Azer Bestavros

Azer Bestavros is Professor and former Chair (2000-2007) of the BU Computer Science Department, which he joined in 1991 after completing his PhD at Harvard. His research contributions in the broad areas of networking and distributed systems include pioneering the Web push content distribution model adopted years later by industry, seminal work on Internet traffic characterization, game-theoretic approaches to cloud resource management, and safety certification of networked systems and software. This work yielded 16 PhD theses, 6 issued patents, 3 startups, and hundreds of refereed papers that are cited over 13,000 times. He was the Founding Director of the BU Hariri Institute for Computing, which was set up in 2010 to “create and sustain a community of scholars who believe in the transformative potential of computational perspectives in research and education.” At the Institute, he spearheaded a number of cloud computing, big-data, and cybersecurity initiatives, most notably the Open Cloud Exchange project which aims to set up a new model for public clouds and for cloud marketplaces. He serves as board member of the Cloud Computing Caucus, a non-profit, non-partisan coalition of industry and key government stakeholders, focused on raising awareness and educating lawmakers and the public on issues associated with cloud computing.

On November 1, 2019 Professor Bestavros was announced as the new Associate Provost for Computing & Data Sciences. In this role he works closely with senior academic leaders and faculty in establishing the policies, operating principles, and strategic issues that will guide the initial efforts of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. Slated to be housed in the new Center for Computing & Data Sciences, this new unit will enable BU to build a collaborative and interdisciplinary interface between our traditional academic units and the faculty and students interested in computing and data sciences. Professor Bestavros will lead the unit and serves as a member of the Council of Deans.

Selected Publications

Azer Bestavros, Andrei Lapets, and Mayank Varia. User-Centric Distributed Solutions for Privacy-Preserving Analytics. In Communications of the ACM, Privacy & Security, ACM Press, 60(2):37–39, February 2017.

Nikolaj Volgushev, Malte Schwarzkopf, Andrei Lapets, Mayank Varia, and Azer Bestavros. DEMO: Integrating Security Multi-Party Computation in Big Data Workflows. In Proceedings of CCS’16: ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Vienna, Austria, October 2016.

Christine Bassem and Azer Bestavros. Network-Constrained Packing of Brokered Workloads in Virtualized Environments. In Proceedings of CCGrid’15: The IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, May 2015.

Nikolaos Laoutaris, Georgios Smaragdakis, Konstantinos Oikonomou, Ioannis Stavrakakis, and Azer Bestavros. Distributed Server Migration for Scalable Internet Service Deployment. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 22(3):917-930, June 2014.

Azer Bestavros and Orran Krieger. Towards an open cloud marketplace: Vision and first steps. IEEE Internet Computing: View from the Cloud, January 2014.