Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Professor Lecture • Riding Along with the Time-traveling Networking Researcher

Please note: This lecture will take place in DC 1302 and online.

Mostafa H. Ammar, Regents’ Professor
School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

A networking researcher, traveling forward in time from 1985 to the present, would be shocked by many things — not the least of which is the fact that people are still doing networking research in 2022.

In this talk we will first have fun riding along with this time-traveler as they shuttle between 1985 and 2022. What a difference 37 years make! For those of us who cannot afford a time machine, we have observed a more gradual evolution. So getting off the ride-along for a moment, we will attempt to answer these very deep questions about network evolution: Are there any discernible evolutionary patterns? What in the world is OSI and whatever happened to it? Does it make sense to keep talking about THE Internet? Is there anything left to do in networking? Are we having fun yet?

To confirm our answers to these questions and more, we will then continue our ride-along with our friend the time-traveler to the year 2050 and take a look at what networking looks like then.

Biography: Mostafa Ammar is a Regents’ Professor with the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Ammar received the S.B. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo.

Dr. Ammar’s research interests are in network architectures, protocols and services. He has contributions in many areas within networking research, most recently in disruption-tolerant networks, mobile cloud computing, network virtualization, packet scheduling in modern networks, and adaptive video streaming. To date, 39 Ph.D. students have completed their degrees under his supervision; many have gone on to distinguished careers in academia and industry.

Dr. Ammar has served the networking research community in multiple roles. Most notably, he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN) from 1999 to 2003, and he was the co-TPC Chair for the IEEE ICNP 1997, ACM CoNEXT 2006 and ACM SIGMETRICS 2007 conferences. He received many awards throughout his career. He is most proud of receiving the 2018 Alumni Achievement Award for Academic Excellence from the University of Waterloo. Dr. Ammar is Fellow of the ACM and Fellow of the IEEE.

Did you miss Professor Mostafa Ammar’s lecture or would you like to hear it again? If so, just start the video below.