Resume of Robert Carter

Education:

Thesis Title: "Performance Measurement and Prediction in Packet-Switched Networks: Techniques and Applications"

My thesis work investigated tools and techniques for performance measurement and prediction in packet-switched networks. I developed tools that measure the bottleneck bandwidth of a connection (BPROBE) and the available bandwidth of a connection (CPROBE). Both of these have been validated and used for end-to-end assessment in the Internet; the commercial product Net.Medic has employed these methods for bandwidth assessment. One application of these tools is dynamic server selection (DSS) in which a client chooses a server based on measurements of current (or recent) network conditions. Through simulation, I have shown that a DSS strategy in a system such as the World Wide Web can improve user response time by up to 50% with a minimal increase in network traffic.

Thesis Title: "Parallel Algorithms for Triangulations of Point Sets in 3D"

Professional Experience:

As a member of a small research team designing architecture and algorithms for self-configuring Network Databases, I am investigating caching algorithms for data with expiration times. We have shown how classical replacement algorithms (e.g. LRU, LRU-x) and their competitive analytical results can be extended for application in an environment in which data items are updated periodically.

Designed and implemented prototype IP measurement tool (throughput, packet loss, file transfer delay) used in assessment of providers of VPN services. Led evaluation of commercial products and supervised development, release and training.

I am investigating the use of JAVA Beans for Service Creation, including the design of a bean hierarchy and the use of Enterprise Java Beans for service execution. As part of this I am active in the JAIN industry consortium defining standards for service creation and execution.

Conducted performance evaluation of Enterprise Java Beans environments (BEA WebLogic, ObjectSpace Voyager) as part of an investigation into collaborative e-commerce environments. Designed a collaborative shopping application with multi-site shopping cart and shared navigation.

Taught introductory programmng and systems courses; was a teaching assistant for courses in parallel algorithms and architectures.

Designed, implemented and documented a distributed database service and tools for Jasmine, a modular, object-oriented source code control and project management product.

Maintained and improved file system layer of Mesa run-time system.

Led a team of 3 programmers responsible for development and support of FRACT, a major module of MASKAP, a large software system for VLSI layout verification.

Technology Skills:

UNIX (Linux, Solaris), Windows NT, C, C++, Java, CORBA, Perl, Tcl/Tk, JDBC, IP, TCP, LDAP, SNMP, Macromedia Director

Publications:

R.L. Carter and M.E. Crovella, "On the Network Impact of Dynamic Server Selection", to appear in Computer Networks, Dec. 1999.

R.L. Carter and M.E. Crovella, "Server Selection Using Dynamic Path Characterization in Wide-Area Networks". in Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '97, Kobe, Japan, April 1997.

R.L. Carter and M.E. Crovella, "Measuring Bottleneck Link Speed in Packet-Switched Networks", in Performance Evaluation, Volume 27/28, special issue of selected papers from Proceedings of Performance '96, Lausanne, Switzerland, October 1996.

M.E. Crovella and R.L. Carter, "Dynamic Server Selection in the Internet". In Proceedings of the Third IEEE Workshop on the Architecture and Implementation of High Performance Computer Systems '95, Mystic, CT, August 1995.

A. Bestavros, R.L. Carter, M.E. Crovella, C.R. Cunha, A. Heddaya and S.A. Mirdad, "Application-Level Document Caching in the Internet". In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Service in Distributed and Networked Environments. Whistler, British Columbia, June 1995

K. Park and R. Carter, "On the effectiveness of genetic search in combinatorial optimization," in 10th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Genetic Algorithms and Optimization Track. February, 1995.

Professional activities:

• 10th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
• Information Processing and Management

Professional memberships:

ACM

IEEE

SIAM

Awards received:

Teaching Fellow of the Year, Boston University Computer Science Department. May 1994.

Student Travel Grant to attend SIGCOMM '96

Citizenship:

References: