Tianrui Hu

I recently earned my PhD from the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, advised by Prof. David Choffnes and Dr. Daniel Dubois. Before joining Northeastern, I obtained my M.S. from Virginia Tech under the supervision of Prof. Gang Wang and Prof. Bimal Viswanath.
At Google, I’m currently building softwares for networking systems.

Experience

• Google

  Software Engineer 05/2025 - Present
  

• Netflix

  Engineering Intern 06/2023 - 08/2023
  

Education

• Northeastern University

  Ph.D. in Computer Science 09/2020 - 04/2025

• Virginia Tech

  M.S. in Computer Science 08/2018 - 05/2020

• Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

  B.Eng. in Telecommunication Engineering 09/2014 - 06/2018

Publications

• [IMC ‘24] IoT Bricks Over v6: Understanding IPv6 Usage in Smart Homes

  [PDF] [Dataset & Code] Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2024. Tianrui Hu, Daniel J. Dubois, David Choffnes. * Presentation at:
  - RIPE 89 Measurement Analysis and Tools Working Group (Oct 29th)
  - IETF 121 Dublin IRTF Measurement and Analysis for Protocols Research Group (Nov 5th)

• [IMC ‘23] BehavIoT: Measuring Smart Home IoT Behavior Using Network-Inferred Behavior Models

  [PDF] [Dataset & Code] Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2023. Tianrui Hu, Daniel J. Dubois, David Choffnes.

• [IMC ‘23] In the Room Where It Happens: Characterizing Local Communication and Threats in Smart Homes

  [PDF] [Dataset & Code] Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2023. Aniketh GirishASTERISK_PLACEHOLDER, Tianrui HuASTERISK_PLACEHOLDER, Vijay Prakash, Daniel J. Dubois, Srdjan Matic, Danny Yuxing Huang, Serge Egelman, Joel Reardon, Juan Tapiador, David Choffnes, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez. ASTERISK_PLACEHOLDER Equal contribution. Impact: Our findings are acknowledged by several major IoT vendors and Google, who are working with us on potential mitigations through Android OS, app review, and IoT standardization. News coverage: [CBS] [Wired(ES)] [El País] [Northeastern] [Reddit]

• [IEEE S&P ‘20] Throwing Darts in the Dark? Detecting Bots with Limited Data using Neural Data Augmentation

  [PDF] Proceedings of The 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P), 2020. Steve T.K. Jan, Qingying Hao, Tianrui Hu, Jiameng Pu, Sonal Oswal, Gang Wang, Bimal Viswanath.

• [IC-NIDC ‘18] Multi-Task Adversarial Network Bottleneck Features for Noise-Robust Speaker Verification

  [PDF] Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Network Infrastructure and Digital Content (IC-NIDC), 2018. Hong Yu, Tianrui Hu, Zhanyu Ma, Zheng-Hua Tan, Jun Guo.

• [IJCAI ‘17] Depression detection via harvesting social media: A multimodal dictionary learning solution

  [PDF] Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2017. Guangyao Shen, Jia Jia, Liqiang Nie, Fuli Feng, Cunjun Zhang, Tianrui Hu, Tat-Seng Chua, Wenwu Zhu.

Research Projects

• Mon(IoT)r: Network-based Approaches to Understand and Improve Privacy and Security of Smart Home IoT Devices | 2020-2025
• ProperData: Protecting Personal Data Flow on the Internet | 2020-2025

• Netflix Intern Project | 2023.6-2023.8

• BehavIoT: Modeling Smart Home Behavior | 2020-2022
• Detecting Bots with Limited Data using Neural Data Augmentation | under the supervision of Prof. Gang Wang and Prof. Bimal Viswanath | 2018-2020