Networking Researcher Sylvia Ratnasamy Wins ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

^{April 21, 2015}
Professor Sylvia Ratnasamy is the winner of the 2014 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, given each year to an outstanding young computer professional. Ratnasamy, a senior Networking and Security researcher as well as an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, is recognized for her contributions to the first efficient design for distributed hash tables, a critical element in large-scale distributed and peer-to-peer computing systems. ACM cited Ratnasamy’s 2001 paper, “A Scalable, Content-Addressable Network,” which she co-wrote while a graduate student with fellow members of ACIRI, the precursor of ICSI’s Networking and Security Group. The paper is the seventh most cited in the area of networks and communications, according to Microsoft Academic Search.

The announcement also cites Ratnasamy’s innovative design and implementation of networked systems that enable a data object in a network to be located quickly without requiring a central registry. Her recent research introduces RouteBricks, an approach that makes networks easier to build, program, and evolve, and that is used as a way to exploit parallelism to scale software routers.

Ratnasamy has also received the ACM SIGCOMM test-of-time award (2011), the ACM SIGOCMM rising star award (2011), the Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship (2011), and the Yahoo ACE award. Previous winners of the Grace Murray Hooper Award include Professor Vern Paxson, director of Networking and Security research, and Professor Daniel Klein, a member of the Speech Group. The award will be presented on June 20 in San Francisco.