Mark Crovella and BU CS alumnus Anukool Lakhina highlighted in Science Coalition report
Guavus, Inc., founded by BU CS alumnus Anukool Lakhina (CAS’01, GRS’01,’07) and Professor Mark Crovella, is featured in a report on the benefits of federally funded research that was released yesterday by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Science Coalition. The report, American-Made Innovation Sparking Economic Growth, documents the ways that this company and others are bringing to market transformational innovations in areas ranging from health care to defense and are contributing to US job creation and economic growth. The report’s release coincides with Congressional consideration of funding for America’s science agencies, which is threatened by cuts proposed by the Trump administration, including a reduction of 18.3 percent, or about $5.8 billion, of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget.
From BU Today:
The third BU company cited in the Science Coalition report is Guavus, Inc., which was founded by Anukool Lakhina (CAS’01, GRS’01,’07) and grew out of his work as a BU doctoral student under Mark Crovella, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of computer science. That research—and additional work by BU researchers that led to the founding of Guavas—was supported by about $6 million in funding from the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation. Lakhina, winner of a Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award in 2015, is the CEO of Guavus, based in San Mateo, Calif. The company develops data analysis platforms and applications that enable companies to process high-volume streaming data for business analytics and engineering; it has more than 400 employees.
“Guavus pioneered big-data analytics before the emergence of data science,” says Crovella, a member of the company’s technical advisory board. “Anukool Lakhina’s PhD thesis benefited from cross-disciplinary collaboration between BU’s departments of computer science and statistics, and the power of the resulting methods he developed led directly to the founding of Guavus. Its success has been a testament to the way that federally funded basic research attacks problems before they become mainstream, and thereby drives innovation. BU provided the ideal scientific environment to nurture the innovative contributions in Anukool’s research.”
Read the full BU Today article here. The full Science Coalition Report is available here.