This talk describes two network overlays that are used heavily by the customers of Akamai Technologies today. The first protects the banking industry from distributed denial of service attacks, whereas the second reduces the latency experienced by users of a major search engine.  In the context of these two overlays, the talk discusses limitations in the functionality that a content distribution network (CDN) like Akamai can provide on behalf of its customers (the content providers), and suggests that there may be opportunities to address these limitations by exploiting social awareness.

Biography

Bruce Maggs received the S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively.  His advisor was Charles Leiserson.  After spending one year as a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, he worked as a research Scientist at NEC Research Institute in Princeton from 1990 to 1993.  In 1994, he moved to Carnegie Mellon, where he stayed until joining Duke University in 2009 as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science.  While on a two-year leave-of-absence from Carnegie Mellon, Maggs helped to launch Akamai Technologies, serving as its Vice President for Research and Development, before returning to Carnegie Mellon. He retains a part-time role at Akamai as Vice President for Research. 

Maggs's research focuses on networks for parallel and distributed computing systems.  In 1986, he became the first winner (with Charles Leiserson) of the Daniel L. Slotnick Award for Most Original Paper at the International Conference on Parallel Processing, and in 1994 he received an NSF National Young Investigator Award.  He was co-chair of the 1993-1994 DIMACS Special Year on Massively Parallel Computation and has served on the steering committees for the ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) and ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), and on the program committees of numerous ACM conferences including STOC, SODA, PODC, and SIGCOMM.