February 6, 2008  -  ECE proudly congratulates Aleksandar Kuzmanovic who is recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development  (CAREER) Award. The CAREER award is NSF's most prestigious honor for junior faculty members.  Established in 1995, the grant helps top performing scientists and engineers early in their careers to develop their contributions and commitment to research and education.

At Rice, he served as a research assistant for Professor Edward W. Knightly. “Aleksandar is a rising star in the research community and is making critical advances in the areas of Internet measurement and resilience to denial-of-service attack”, said Professor Ed Knightly.  In addition, Kuzmanovic was a teaching assistant and lecturer on call for various ECE courses. He earned his Ph.D. from Rice in 2004 and received B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1996 and 1999, respectively.

Since 2005, Kuzmanovic has been Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University. He leads the Northwestern Networks Group, which is a part of the Northwestern Systems Research Group. His research interests are in the area of computer networking with emphasis on design, measurements, analysis, denial-of-service resiliency, and prototype implementation of protocols and algorithms for the Internet. This award will fund his research, Internet Audit: A Theory, Toolset, and Applications for a World without Net Neutrality. The main goal is to build a system capable of monitoring network or Content Distribution Network services and elements, revealing their behavior and policies, and accurately detecting and exposing biased or discriminatory network practices. The focus will be on devising novel distributed end-host-based auditing methodologies  and tools to systematically study a number of threat models, that range from open DoS attacks to more sophisticated methods in which ISPs are adding jitter or using differentiated services in destructive ways.

“Kuzmanovic is an outstanding Rice alumnus. We're continuously delighted in the success he is having at Northwestern University.  Alex is advancing the state of the art in designing resilient Internet protocols and in network measurement,” said Dr. Behnaam Aazhang, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice.