About

I received my Ph.D. in 1993 from MIT after working at DEC designing protocols and products, including the bridge architecture and Gigaswitch. From 1993-1999, I was a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and at UCSD from 1999 to 2013. I took two years off to found a startup NetSift that was acquired by Cisco in 2005. I was the Distinguished Visitor in the computer science department at Stanford University from 2010-2011. From 2012-2016, I was a Principal Researcher and Partner at Microsoft Research.   So I have made the full circuit from industry to academia to startups to industrial research. It's been fun!

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My early career was spent on dreaming of ways to speed up Internet routers, the workhorses of the Internet, for which I have 25 patents with coauthors. Several of these algorithms appear in commercial systems including Linux (timing wheels), the Cisco GSR (DRR), and Microsoft Windows (IP lookups).  I tried to systematize work in this field by writing a book "Network Algorithmics"  that was published in 2004 by Morgan-Kaufman. I helped design the hardware lookup engine for Procket's 40 Gbps router.  I love keeping in touch with industry. Thus I have been on the advisory boards of Memoir,  Jibe, and most recently Intentionet and have consulted for ST Microelectronics, Fujitsu, and AOL. 

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While most of my papers have been on networking, my curiosity has led me to to other areas such as computer architecture, genomics, and databases. I also love theoretical computer science.  After Dijkstra's early work, I helped develop general techniques for self-stabilization, an abstraction of a strong network fault-tolerance property.  My habit of kibbitzing with theoreticians led me to a fun collaboration with Ron and Fan Graham which had the pleasant side effect of giving me an Erdos number of 2.  My most recent work has been on Network Design Automation, (NDA) about making the Internet correct not just fast,

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I was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022,  Internet Hall of Fame in 2021,  National Academy of Inventors in 2020  and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017.  I won the IEEE Kobayashi Award for Computers and Communications in 2014, and the SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award for networking in 2014. I have been a Fellow of the ACM since 2002 and an ONR Young Investigator. My home community is SIGCOMM.  I was PC co-chair of SIGCOMM 2012 and general co-chair of SIGCOMM 2001.  I have been fortunate to work with great colleagues which has led to best paper awards at SIGCOMM (2020, 2014), ANCS (2013), OSDI (2008) and PODC (1996), and to the IETF Applied Networking Prize (2013).

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As a faculty member, I care about People, Impact, and Ideas.  I am as delighted by the UCSD Best Teacher Award (2001) and the Graduate Mentor of the Year Award at Washington University (1997) as by any other awards.  At UCLA during COVID, I have tried to innovate in teaching using Miniflips and Remote interviews, and we are piloting a new mentoring program for underserved high schoolers.  Here is a link to BruinWalk with UCLA student reviews. I am also proud of my PhD students who have graduated and become Faculty (one an ACM Fellow), founded startups, and became Distinguished Engineers at major companies.

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Here are some measures of the academic impact and industrial impact​ of my work, and my Google Scholar page.  Finally, besides computer science, I am fascinated by other ideas such as interdisciplinary thinking  (using a metaphor I call confluence thinking), technology transfer, and apologetics. 

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