John Byers
Associate Professor of Computer Science John Byers has been making waves lately through his research in the field of e-commerce, one of his areas of specialty. In the fall, Byers and his colleagues published a study of daily deal site Groupon that called into question the benefit to participating merchants (the daily deals create a higher profile on Yelp, but also a surge of negative Yelp reviews). Also in the fall, Byers along with colleagues discovered a major privacy breach on Yelp, the popular business listing and review site.
In addition to his e-commerce research, Byers studies algorithmic and economic aspects of networking and large-scale data management. He received the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award in 2009 for his work on scalable loss-resilient multicast, the IEEE ICDE Best Paper Award in 2004 for his work on sensor databases, and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2001. John earned his BA in Computer Science, Economics, and Mathematics at Cornell University (1991), and his PhD in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley (1997). In addition to his teaching and research activities, he is Chief Scientist and a member of the Board of Directors at Cogo Labs (formerly Adverplex), a quantitative online advertising firm based in Cambridge, MA, where he has had an executive role since the company’s founding in 2005.
You can read BU Today articles on his Groupon research here, and his Yelp research here.