LCN 2002

Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy ("buy chee") was appointed the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at the University of California, Berkeley on November 1st, 2001. Prior to that, she spent nearly three years as the Assistant Director for the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate, where she managed an annual budget of approximately $500 million. Dr. Bajcsy came to the NSF from the University of Pennsylvania where she was computer science and engineering professor.

Dr. Bajcsy is a pioneering researcher in machine perception, robotics and artificial intelligence. She is a professor both in the Computer and Information Science Department and in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Department and is a member of the Neuroscience Institute in the School of Medicine. She is also director of the university's General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Laboratory, which she founded in 1978.

Dr. Bajcsy has done seminal research in the areas of human-centered computer control, cognitive science, robotics, computerized radiological/medical image processing and artificial vision. She is highly regarded not only for her significant research contributions but also for her leadership in the creation of a world-class robotics lab, recognized world wide as a premiere research center. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering as well as the Institute of Medicine. She is especially known for her wide-ranging, broad outlook on the field and cross-disciplinary talent and leadership, successfully bridging such diverse areas as robotics and artificial intelligence, engineering and cognitive science.

Dr. Bajcsy received her master's and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University in 1957 and 1967, respectively. She received a Ph.D. in computer science in 1972 from Stanford University, and since that time has been teaching and doing research at Penn's Department of Computer and Information Science. She began as an assistant professor and within 13 years became Chair of the department. Prior to the University of Pennsylvania, she taught during the 1950s and 1960s as an instructor and assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Department of Computer Science at Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. She has served as advisor to more than 50 Ph.D. recipients. In 2001 she received an Honorary Doctorate from Universty of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

In 2001 she became a recipient of ACM A.Newell award.

It's natural to assume that network protocol design is by now a well-known science, where the designers of today's standards take care to understand the tricks and pitfalls learned from previous protocols. This talk dispells this and other myths. It is intended to be provocative, making people question the things people assume are true; instructive, giving hints as to how to avoid some of the problems in future protocols; and inspirational, convincing students that there are ample opportunities to make contributions.

This talk discusses wrong turns that have been made, such as what necessitated the invention of bridges, and what caused IP multicast to be unimplementable. It also talks about how a protocol, even one "proven correct", can go horribly wrong, such as the unstable ARPANET protocol for distributing routing information. It talks about "obvious" tricks such as version numbers, that even today protocol designers insist on misusing. And it covers some of the areas in which research is most needed.

Radia Perlman's work has had a profound impact on our field. She is the inventor of the spanning tree algorithm used by bridges/switches, and a lot of the technology behind modern routing protocols, including robust distribution of routing control messages, designated routers for scalability of multiaccess links, and robust parameter management. She has also analyzed IP multicast and identified the problems with the model that made all designs so complex and unscalable, and introduced the modification to the design (extended address multicast, also known as "simple multicast") that would fix these problems. Her thesis on robust routing in a network despite malicious packet switches is an important proof of concept for this important new denial of service attack. She has most recently been concentrating on network security issues, including analyzing and redesigning IKE, the key distribution protocol for IPsec, and scalable PKI models.

Radia is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. She is the author of Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols, and co-author of Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World, two of the top 10 networking reference books according to Network Magazine. She is one of the 25 people whose work has most influenced the networking industry, according to Data Communications Magazine. She has an S.B. and S.M in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT and about 50 issued patents. She was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.