ProperData at IMC 2025
ProperData continued the tradition of strong presence at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference – the premier conference on Internet measurement and analysis. IMC 2025 took place Oct. 27-31, 2025, in Madison, Wisconsin. Several ProperData members and alumni attended, presented their papers, and participated in various capacities.
Papers co-authored and presented by ProperData researchers and alumni at IMC 2025 include the following:
- From Voice to Ads: Auditing Commercial Smart Speakers for Targeted Advertising based on Voice Characteristics, by Tu Le (currently with The University of Alabama, previously at UC Irvine), Luca Baldesi (currently with Apple, previously at UC Irvine), Athina Markopoulou (UC Irvine), Carter T. Butts (UC Irvine), Zubair Shafiq (UC Davis)
- Where in the World Are My Trackers? Mapping Web Tracking Flow Across Diverse Geographic Regions, by Sachin Kumar Singh (University of Utah), Robert Ricci (University of Utah), Alexander Gamero-Garrido (UC Davis)
- CookieGuard: Characterizing and Isolating the First-Party Cookie Jar, by Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami (UC Davis), Aurore Fass (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Zubair Shafiq (UC Davis)
- FP-Inconsistent: Measurement and Analysis of Fingerprint Inconsistencies in Evasive Bot Traffic, by Hari Venugopalan, Shaoor Munir, Shuaib Ahmed, Tangbaihe Wang, Samuel T. King, Zubair Shafiq (all with UC Davis)
- Quantifying the Threat of Sandwiching MEV on Jito: A Measurement of Solana’s Leading Validator Client, by Nicole Gerzon, Ben Weintraub, Junbeom In, Alan Mislove, Cristina Nita-Rotaru (all with Northeastern University)
- An In-Depth Investigation of Data Collection in LLM App Ecosystems, Yuhao Wu, Evin Jaff, Ke Yang (now at UC Irvine), Ning Zhang, Umar Iqbal (all with the Washington University in St. Louis)
ProperData members also led a range of other activities:
- Session chairs: Session 1 (on Privacy) included 4 out of 5 papers co-authored by ProperData members and was chaired by alum Umar Uqbal. Zubair Shafiq chaired Session 4b (on Blockchain).
- Workshop: David Choffnes co-organized the inaugural workshop of Policy-Relevant Internet Measurements and Experimentation (PRIME), co-located with IMC 2025.
- IMC Committees: ProperData faculty and alumni are regular members of the Technical Program Committee. David Choffnes is also a member of the IMC steering committee. It was announced that Alan Mislove will be the TPC Co-Chair for IMC 2026. Athina Markopoulou joined the IMC steering committee (ex-officio, as liaison to the SIGCOMM executive committee).
- Students: several ProperData students attended the conference and the student workshop.
It was great to connect with members and alumni (several now in faculty and industry positions) and see our ProperData community grow and expand.