PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS: I am always looking for highly-talented graduate students who are passionate about Internet-scale distributed systems and networking.  Our research spans the whole range: algorithms, theoretical analysis, architectures, experimental, and deployed systems. If you are interested, please apply to our graduate program and indicate your interest in working with me.

                                                                       

Biography

Prof. Sitaraman is currently in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research focuses on all aspects of Internet-scale distributed systems, including algorithms, architectures, performance, and energy efficiency. 

He is best known for his role in pioneering content delivery networks that currently deliver much of the world’s web content, streaming videos, and online applications.  As a principal architect, he helped create the Akamai network . He directs the Laboratory for Internet-Scale Distributed Systems (LIDS) and is a member of the  Theoretical Computer Science group.  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.

Current Favorites

1. •Ever wondered how your video player adapts the quality of your video to the available bandwidth? An adaptive bitrate switching  algorithm with provable optimality that is now part of the DASH reference video player...
   

1. BOLA: Near-Optimal Bitrate Adaptation for Online Videos, Kevin Spiteri, Rahul Urgaonkar, and Ramesh Sitaraman, Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, April 2016.
   

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1. •Learn more about the algorithmic research that is at the core of one of the largest distributed systems in the world...
   

1. Algorithmic nuggets in content delivery, Bruce M. Maggs and Ramesh K. Sitaraman, Invited Editorial, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication  Review (CCR),  15 pages, July 2015.
   

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1. •How to have your cake and eat it too in streaming analytics! Aggregation schemes that have both low update traffic and low staleness ...
   

1. Optimizing Grouped Aggregation in Geo-Distributed Streaming Analytics,'' Benjamin Heintz, Abhishek Chandra, and Ramesh K. Sitaraman,  ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC), pages 133-144, June 2015.
   

2. Best Paper Finalist. Best Paper Presentation Award
   

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1. •Do viewers watch less if  an online video stalls frequently? Do viewers with high-speed broadband connectivity have less patience for a video to start up than similar viewers with slower connectivity? Read more to find out...
   

1. 1. Video Stream Quality Impacts Viewer Behavior: Inferring Causality using Quasi-Experimental Designs, S. Shunmuga Krishnan and Ramesh Sitaraman,  Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Boston, MA, Nov 2012.
      

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3. •Why defending Web sites from the bad guys is increasingly hard work...
   

1. Protecting Websites from Attack with Secure Delivery Networks, David Gillman, Yin Lin, Bruce M. Maggs, and Ramesh K. Sitaraman, Invited Paper (Cover Feature),  IEEE Computer, Volume 48, Number 4, pages 6-34, April 2015.
   

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