Nick Feamster has been awarded the Rising Star Award by ACM SIGCOMM www.sigcomm.org, ACM's Special Interest Group on Data Communications, for his pioneering contributions to network operations and security. Feamster, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, was cited for outstanding research contributions early in his career in network operations and security. His ongoing work with network operators has resulted in innovative and practical systems for making networks more secure, more available, and easier to manage. He will receive the award and deliver the keynote address at the ACM International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT) December 1, in Philadelphia, PA, USA http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/ .
Feamster’s research in network security and operations has influenced research and industry on a national level. Aspects of his work have also been incorporated into commercial spam filtering products and Web mail clients at Yahoo, Cisco/Ironport, and McAfee as well as a U.S. Department of Defense high-speed network monitoring project. His work on the routing configuration checker has been used by hundreds of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) around the world to check their network configurations for errors. Feamster has also been involved in setting the nation’s cyber-security agenda by developing a “wish-list” for the security community’s needs for data access, and he co-led a multi-agency workshop on “Security-Driven Architectures.”
A recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and a Sloan fellowship in 2008, Feamster won the Best Student Paper Award at ACM SIGCOMM 2006, and the Best Paper at ACM/Usenix Networked Systems Design and Implementation Symposium (NSDI) in 2005. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he holds S.B., M.Eng, and Ph.D. degrees from that institution.
The SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, presented annually, recognizes a young researcher who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of communication networks during the early part of his or her career.