blog post on RIPE Labs: 20 Years of Inferring Interdomain Routing Policies.
• [May '24] Presented at RIPE 88 in Krakow, Poland, supported by the RACI RIPE Fellowship.

Research Experience

• Postdoctoral Researcher (October 2024 - September 2026)
  Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) Group, University of Twente.
  Project: User-driven Path verification and control for Inter-domain Networks (UPIN).
• Research Engineer (March 2024 - May 2024)
  Institute of Communication & Computer Systems, NTUA.
  Project: Evaluation and validation of connected mobility in real systems beyond 5GS.
• Research Intern (September 2022 - October 2022)
  SimulaMet, Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering.
  Subject: Investigating the Confounding Factors of Interdomain Path Inference.
  
• Research Field Editor (June 2022 - November 2022)
  TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology.
  Subject: Describing research papers in a structured manner within a knowledge graph.
• Research Engineer (May 2020 - October 2020)
  InfoLab21, School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University.
  Subject: Porting research prototypes to production software.
  
• Graduate Student Researcher (2018 - 2020)
  Telecommunications and Networks Lab (TNL), Institute of Computer Science, FORTH.
  Subject: Evaluating Network-aware Recommendations.
  
• Undergraduate Research Fellow (2016 - 2018)
  Telecommunications and Networks Lab (TNL), Institute of Computer Science, FORTH.
  Subject: Design and Implementation of a Network-aware Recommendation Module.
  

Teaching Experience

• Lecturer (April 2025 - July 2025), Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics & Computer Science, University of Twente.
• Teaching Assistant (October 2020 - September 2023), School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University.
• Teaching Assistant (September 2018 - August 2020), Computer Science Department, University of Crete.

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science (2020 - 2024), School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, UK.
  Supervisors: Prof. Neeraj Suri, Dr. Vasileios Giotsas.
  Thesis: Understanding the Confounding Factors of Interdomain Routing Modeling.
• M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering (2018 - 2020), University of Crete, Greece.
  Supervisor: Prof. Xenofontas Dimitropoulos.
  Thesis: Evaluation of Network-aware Recommendation Systems in Realistic Settings.
• B.Sc. in Computer Science (2011 - 2018), University of Crete, Greece.
  Supervisor: Prof. Xenofontas Dimitropoulos.
  Thesis: Design and Implementation of a Network-aware Recommendation Module in an Android Application.

Community Service

• Publication Chair for the Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA) 2026.
• TPC Member of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2026.
• TPC Member of the Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM) 2026.
• Shadow TPC Member of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2025.
• Peer Reviewer for Elsevier Computer Networks (COMNET), 2025.
• Peer Reviewer for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), 2024.
• Peer Reviewer for IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT), 2019.
• Student Member of ACM, 2019.
• Volunteer at the ACM Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), 2018.

Grants

• RACI Fellowship, RIPE 91, Bucharest, Romania, 2025.
• RACI Fellowship, RIPE 90, Lisbon, Portugal, 2025.
• RACI Fellowship, RIPE 88, Krakow, Poland, 2024.
• Travel Grant, ACM Internet Measurement Conference, Nice, France, 2022.
• Curation Grant, TIB Leibniz Information Centre, Germany, 2022.
• Travel Grant, HiPEAC Student Challenge VII, Bilbao, Spain, 2019.

Distinctions and Honors

• Honourable Mention Award, XVIII Workshop on Performance of Computer and Communication Systems, Belem, Brazil, 2019.
• Second Prize Winners, 1st ACM SIGCOMM Hackathon, Budapest, Hungary, 2018.
• Undergraduate Scholarship, ICS FORTH, Heraklion, Greece, 2016.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

• S. Kastanakis, R. Fontein, S. K. Khadka, E. Jaw, C. Hesselman, and M. Jonker. "Prefix Top Lists Reloaded: A Temporal Prefix Ranking Dataset," in Proceedings of the 2026 Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM ’26).
• R. Hendriks, S. Servillo, F. Cuomo, C. Hesselman, R. van Rijswijk-Deij, and S. Kastanakis. "Too Remote to Be Local: Latency Inflation in Anycast due to Remote Peering," in Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM ’25).
• A. Affinito, C. Hesselman, and S. Kastanakis. "GRASS: Green Ranking of Autonomous SystemS," in Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM ’25).
• S. Kastanakis, V. Giotsas, I. Livadariu, and N. Suri. "Investigating Location-aware Advertisements in Anycast IP Networks," in Proceedings of the Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW’24).
• S. Kastanakis, V. Giotsas, I. Livadariu, and N. Suri. "Replication: 20 Years of Inferring Interdomain Routing Policies," in Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference (IMC ’23).
• S. Kastanakis, P. Sermpezis, V. Kotronis, D. Menasche, and T. Spyropoulos. "Network-aware Recommendations in the Wild: Methodology, Realistic Evaluations, Experiments," in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, December 2020.
• P. Sermpezis, S. Kastanakis, J. Pinheiro, F. Assis, M. Nogueira, D. Menasche, and T. Spyropoulos. "Towards QoS-Aware Recommendations," in Proceedings of the 2020 ACM RecSys Workshop on Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CARS 2.0 ’20).
• F. Assis, M. Nogueira, D. Menasche, J. Pinheiro, P. Sermpezis, S. Kastanakis, T. Spyropoulos, C. Delgado. "Content Recommendation and QoE: An Experimental Study on the Role of QoS Towards Video Preferences," in Proceedings of the 2019 XVIII Workshop on Performance of Computer and Communication Systems.
• S. Kastanakis, P. Sermpezis, V. Kotronis, and X. Dimitropoulos. "CABaRet: Leveraging Recommendation Systems for Mobile Edge Caching," in Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Mobile Edge Communications (MECOMM ’18).

Poster Sessions

• N. Höger, C. Hesselman, M. Müller, and S. Kastanakis. "xBGPsec: Enhancing BGP Security with Transitive Signatures and External Validation," 2025 International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM ’25).
• S. Kastanakis, C. Hesselman. "From Policy to Practice: A Research Agenda for Measurement-based BGP Risk Assessment," 2024 ACCSS Cyber Security Next Generation Workshop (CSNG ’24).
• S. Kastanakis, V. Giotsas, N. Suri. "Understanding the Confounding Factors of Interdomain Routing Modeling," 2022 ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC ’22).
• S. Kastanakis, D. Bakalios, I. Konstantakis, and V. Karagiannakis. "Open Agriculture of Things: Towards An Open Source IoT-based Sustainable Agriculture," 2019 HiPEAC CSW Autumn.
• S. Kastanakis, M. Nogueira, F. Assis, P. Sermpezis, D. Menasche, and T. Spyropoulos. "Towards QoS-friendly Content Recommendations: An Experimental Framework," 2018 ACM International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT ’18).