On July 5th, 2025, 27 of our graduating Bachelor students presented their research projects at the Twente Student Conference on IT (TScIT). As DACS, we are proud to have supervised our students within the Network Systems and Network Security track. Their projects covered a wide range of timely and important topics—including cybersecurity, internet infrastructure, wireless networks, and social platforms—each contributing to a more trusted, transparent, and resilient Internet.
Held in two parallel sessions, the presentations from TCS and BIT students explored the current state of digital communication systems. Topics ranged from the deployment of core services such as Network Time Protocol (NTP) and DNS root servers to the operation of public internet scanners. Several students proposed novel algorithmic tools, such as techniques to profile mobile applications, even when encrypted, or new data structures that enable faster analysis of network telescope data.
In light of the growing popularity of large language models (LLMs), multiple studies investigated their use in cybersecurity, such as detecting booter websites or identifying IoT-related vulnerabilities within the CVE database. Sustainability also took center stage in a study examining the global distribution of green hosting providers between 2021 and 2024.
Given the central role of social media and content platforms in our everyday life, several projects analyzed services such as Reddit, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube Kids. Topics included technical investigations into domain blocking in parental control systems, an analysis of content diversity in YouTube Kids' recommendation algorithm, and the detection and mitigation of hate speech across platforms with a strong emphasis on promoting safer online spaces.
Among the highlights, Niek Damink received the Best Paper Award out of the six nominations in the track. His research introduced a new task scheduling method based on Longest Betweenness Centrality which is a graph-based metric that assesses how critical each task is to the overall process. His approach consistently outperformed many established methods and performed close to the top benchmark, demonstrating how deeper structural insights can lead to more efficient computing.
We also had the pleasure to present the Best Presentation Awards to Martin Angelov and Rein Fernhout, based on audience votes in each of the two parallel sessions. Martin’s work explored how anycast deployment has evolved over the past decade, while Rein analyzed the global deployment and characteristics of NTP servers.
Congratulations to Niek, Martin, Rein, and to all our graduates, for their outstanding work and contributions!
Best paper award:
- Niek Damik, A Novel Heuristic for Directed Acyclic Graph Task Scheduling Using Longest Betweenness Centrality
Best presentation awards:
- Martin Angelov, Analyzing Anycast Operator Diversity and Service Deployment
- Rein Fernhout, Charting the Temporal Topology: Enumerating the Global NTP Server Network
