kc claffy - Professional Biography

kc claffy has played a leading role in Internet research for more than a decade. For the last 15 years she has led the direction, strategy, and overall management of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), which she founded at the UC San Diego Supercomputer Center in 1996. CAIDA is an internationally respected Internet research organization, responsive to industry, government, and academic sector needs and interests, providing tools and analyses to promote a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure.

As a research scientist at SDSC and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UCSD, her research interests include Internet (workload, performance, topology, routing, and economics) data collection, analysis, visualization, and enabling others to make use of CAIDA data and results. She has been at SDSC since 1991 and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego.

Research

kc has been studying various Internet research topics since 1990, spanning topology, routing, traffic, economics, and policy. In 1993 she co-authored her first paper on proposed traffic management approaches to deal with congestion, in a paper entitled, . In 1994 she published her doctoral dissertation on Internet traffic characterization, using public NSFNET traffic data. She established her research career, and a leading organization, in pursuit of rigorous analysis of the best available empirical data to inform our understanding of the Internet as a complex system, and to foster a rigorous discipline to guide scientific study of the Internet, despite the dearth of available empirical data about the public Internet as the infrastructure privatized. kc has published over 120 papers, most recently on Internet traffic classification, topology measurement and mapping, DNS evolution, economics, policy, and privacy-respecting data sharing. She has led several infrastructure and measurement projects that study of the Internet's core infrastructure, focused on the health and integrity of the Internet's topology, routing, addressing, and naming systems. More recently she is contributing to research and development of a new public Internet architecture based on the best available empirical data regarding the problems of the current Internet.

Expert testimony and advice

kc has given testimony and advice to FCC, DHS, NSF, DOE, FTC, OSTP, NSA, DARPA, NIST, regarding how the public sector can best support measurable progress on our scientific understanding of current and future national information infrastructure. She has given invited talks on Internet topics at NANOG, ARIN, CENIC, QUILT, OECD, ISOC, IBM, NLR, Google, CENIC, Usenix, LISA, AUUG, RIPE, Pew, Terena, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia.

Community Service

kc has presented at Internet operational and policy fora (e.g, NANOG, ARIN, IETF as needed) and many government agencies (DHS, NIST, NCS/DISA, DARPA, FCC, FTC, OSTP, NSA, GAO, NSF) on a variety of topics related to the past, present and future of the Internet, and often to share and discuss research directions and results of CAIDA activities with implications for the future. She generally leads 2-3 workshops per year. kc served on the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) program committee for ten years (1996-2005), and also serves as a guest member of two of ICANN's three primary advisory committees: SSAC (Security and Stability Advisory Committee) and RSSAC (Root Server Selection Advisory Committee). For the last 3 years she has served on Internet2's Research Advisory Council.

kc has served on program committees, published papers, or both, in all of the main conferences related to empirical Internet science: Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), Passive and Active Measurement Conference, ACM SIGCOMM, Infocom. From 2004-2008 she served on the Editorial Board of IEEE Internet Computing.

Funding

Since founding CAIDA in 1997, kc has brought in over $30M of funding to UCSD. CAIDA has received the majority of its funding from NSF with 23 grants since its inception, though the organization has also won support from other government agencies, DHS, DARPA, DOI. As a corporate sponsor, Cisco has contributed over $1.5 million in the same time period. kc solicited additional funds via CAIDA membership which contributed over $1M and almost another $1M from other donors, such as WIDE, ARIN, and others. Currently CAIDA operates on an annual budget of $2.5M/year with 14 staff and 4-8 students/visitors.

Mentoring

kc has mentored 3 post doctoral scholars, 37 graduate students, and 20 visiting interns, assisting with both independent research and publishing results on a complex problem. Over the same period she has directed 32 undergraduate students. kc has recently hosted long-term visitors from China, Korea, and Italy, working on comparative analysis of Internet characteristics in different countries.