Sitaraman Elevated to IEEE Fellow for Pioneering Contributions to Content Delivery

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest professional organization for the advancement of technology, has elevated UMass Amherst Computer Science Professor Ramesh Sitaraman to the honorary position of Fellow for his "contributions to content delivery, internet performance, and distributed systems."

With over 400,000 IEEE members in 160 countries, less than 0.1 percent of voting members are selected annually for the association's highest honor. Sitaraman joins nine other faculty members in the College of Information and Computer Sciences who hold the distinction.

Over the past two decades, Sitaraman's research has focused on algorithms and architectures for improving the reliability, performance, and scalability of the Internet. He is known for his role in pioneering content delivery networks (CDNs) that enable web pages to download faster and videos to play smoothly without freezing, as well as ensuring that large online events, such as the Super Bowl, can scale to millions of viewers. He helped create the world's first major CDN, the Akamai CDN, currently consisting of hundreds of thousands of servers all over the world that deliver a significant fraction of the world's online content to billions of users. CDNs are now a core component of the modern Internet and are utilized by nearly every major enterprise that uses the Internet.  

At UMass Amherst, Sitaraman's current research focuses on all aspects of Internet-scale distributed systems, including algorithms, architectures, performance, and energy efficiency.  He directs the Laboratory for Internet-Scale Distributed Systems (LIDS) and is a member of the Theoretical Computer Science group. He is a recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award, the Excellence in DASH Award from the DASH Industry Forum, and the College of Natural Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award. He received a B. Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University.