Mark Crovella

Professor of Computer Science, College of Arts & Sciences Professor at Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences

Mark Crovella is professor of Computer Science at Boston University, where he was been since 1994. During 2003-2004 he was a visiting associate professor at the Laboratoire d’Infomatique de Paris VI (LIP6). From 1984 to 1994 he worked at Calspan Corporation in Buffalo NY, eventually as a Senior Computer Scientist.

His research interests are in performance evaluation, focusing on parallel and networked computer systems. In the networking arena, he has worked on characterizing the Internet and the World Wide Web. He has explored the presence and implications of self-similarity and heavy-tailed distributions in network traffic and Web workloads. He has also investigated the implications of Web workloads for the design of scalable and cost-effective Web servers. In addition he has made numerous contributions to Internet measurement and modeling; and he has examined the impact of network properties on the design of protocols and the construction of statistical models.

Professor Crovella is co-author of Internet Measurement: Infrastructure, Traffic, and Applications (Wiley Press, 2006) and is the author of over fifty papers on performance evaluation of computer systems. He holds four patents deriving from his research. He is an editor for Computer Communication Review, and a past editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Computer Networks and IEEE Transactions on Computers. He was the Program Chair for the 2003 ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, and the General Chair of the 2005 Passive and Active Measurement Workshop. His paper (with Azer Bestavros) “Self-Similarity in World Wide Web Traffic: Evidence and Possible Causes” is listed by Citeseer as one of the most cited papers in Computer Science, and his paper (with Paul Barford) “Critical Path Analysis of TCP Transactions” was nominated for the 2002 William Bennett Prize, given annually to the best paper published in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He has given numerous invited talks and tutorials, and is a founder of and consultant to companies involved in Internet technologies.