Prospective Students

Joining my research group at UMD

Recruiting

I am recruiting PhD students to join my research group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I will start as an Assistant Professor in 2027.

If you are interested in working with me, please apply through the official UMD Computer Science graduate admissions process. In your statement, please mention me, Loqman Salamatian, by name so your application is easy for me to find. The formal application goes through UMD, and the UMD Graduate School application process page has the university-level details.

You are also welcome to send me a short email describing your background, research interests, and what draws you to the group. The email does not need to be elaborate; its main purpose is to help me identify your application.

Research

My research asks how we can understand an Internet that is globally important but only partially observable. Network operators, researchers, policymakers, and users often need answers to questions that the available data was not designed to answer: where a performance problem originates, how traffic reaches a service, which infrastructure choices shape user experience, or how technical systems distribute access and reliability across populations.

Addressing these questions usually requires combining several kinds of work. We may design new measurements, repurpose large operational datasets, build systems that operate at Internet scale, or develop inference methods that recover hidden structure from indirect evidence. A recurring challenge is to distinguish what the data directly establishes from what must be inferred, and to characterize the assumptions under which that inference is credible.

Current and prospective directions include Internet measurement, network topology and routing inference, performance diagnosis, infrastructure planning, and methods for studying the social and policy consequences of networked systems. I am especially interested in work that crosses traditional boundaries: for example, using systems techniques to answer questions about accountability, or using measurement and causal reasoning to understand how infrastructure decisions affect different users.

Students do not need prior experience in all of these areas. Strong preparation in networking, systems, measurement, statistics, optimization, or data analysis can each provide a useful starting point. More important is an interest in problems where the evidence is incomplete, the right abstraction is not obvious, and progress requires both technical construction and disciplined reasoning.

Working Together

I view research as an iterative process rather than a sequence in which the question, method, and evaluation are fixed from the beginning. Projects often start with an observation or a broad problem. We then sharpen the question, determine what evidence would be convincing, build the necessary system or methodology, and revise our understanding as the results expose weaknesses in the original framing.

I care about technical depth, but also about knowing why a result should be believed. That means examining alternative explanations, testing sensitivity to modeling choices, understanding where a method fails, and resisting claims that extend beyond the evidence. Negative results and failed approaches are often valuable when they reveal that a question was poorly posed or that an assumption does not survive contact with real data.

Writing is part of this reasoning process. Clear exposition forces us to identify the actual contribution, separate mechanism from observation, and explain why the work matters beyond a particular dataset or implementation. I work closely with students on framing, experimentation, visualization, and writing, especially early in a project when these pieces are still tightly connected.

My goal as an advisor is to provide guidance while helping students develop independent research judgment. Over time, students should become able to identify worthwhile problems, choose methods appropriate to the evidence, evaluate their own claims critically, and articulate a research agenda that is recognizably their own. I value curiosity, intellectual honesty, reliability, and a willingness to take increasing ownership of both the direction and execution of the work.