APPLICATIONS

Professor Mark Crovella to study ways to simplify network connections

Boston University Prof. Mark Crovella, professor of computer science in the College of Arts & Sciences, has been awarded a $450,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study ways of simplifying the graphs that are used to describe and understand complex computer networks.

Many important problems in computer networking depend on the observed properties of network graphs obtained by measuring the behavior of network components such as routers, wireless nodes, and even social relationships. But despite the explosion of detailed data now available such graphs are still poorly understood, in part because of the difficulty of displaying complex, or "high-dimensional," data. Crovella and his team of two graduate students aim to use hyperbolic geometry to create graphs that are simpler.

The team also hopes to create software tools that will facilitate others' research involving networks, and to develop new methods for routing that can be used in creating networks.

Crovella joined the BU faculty in 1994. During 2003-2004, he was a visiting associate professor at the Laboratoire d'Infomatique de Paris VI (LIP6). He received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, a master's from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a PhD in computer science from the University of Rochester. From 1984 to 1994, he worked at Calspan Corporation in Buffalo, NY, eventually as a senior computer scientist.

Crovella's research interests are in performance evaluation, focusing on parallel and networked computer systems. In the networking arena, he has worked on characterizing the Internet and the World Wide Web. He has also investigated the implications of Web workloads for the design of scalable and cost-effective Web servers. Crovella is co-author of Internet Measurement: Infrastructure, Traffic, and Applications (Wiley Press, 2006) and is the author of over one hundred papers on networking and computer systems.