Short Biography

Mark Crovella is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Boston University, where he has been since 1994. He served as Chair of Computer Science from 2013 to 2018, and since 2022 he has been the first Chair of Academic Affairs in CDS. From 2012 to 2014 he worked as Chief Scientist of Guavus, Inc. During 2003-2004 he was a Visiting Associate Professor at the Laboratoire d'Infomatique de Paris VI (LIP6), and in 2018-2019 he was visiting faculty at LIP6, INRIA Paris, and LINCS Paris. He received a B.S. from Cornell University in 1982, and an M.S. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester in 1994. From 1984 to 1994 he worked at Calspan Corporation in Buffalo NY, eventually as a Senior Computer Scientist.

His research interests are in data science and machine learning broadly, with applications in computational biology, social impacts of computing, and computer networking. In the networking arena, he has worked on characterizing the Internet and the World Wide Web. He has explored the presence and implications of self-similarity and heavy-tailed distributions in network traffic and Web workloads. He has also investigated the implications of Web workloads for the design of scalable and cost-effective Web servers. In addition he has made numerous contributions to Internet measurement and modeling; and he has examined the impact of network properties on the design of protocols and the construction of statistical models. In the network science arena, he has focused on the analysis of social, biological, and data networks.

Professor Crovella is co-author of Internet Measurement: Infrastructure, Traffic, and Applications (Wiley Press, 2006) and is the author of over two hundred papers on networking and computer systems. He holds ten patents deriving from his research. As of 2021, Google Scholar reports over 30,000 citations to his work. He has given numerous invited talks and tutorials, and is a founder of and consultant to companies involved in Internet technologies.

Between 2007 and 2009 Prof. Crovella was Chair of ACM SIGCOMM. He is a past editor for Computer Communication Review, IEEE-ACM Transactions on Networking, Computer Networks and IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was the Program Chair for the 2003 ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference and for IFIP Networking 2010, and the General Chair of the 2005 Passive and Active Measurement Workshop. His paper (with Azer Bestavros) “Self-Similarity in World Wide Web Traffic: Evidence and Possible Causes” received the 2010 ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award, and his paper (with Gonca Gursun, Natali Ruchansky, and Evimaria Terzi) “Routing State Distance: A Path-Based Metric for Network Analysis” won a 2013 IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize. Professor Crovella is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.