Brian Levine
speaker
Brian Levine is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is an ACM Fellow. He joined UMass after graduating with a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of California Santa Cruz in 1999. His current research is focused on forensics and stopping Internet-based crimes against children. During his career, his research has included many other topics in networking and network security and privacy, such as p2p file sharing, anonymous communication systems, and cryptocurrencies.
Nicholas Weaver
speaker
Nicholas Weaver received a B.A. in Astrophysics and Computer Science in 1995, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2003 from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2003 he joined ICSI where his primary research focus is on network security, notably worms, botnets, and other internet-scale attacks, and network measurement. Other areas have included both hardware acceleration and software parallelization of network intrusion detection, defenses for DNS resolvers, tools for detecting ISP-introduced manipulations of a user’s network connection, cryptocurrency, and small drones. He has also regularly taught as a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley.
Jim Kurose
organizer
Jim Kurose is a Distinguished University Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has been on the faculty since receiving his PhD in computer science from Columbia University. He received a BA in physics from Wesleyan University. He has held a number of visiting scientist positions in the US and abroad, including the Sorbonne University, the University of Paris, INRIA and IBM Research. His research interests include computer network architecture and protocols, network measurement, sensor networks, and multimedia communication. He is proud to have mentored and taught an amazing group of students, and to have received a number of awards for his research, teaching and service, including the IEEE Infocom Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award, the ACM Sigcomm Test of Time Award, and the IEEE Computer Society Taylor Booth Education Medal. With Keith Ross, he is the co-author of the best-selling textbook, Computer Networking: a Top Down Approach (Pearson), now in its 8th edition. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.
From January 2015 to September 2019, Jim was on leave, serving as Assistant Director at the US National Science Foundation, where he led the Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). With an annual budget of nearly $1B, CISE’s mission is to uphold the nation’s leadership in scientific discovery and engineering innovation through its support of fundamental research in computer and information science and engineering and transformative advances in cyberinfrastructure. Here is a blogpost on his NSF work. While at NSF, he also served as co-chair of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Subcommittee (NITRD) of the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology, facilitating the coordination of networking and information technology research and development efforts across Federal agencies. In 2018, Jim also served as the Assistant Director for Artificial Intelligence in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).