School of Computing graduate research assistant and Ph.D. candidate M A U Shariff (Mahin) presented at the National Science Foundation’s AgWireless 2026 Workshop, held at Iowa State University from Aug. 29–Sept. 1.
AgWireless is a flagship workshop that brings together national researchers, government representatives, and industry leaders to discuss the deployment of advanced wireless networks, edge computing, and AI in rural America to support smart farming and rural communities.
Shariff attended AgWireless as a representative of Netgroup, the research group of professor Byrav Ramamurthy focused on networking and security. Shariff presented his paper, co-authored by Ramamurthy, "Forecasting Bursty Network Traffic on Commodity Hardware,” which explores a 5-phase deployment blueprint using advanced artificial intelligence to forecast network traffic peaks and how these predictive AI models can be adapted for ARA rural x-haul testbeds.
For this research, which is directly supported by grants from NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Shariff and his collaborators validated their models on a large dataset of 13.7 billion packets across 10 core routers on the Internet2 national backbone. Their pipeline successfully trained the complex models in under 6 seconds per router using standard, low-cost commodity hardware.
“This research proves that AI-driven network management can run efficiently in production without expensive high-performance computing clusters,” Shariff said, “This is crucial for deploying smart, self-healing networks in resource-constrained rural areas, such as the ARA wireless testbed.”
Shariff also participated in the workshop’s high-intensity, specialized hackathon. Shariff worked as part of a collaborative team to code and engineer a real-world wireless routing and network optimization solution designed specifically for rural agricultural testbeds. Following the hackathon, Shariff and the team presented case study and technical results to a panel of expert judges and workshop attendees.
"The hackathon was intense but incredibly rewarding,” Shariff said. “Working alongside a talented team of systems researchers from different institutions forced us to think on our feet, combine our diverse technical strengths, and engineer a practical wireless routing solution under a tight deadline. Presenting our final case study and seeing how our technical results resonated with the expert judges was a true highlight of the workshop."
Following the workshop, Shariff also attended the Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa. The Farm Progress Show is the nation’s largest outdoor farm event, annually hosting over 600 exhibitors from around the world and connecting thousands of producers with companies that are pushing the boundaries of innovation in agriculture.
“As a computer scientist and ML systems engineer, seeing autonomous tractors, real-time edge sensors, and massive ag-tech deployments in action was incredibly eye-opening,” Shariff said. “It highlighted the massive scale of modern agricultural data and illustrated the direct, practical need for the robust, high-performance wireless networks we are researching to keep smart farms operating reliably.”
Shariff said he was grateful for the chance to attend the events and present his research on behalf of Netgroup and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
"Attending both the AgWireless workshop and the Farm Progress Show was a pivotal experience for my doctoral journey. It bridged the gap between the abstract mathematical models we build in our lab at UNL and the physical, high-tech machines operating in the fields,” Shariff said. “Seeing how our research in predictive network operations and MLOps directly supports the future of smart agriculture has given me a renewed sense of purpose and motivation as I transition into the next phase of my Ph.D.”
