IMDEA Networks organizes the 24th edition of the ACM IMC 2024 Conference in Madrid

The event, held at the historical Telefónica building, brought together over 260 researchers from 119 institutions across 28 countries, with IMDEA Networks’ researchers on the organizing committee. The conference program covers and discusses recent research findings in the field of computer network analysis and cybersecurity

06 November 2024

IMDEA Networks organized the 24th edition of the prestigious international conference ACM IMC 2024, held at the Espacio Fundación Telefónica from November 3th to 6th. IMDEA Networks’ researchers Narseo Vallina Rodríguez and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil served as general chairs of the event, which welcomed 260 participants from 119 academic and industry institutions across 28 countries. This year’s edition made an effort to reach out to participants from under-represented African and South American institutions thanks to geo-diversity travel grants. 

The IMC conference series is an internationally selective forum for presenting cutting-edge research on empirical network measurements and analysis. The technical program included over 40 peer-reviewed articles tackling very important and timely research problems such as cybersecurity, privacy, cybercrime, social networks, network performance and robustness, application and user behavior. Prof. Alan Mislove from Northeastern University (Boston, USA) opened the conference with a very interesting Keynote about how empirical Internet research can inform tech policy, leveraging the experience he gained while serving at the White House. The conference, which is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) was supported by key actors in the Internet and research ecosystem: Akamai, ICANN, IpInfo, Google, Meta, Cisco/ThousandEyes, Comcast, TelecoRenta, Internet Society, Internet Initiative Japan, Ripe NCC, Brave, Fastly, and Telefonica, as well as institutional support from Fundación para el Conocimiento Madri+d and the USA National Science Foundation. 

Beyond its academic program, conference attendees participated in sponsor-led events from companies such as IPinfo, Google and Meta, a poster session, and a hackathon organized by the Internet Society, M-Lab, IIJ, and IODA, attracted participants interested in exploring and visualizing open data to identify network disruption events. The attendees also enjoyed a unique cultural program involving a guided visit to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. 

This years’ conference program also included an IMDEA Networks’ article on mobile data analysis during public protests. Researchers André Zanella, Diego Madariaga, Sachit Mishra, Orlando Martínez-Durive, and Marco Fiore, along with Z. Smoreda from Orange Innovation, presented their work titled “Characterizing, modeling and exploiting the mobile demand footprint of large public protests.” This study examines the role of smartphones and mobile applications in protests, specifically during the 2023 pension reform strikes in France, revealing the mobile demand footprint created during these events and presenting models to track the evolution of protests and estimate participation levels using aggregated network data.