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.
Funded by grants totaling over $15M from various government agencies
and industrial labs, his research work
yielded 10 PhD theses,
over 80 masters and undergraduate student projects, and 2 startup companies.
It has resulted in four issued patents,
a number of books and
book chapters,
and over 100 refereed papers. As of 2008,
CiteSeer lists
over 3,700 citations to this body of work.
Azer's research
contributions (with 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 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
offerings include his signature
CS-109 and
CS-350 courses: CS-109
introduces non-majors to the elements of abstraction, quantitative and methodical thinking
that are so fundamental to mathematics and computer science, whereas CS-350 familiarizes
upper-level CS majors with canonical problems that reoccur in 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.
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 various
PI meetings and
CRA leadership workshops,
and led CS community meetings to develop
national research agendas
and
recommendations to government agencies.
Azer has extensive industrial and consulting experience,
including engagements with
Microsoft, Sycamore Networks, Network Appliance,
Macromedia,
Allaire,
Bowne,
SUTI Technologies, and
AT&T. He served on
the technical advisory board of many companies, and is retained by a number
of law firms as an expert on intellectual property issues related to
networking and Internet technologies. His opinions are often featured in
local and national media outlets.
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
applied computer
scientists.
Click here for a short
resume in PDF
Long version available upon request
