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(Curriculum Vita in pdf)
Here is my brief bio:
Farnam Jahanian is Professor, Chair for
Computer Science and Engineering at the
University of Michigan,
and co-founder of Arbor Networks, Inc.
Prior to joining academia, he was a Research Staff Member at
the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York.
Farnam's research is aimed at the study of scalability, dependability and security of networked
systems and applications. His interests include distributed computing, network security,
and network protocols and architectures. Farnam's research at the University of Michigan has
been funded by the National Science Foundation, US Department of Homeland Security,
DARPA, ONR, Cisco, Intel, Hitachi and IBM.
Farnam has led several research efforts aimed at developing new protocols and architectures for ensuring dependability of network infrastructures in the presence of security attacks, hardware and software failures, and operational faults. In the mid 90's, Farnam launched the Internet Performance Measurement and Analysis (IPMA) project, a joint research effort of the University of Michigan and Merit Network, aimed at studying the growth and scalability of the Internet backbone routing infrastructure. This work, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was motivated by the explosive growth in size and topological complexity of the Internet and the increasing strain on the underlying infrastructure. The project deployed the first backbone routing probes across the major Internet public exchange points in 1995. The analysis of inter-domain routing behavior based on this data led to the discovery of BGP routing instability and inter-domain delayed convergence. This research on routing stability and convergence properties has been highly influential within both the network research community and the Internet operational community. It served as a catalyst for significant changes in commercial Internet routing software implementation and impacted routing policies employed by Internet Service Providers. Furthermore, this work was the first research to uncover the fragility of the Internet routing infrastructure, and led to a body of work that has been built on by numerous networking infrastructure researchers over the last decade.
This work was recently recognized with an ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award in 2008.
In early 2000, Farnam led a research effort (the Lighthouse Project, sponsored in part by DARPA and Cisco Systems) aimed at developing a flow-based system for detecting, backtracing and resolving network-wide anomalies such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and routing exploits. Working from a granular understanding of normal network traffic flows, the anomaly detection technique introduced by this effort can rapidly spot distributed attacks, closing a costly gap between detection of a threat and its resolution. This approach does not require any changes to the existing Internet routing infrastructure and has changed how large-scale network security attacks are addressed by today's Internet Service Providers.
This research served as the basis on which Farnam co-founded Arbor Networks with former UM graduate student G. Robert Malan in 2001. During a two-year leave, serving as ArborÕs President, Farnam led the management team of the company and raised over $33 million in two rounds of funding from venture capital firms and strategic investors. The Internet security solutions based on this work have been widely deployed by more than 200 Internet Service Providers, cable operators, content providers, and numerous mission-critical networks around the globe,
and have won numerous awards in recent years.
As one illustration of the impact of this research in practice, more than 70% of the Internet transit traffic in 2007 was protected against DDoS attacks by this technology. As Chairman of Arbor Networks, he is responsible for setting the strategic direction of the company and working with the company's board of directors.
Farnam is currently leading the Internet Motion Sensor Project, a collaborative research project with Merit Network, aimed at observing and characterizing security threats on a global scale. The key idea is that by monitoring unused IP addresses (dark spaces), one could gain a network-wide understanding of cyber threats and their impact globally. The current IMS deployment consists of more than 60 distinct monitored blocks at 18+ organizations across the Internet, monitoring over 17 million unique IP addresses corresponding to more than 1.25% of all routed IPv4 space. The IMS system is being used by the ISP operational community as a reconnaissance tool, serving as an early warning system for brewing attacks. The data from the IMS project has been used to gain new insights into subtle characteristics of several recent Internet attacks and their impact on the underlying global infrastructure. With a significant grant from DHS, FarnamÕs group is currently involved in a research effort in developing a framework and tools for "Understanding, Detecting, and Disrupting Botnets."
The author of over 80 published research papers, Farnam has served on dozens of advisory boards and government panels in recent years, including Internet2's External Relations Advisory Council, National Advisory Board for UM Office of Technology Transfer, and the SparkZone Advisory Board. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Amoco Teaching Award, the University of Michigan College of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award, the EECS Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award, the EECS Department Teaching Excellence Award, the IBM Faculty Development Award, an IEEE Service Award, the Eta Kappa Nu Professor of the Year Award, and an IBM Outstanding Technical Innovation Award. He has been an active advocate for regional economic development efforts over the last decade, working with entrepreneurs, frequently lecturing on the topic and serving on numerous advisory boards. He was the 2005 recipient of the Governor's University Award for Commercialization Excellence. He was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers from 1995-99, and is serving on the editorial board of the International Journal of Time-Critical Computing Systems. Farnam holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.
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