Computer systems and networking expert Ravi Netravali has won the Rising Star Award from SIGCOMM, the communications and computer networks branch of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
The Rising Star award is given each year to one researcher who has made outstanding contributions to the field of communications networks within 10 years of receiving a Ph.D. The selection committee considers the work’s depth, impact and novelty. The 2023 award cites Netravali’s “contributions in greatly improving the performance of a wide range of networked systems and distributed applications by using tools from machine learning and program analysis.”
The endless stream of distributed applications — spanning everything from the web to AI systems to video services — are integrated into nearly every aspect of modern life. Yet these services often run atop networks that are not designed to support them, either due to resource limitations or lack of application awareness. Netravali's research aims to bridge this gap between applications and networks by exploring the space of co-designs in which they cooperate more deeply. Along these lines, his research group designs practical systems solutions that consistently and automatically run with high performance in different networked settings, and also take advantage of cutting-edge network technologies.
Netravali earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. He was an assistant professor at the University of California-Los Angeles until joining Princeton in July, 2021. He has previously won many honors, including a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award and a Facebook Research Award. Earlier this year he was honored by the School of Engineering and Applied Science with the Howard B. Wentz, Jr. Junior Faculty Award, recognizing his excellence in both teaching and research.