User:Bestavros

Azer Bestavros is Professor of Computer Science at Boston University, which he joined in 1991, and which he chaired from 2000 to 2007, culminating in the Chronicle of Higher Education's ranking of the department as 7th in the US in terms of scholarly productivity.

Azer's research interests are in the broad areas of networking and real-time systems. His research work yielded 10 PhD theses, over 80 masters and undergraduate student projects, and 2 startup companies. It has resulted in 4 issued patents, 4 edited books, dozens of book chapters, and over 100 technical papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. This body of work is highly cited. As of August 2006, with over 3,000 citations, CiteSeer ranks him in the top 5% of its 10,000 most-cited CS authors. Since 1999, WebBib has ranked his publications as one of the top three cited bodies of web-related research by a single author. His research has been funded by grants totaling over $15M from various government agencies and industrial labs.

Azer's research contributions (with dozens of students and collaborators) include his pioneering of the push content distribution model adopted years later by CDNs; his seminal work on traffic characterization and reference locality modeling, his work on various network transport, caching, and streaming media delivery protocols; his work on e2e inference of network caricatures; his work on identifying and countering adversarial exploits of system dynamics; his work on game-theoretic approaches to overlay and P2P networking applications; his generalization of classical rate-monotonic analysis to accommodate uncertainties in resource availability/usage; his use of redundancy-injecting codes for timely access to periodic broadcasts; his work on verification of network protocol compositions, including the identification of deadlock-prone arrangements of HTTP agents; and his work on virtualization services and programming environments for embedded sensor networks.

Azer's curricular development efforts include his signature CS-350 course, which he developed and taught since 1998. Through a rigorous treatment of the invariant concepts underlying computing systems design, CS-350 familiarizes students with canonical problems that reoccur in software systems, including operating systems, networks, databases, and distributed systems, and provides them with a set of classical algorithms and basic performance evaluation techniques for tackling such problems. More recently, Azer is spearheading an initiative to develop a course for non-majors to introduce them to the elements of abstraction, quantitative and methodical thinking that are so fundamental to mathematics and computer science.

Azer is chair of the IEEE Computer Society TC on the Internet and executive member of the TC on Real-Time Systems. He received distinguished ACM and IEEE service awards, and was selected as distinguished speaker of the IEEE Computer Society. He served as general chair, PC chair or PC member of most flagship conferences in networking, real-time systems, and databases, including Sigmetrics, Infocom, ICNP, RTSS, RTAS, ICDCS, LCTES, ICDE, Sigmod, and VLDB. He organized CS leadership workshops at CRA Snowbird conferences on models for university-led technology transfer in 2000, and on models for publications in CS in 2006. He led meetings to develop research agendas and recommendations to government agencies, including the PI meeting of the CRI program at NSF, and the HCCS coordinating committee of NITRD.

Azer has extensive consulting experience, including past engagements with Network Appliance, Macromedia, Allaire, Bowne, SUTI Technologies, and AT&T. He consulted and served on the technical advisory board of many companies, and is retained by a number of law firms as a consultant on intellectual property issues related to networking and Internet technologies.

Azer obtained his PhD in Computer Science in 1992 from Harvard University, under Thomas E Cheatham, one of the "roots" of the academic genealogy of computer scientists.