Keith W. Ross

Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science
& Department Head

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Polytechnic Institute of NYU
Six MetroTech Center
Brooklyn, NY 11201
phone: 718-260-3859
fax: 718-260-3609

e-mail:  ross@poly.edu

Biosketch

Professor Ross joined Polytechnic University as the Leonard J. Shustek Chair Professor in Computer Science in January 2003. He has been Department Head since September 2008. Before joining Polytechnic, he was a professor for five years in the Multimedia Communications Department at Eurecom Institute in Sophia Antipolis, France. From 1985 through 1997, he was a professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a B.S.E.E from Tufts University, a M.S.E.E. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Computer and Control Engineering from The University of Michigan.

Professor Ross has worked in peer-to-peer networking, Internet measurement, video streaming, Web caching, multi-service loss networks, content distribution networks, network security, voice over IP, optimization, queuing theory, and Markov decision processes. He is an IEEE Fellow, recipient of the Infocom 2009 Best Paper Award (1,435 papers submitted), and recipient of  Best Paper in Multimedia Communications 2006-2007 (awarded by IEEE Communications Society).  He is currently associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and has served on numerous journal editorial boards and conference program committees. He was PC co-chair for ACM Multimedia 2002, ACM CoNext 2008, and IPTPS 2009. He has served as an advisor to the Federal Trade Commission on P2P file sharing.

Professor Ross is co-author (with James F. Kurose) of the popular textbook, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet, published by Addison-Wesley (first edition in 2000, fifth edition 2009). It is the most popular textbook on computer networks in CS departments, both nationally and internationally, and has been translated into twelve languages. Professor Ross is also the author of the research monograph, Multiservice Loss Models for Broadband Communication Networks, published by Springer in 1995.

From July 1999 to July 2001, Professor Ross took a leave of absence to found and lead Wimba, an Internet technology start-up. Wimba develops and markets Java-based asynchronous and synchronous voice-over-IP technologies, primarily for the on-line education and language learning markets. Wimba is now headquartered in NYC and has more than 80 employees worldwide. A personal account of asynchronous voice and the early days of Wimba can be found here.

Publications

Peer-to-peer
Caching and content distribution
Streaming video
Video on demand
Multimedia messaging
QoS in packet-switched networks
Monte integration for product-form loss and queuing networks
Efficient simulation of Markov processes
Loss networks
Markov decision processes
 

Current Research Team

Zhengye Liu, Postdoc
Angela Wang, PhD student
Prithula Dhungel, PhD student
Chao Zhang, PhD student

Former PostDocs

Di Wu, Sun Yat-Sen University (Guangzhou, China)
Xiaojun Hei, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Wuhan, China)

Former PhD Students

Jian Liang, eBay
Rakesh Kumar, Bloomberg
Philippe de Cuetos, ENST, Paris
Jussi Kangasharju, University of Helsinki
David Turner, California State University
Despina Saparilla, Cisco Systems
Martin Reisslein, Arizona State University
Jean McManus, Verizon
Bill Liang, Tellme
Sanjay Gupta, Motorola
Jie Wang, Flash Networks
Shun-Ping Chung, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
Danny Tsang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Melike Baykal-Gursoy, Rutgers University
Ravi Varadarajan, Datek

Recent Press Articles Citing Research

Web users could slash cost of putting video online, New Scientist Tech, 11 September 2007,  http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn12625-web-users-could-slash-cost-of-putting-video-online.html

File-sharing sites are being subverted for web attacks, New Scientist Tech,  30 May 2007, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11949-filesharing-sites-being-subverted-for-web-attacks.html

Recent Courses at Polytechnic

• CS 684 Computer Networking: This is a senior/master's level course in computer networking. Typically, I teach Chapters 1 through 5 from my textbook, and then teach one of the à la carte chapters (wireless, multimedia, security, or network management). The assignments include a midterm exam, final exam, Ethereal labs, homework problems from the textbook, and Java socket programming assignments from the textbook.
• CS 393/CS 682 Network Security: I have been teaching this course each spring semester since 2004. In this course we cover network attacks; firewalls and intrusion detection systems; cryptography; and P2P security. It is a lab intensive course, with labs on network mapping with Nmap; writing a sniffer; firewalls with iptables; intrusion detection with Snort; tracing SSL; IPsec with open swan.  For more information about this course, including the powerpoint slides, go here.