Dr. Ran Ben Basat

Dr. Ben Basat’s Ph.D. was from the Technion in Computer Science. He devised a method to identify networks that send an excessive amount of traffic. This capability is essential for mitigating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which pose a real threat to the Internet environment. His solution is the first to allow networking devices to compute the attacking networks in real time and with provable guarantees. In another paper, he found a solution to the problem of load balancing by allowing a network switch to identify, in constant time and optimal space, the connections that require the most bandwidth. The best indicator of future bandwidth consumption is the recent past, and finding those that needed significant bandwidth and allocating them allows a substantial reduction in network bottlenecks. Dr. Ben Basat’s contributions are in the practical systems space of computer networks and big data/streaming algorithms – an area in which good academic candidates are lacking, as opposed to theoretical computer science. At Harvard, Dr. Ben Basat will work in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he hopes to push the boundaries of what is considered feasible in network monitoring and security. He will be collaborating with researchers in the Carnegie Mellon University CyLab.