Professor Wins $35,000 Award For Work on Internet Traffic

UC Berkeley associate professor Vern Paxson was named a recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award by the Association for Computing Machinery earlier this month.

Paxson, who teaches in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department and is also a staff scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Network Research Group, will receive the award for research in the mid-1990s on the nature of Internet traffic.

"I'm delighted and honored," Paxson said. "It is a high honor, and is very pleasing to receive."

The award honors outstanding work done by computer scientists under 35 years of age and includes a $35,000 prize, according to the award's Web site.

The award will be presented in a ceremony on June 28. Paxson says that he does not yet have plans for the money.

Paxson's research, which was completed before he was 35, was the first to monitor traffic between multiple sites, said Scott Shenker, a professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department who nominated Paxson for the award.

Using a network of more than 35 sites, Paxson tracked the movements of packets of data between the sites.

"Vern measured how long the packets took to move, what got dropped, and what happened in the drops," Shenker said. "No one had done this level of systematic measurement before."

Before his work was published, researchers who tracked the flow of data usually looked at movement along a single route, Paxson said.

By using 35 different sites, Paxson was able to look at traffic on more than 1,000 routes. This changed the scale on which the Internet could be understood, he said.

"He brought measurements to a completely different level of seriousness," Shenker said. "Vern revolutionized the field, and it has never been the same."

Paxson has since moved on to become an expert on network security, looking at ways in which people infiltrate secured networks.

"He has not sat on his laurels," Shenker said. "He is one of the few, if not the, leading experts on network security."

Paxson said he is pleased with the work he had done on Internet trafficking.

"Looking back, I'm happy about that work," he said. "It was satisfying in a lot of ways because I knew that I was looking at something that nobody had seen before."

Tags: LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY, COMPUTER