Given the time I spent preparing talks—which is time well-invested if you ask me—I have always been frustrated by the little visibility they get. This page is my attempt to correct that. It showcases (almost) all the presentations and talks I have given over the years, in reverse chronological order.

Besides learning about my research, browsing through this list is a good way to see how my presentation style has evolved over the years. (Hopefully for the better, but I'll let you be the judge of that.)

For each talk, you'll find a description of its context along with links to both an online (and relatively mobile-friendly) slideshow and the PDF. Links to recordings are also included, whenever available. The online slideshow is made using reveal.js. Use arrow keys to navigate, Space for next slide, F for fullscreen, O or Esc for overview, and ? for the complete list of keyboard shortcuts. In case you wonder, I use Keynote for designing my slides and rely on a grid-based design.

A couple of highlights:

• My latest keynote talk which surveys our recent works on network verification;
• A talk in which I describe my "research vision" that I gave at a yearly retreat;
• My tenure talk which surveys my research at ETH between 2015 and 2020;
• The presentation I gave to get my ERC Starting Grant;
• The job talk I gave at ETH when applying to become a professor;
• The presentation I gave for my PhD defense, in 2012 (gasp);
• The first talk I ever gave at a conference (technically, it was a workshop). Clearly not the greatest, but we all start somewhere.

Disclaimer: This page is a work in progress: not all the talks are there (yet), so please come back. Some talks overlap in topics and/or content. To avoid useless redundancies though, I only included one copy of each talk even though I might have given it at various venues. (If you are interested in a more exhaustive list of the talks I have given over the years, feel free to check out my curriculum vitae.)

For questions or complaints, feel free to reach me at lvanbever@ethz.ch.

1. 2025
2. Verifying configurations was the easy part (PDF, Video)

   A keynote talk I gave to the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Formal Methods Aided Network Operation (FMANO) and at the ACM/IRTF Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW). In the talk, I reflect on the progress of network verification, and what is needed to make it more usable.

   

3. NSG is 10-years old. Holy Cow! (PDF)

   A short presentation I gave to kickstart the celebrations for the 10-year anniversary of our research group. In it, I briefly reflect on our journey and achievements thus far.

   

4. 2023
5. Machine Learning for Networking. What? With what? For what? (PDF)

   I gave this talk in which I reflect on several aspects of ML applied to networking at the Google Networking Summit. I talk about the potential of transformer-based models and how to train them based on network data; where to get this data from; and what to do with it.

   

6. 2022
7. A solar-powered Internet Backbone? (PDF)

   Every year our research group goes on a retreat for a couple of days. Among many things, we use this time to reflect on new project ideas. The overarching theme of our retreat in 2022 was sustainability. I gave this talk at the beginning of the retreat to discuss about the idea of a solar-powered Internet backbone. FYI, we haven't pushed (yet) on the idea, but the time might come.

   

8. When network programmability meets security: the good, the bad, and the ugly. (PDF)

   A keynote talk I gave at the Workshop on Formal Foundations and Security of Programmable network INfrastructures (FFSPIN), which was co-located with SIGCOMM. In there I reflect on how network programmability can: help us protect network infrastructures (the good); be the target of attacks (the bad); or, worse, enable new ones (the ugly).

   

9. 2021
10. The three tales of (correct) network operations (PDF)

    I won the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star award in 2021 and, as a result, was invited to give the keynote at the ACM CoNEXT conference. In it, I highlight some of our key results regarding configuration synthesis; configuration verification; and reconfiguration techniques.

    

11. My vision on research (PDF)

    A presentation on my research vision I gave to my research group during our yearly retreat. In it I reflect on what makes for succesfull research in our field taking inspirations from world-class designers and illustrators (a stretch, I know).

    

12. My experience teaching online (PDF)

    A talk I gave about my experience teaching online during the COVID years, the lessons I learned doing so, alongside with the tools, techniques, and setup I'm using.

    

13. 2020
14. Programmable, Hardware-based Routing and Scheduling (PDF)

    A keynote talk I gave to the Euro P4 workshop in which I talk about how data-plane programmability can help solving routing and scheduling problems. In it I talk about our works on how to speed up failure detection, routing computation, alongside with how to enable programmable scheduling on existing hardware targets.

    

15. 2019
16. Network monitoring in the age of deep network programmability (PDF)

    The keynote I gave to TMA 2019. In it I talk about our works on fast convergence, network reasoning, and network monitoring.

    

17. From Network Verification to Synthesis (PDF)

    The presentation I gave during my interview for getting my ERC Starting Grant on configuration synthesis.

    

18. Self-Driving Networks. Breaking new ground in network automation (PDF)

    This presentation constituted the very last step in my tenure process. In it I reviewed the key works we did since I joined ETH in 2015.

    

19. Network Control Planes. What? How? Where? (PDF)

    A presentation I gave at a Dagstuhl Seminar on Programmable Network Data Planes. In it I talk about control planes, their functions, and where these should be running.

    

20. 2018
21. Programming networks: Not your standard API (PDF)

    A restrospective talk I gave covering our goal of building efficient control loops fot networks running distributed routing protocols.

    

22. 2017
23. Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies (PDF)

    A talk I gave on our most-impactful work to date (at least, when it comes to citation counts). In it I analyze the impact of routing attacks on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin

    

24. 2016
25. Predictive Fast Reroute upon Remote BGP Disruptions (PDF)

    A presentation I gave on SWIFT, a system to speed up convergence times upon remote BGP failures. Ultimately, SWIFT got subsummed by Blink, another of our systems in which we leveraged faster-to-acquire data-plane signals rather than control-plane-based signals.

    

26. 2015
27. Improving the Internet. From Fragility to Resilience (PDF)

    An ETH tradition: every new appointed professor is bound to give an inaugural lecture about his/her research. This is mine.

    

28. Boosting existing networks with SDN (PDF)

    A talk about how to turn existing, traditional networks into Software-Defined ones by taking control over their inputs (Fibbing) and by combining routers with SDN switches (Supercharged).

    

29. 2014
30. Anonymity on Quicksand: Using BGP to compromise Tor (PDF)

    My first HotNets talk! In it I discuss the security impact that BGP routing has over Tor. This work ultimately led to the RAPTOR paper published at Usenix Security and then, later, to our study of the impact of BGP routing on cryptocurrency.

    

31. Making the Internet more scalable and manageable (PDF)

    The job talk I gave at ETH Zürich as part of the interview process. (I guess they were happy with it.)

    

32. 2013
33. On integrating Software-Defined Networking within existing routing systems (PDF)

    A talk I gave during my postdoc in which I present the ideas that ultimately led to the Fibbing paper and the SDX paper.

    

34. HotSwap: Correct and Efficient Controller Upgrades for Software-Defined Networks (PDF)

    How I went from reconfiguring networks in my PhD thesis to upgrading SDN controllers in my postdoctoral research.

    

35. Novel Applications for a SDN-enabled Internet Exchange Point (PDF)

    A talk about interesting usages of Software-Defined eXchange Points (SDXes) I gave at the IETF 87 (in Berlin)

    

36. When the cure is worse than the disease: The impact of graceful IGP operations on BGP (PDF)

    My second talk at INFOCOM in which I talk about the importance of considering the entire set of protocols whenever one reconfigures a network. Check the paper for more details.

    

37. CellSDN: Taking control of cellular core networks (PDF)

    A talk I gave on the SoftCell paper in which we aim at bringing the concepts of SDN to cellular core networks.

    

38. 2012
39. Methods and Techniques for Disruption-Free Network Reconfiguration (PDF)

    My PhD presentation! The official one contained many comics illustrations which I had to remove, unfortunately, for the online version. You can find the text of my thesis here.

    

40. Improving network agility with seamless BGP reconfigurations (PDF)

    A talk I gave at Princeton University (in Jennifer Rexford's group) which ultimately led me to spend two amazing years there as a postdoctoral researcher.

    

41. iBGP Deceptions: More Sessions, Fewer Routes (PDF)

    My first talk at IEEE INFOCOM presenting our paper on the complexity of determining whether a BGP network is correct or not.

    

42. 2011
43. Seamless Network-Wide IGP Migrations (PDF)

    My first presentation at a major conference. To this day, this is still the only SIGCOMM presentation I gave personally.

    

44. 2010
45. Handling the complexity of computer networks management (PDF)

    The intermediate presentation I had to give half-way through my PhD studies and describing my progress thus far.

    

46. 2009
47. Customized BGP Route Selection (PDF)

    A talk I gave on how to increase route and path diversity in BGP by (ab)using BGP MPLS VPNs.

    

48. 2008
49. Towards Validated Network Configurations with NCGuard. (PDF)

    My first real presentation that I gave at the Internet Network Management Workshop (co-located with INFOCOM) in 2008. I presented the results of my master thesis. Not my greatest talk, for sure, but one has to start somewhere.