Sylvia Ratnasamy (born 1976) is a

Belgian Belgian may refer to: * Something of, or related to, Belgium * Belgians, people from Belgium or of Belgian descent * Languages of Belgium, languages spoken in Belgium, such as Dutch, French, and German *Ancient Belgian language, an extinct languag ...

-Indian

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

. She is best known as one of the inventors of the

distributed hash table A distributed hash table (DHT) is a distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table: key–value pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. The ...

(DHT). Her doctoral dissertation proposed the content-addressable networks, one of the original DHTs, and she received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2014 for this work. She is currently a professor at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

Life and career

Ratnasamy received her Bachelor of Engineering from the

University of Pune Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), formerly the University of Poona, is a collegiate public state university located in the city of Pune, India. It was established in 1949, and is spread over a campus in the neighbourhood of Ganes ...

in 1997. She began doctoral work at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

advised by

Scott Shenker Scott J. Shenker (born January 24, 1956 in Alexandria, Virginia) is an American computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the leader of the Extensible Internet Group at the Intern ...

during which time she worked at the

International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...

Berkeley, CA Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emery ...

. She graduated from UC Berkeley with her doctoral degree in 2002. For her doctoral thesis, she designed and implemented what would eventually become known as one of the four original Distributed Hash Tables, the

Content addressable network The content-addressable network (CAN) is a distributed, decentralized P2P infrastructure that provides hash table functionality on an Internet-like scale. CAN was one of the original four distributed hash table proposals, introduced concurrently ...

(CAN). Ratnasamy was a lead researcher at Intel Labs until 2011, when she began as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. In recent years, Ratnasamy has focused her research on programmable networks including the RouteBricks software router and pioneering work in

Network Functions Virtualization Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept that leverages the IT virtualization technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create ...

(NFV). In 2016, she co-founded Nefeli Networks to commercialize NFV technologies.

Personal

Her father is noted chemist

Paul Ratnasamy Paul Ratnasamy is an Indian catalyst scientist, INSA Srinivasa Ramanujan Research Professor and a former director of National Chemical Laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). He was honored by the Government of Ind ...

Awards

Grace Murray Hopper Award The Grace Murray Hopper Award (named for computer pioneer RADM Grace Hopper) has been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1971. The award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or ser ...

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

* ACM SIGCOMM Test-of-Time Award (2011) * ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award (2017)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ratnasamy, Sylvia 1970s births Living people Internet pioneers Women inventors Women Internet pioneers Computer systems researchers Belgian women computer scientists Belgian people of Indian descent University of California, Berkeley faculty Savitribai Phule Pune University alumni Belgian expatriates in India Belgian expatriates in the United States 21st-century Belgian women scientists