The Internet paradox: overcoming success
Professor Laurent Mathy, Computing
10.55 am
The Internet has grown over the last twenty years to the point where it plays a crucial role in today's society and business. By almost every measure, the Internet is a great success. It interconnects over one and a half billion people, running a wide range of applications, with new ones appearing regularly that take the world by storm. However, the Internet is also a victim of its own success as its size and scope render the introduction and deployment of new network technologies and services very difficult, as exemplified by the fact that the fundamental inner workings of the Internet haven't changed in over a decade. In fact, the Internet can be considered to be suffering from 'ossification', a condition where innovation, within the network itself, meets natural resistance.
Unfortunately, the Internet was designed with old assumptions that no longer describe future communications needs, and the current limitations are well-known: stronger security, better mobility support, enhanced reliability and robust service guarantees are only examples of areas where innovation is needed.
This talk will present some of the research ideas pursued in Lancaster to try and rejuvenate the Internet into a more agile network, capable of quickly meeting new and future applications and their, perhaps not yet foreseen, communications requirements.
Biography
Professor Laurent Mathy graduated in Electrical Engineering (Computer Science) from the University of Liège in 1993 and received a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University in 2000.
In 1993, he joined the Research Unit in Networking (RUN) of the University of Liège as a research engineer. From 1995 - 1996, he was a visiting researcher in the Center for Integrated Computer Systems Research (CICSR), the University of British Columbia. He joined the Computing Department at Lancaster in 1996, where he has since established a research group, and was awarded a Personal Chair, in Networked Systems.
During sabbatical leave in 2006-2007, Laurant spent time as a visiting research director at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, France, and as a visiting professor at the University of Liège and the University of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. Laurent has many refereed publications and has extensively contributed to the research community. In particular, he is a founding and steering committee member for the ACM CoNEXT conference, has served on the Technical Programme Committees (TPC) of top conferences in his field, and was the TPC co-chair for IMC 2009 and ICCCN 2010.
He was the recipient of the Young Researcher Award of CFIP'99.