Academic Profile
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.
Click here for a short
resume in PDF
Long version available upon request
