The Federal Communications Commission is encouraging development of applications that help determine how “open” the Internet is—and College of Computing faculty are responding to the challenge.

Two associate professors in the School of Computer Science, Constantine Dovrolis and Nick Feamster, each have entered applications in the FCC Open Internet Apps Challenge. The contest, which runs until July 15, features two categories, one that will name winners selected by a panel of expert judges, and a second decided by a public vote.

Winning apps will be those that best provide users with information about the extent to which their fixed or mobile broadband Internet services are consistent with open Internet principles. Contest winners will be invited to FCC headquarters in Washington to present their work and be honored.  Also, winning apps and the research behind them will be featured on the FCC’s website and social media outlets.

The College’s submitted applications include:

BISMark (Feamster), or Broadband Internet Service benchMARK, a home-router platform that allows users to continually monitor their network performance using measurements taken from the router itself.

NANO (Feamster), or Network Access Neutrality Observatory, which identifies performance degradations resulting from differential treatment of specific classes of applications, users or destinations by the Internet service provider (ISP).

ShaperProbe (Dovrolis), which detects whether an ISP is “traffic shaping”: classifying certain kinds of traffic as low priority and providing different levels of service for them. (ShaperProbe is entered solely in the panel judging.)

Submissions available for public vote will be displayed until July 15 at 5 p.m.