George Varghese began his professional career in 1983 at Digital Equipment Corporation where he worked on designing network protocols and doing systems research as part of the DECNET architecture and advanced development group. He has worked on designing protocols and algorithms for the DECNET and GIGAswitch products. Together with colleagues, he has been awarded six patents, with 7 more being applied for.
From 1990-1992 he did doctoral work at MIT on the theory of distributed algorithms. His Ph.D. thesis was jointly awarded the Sprowls Prize for best thesis in Computer Science at MIT. He joined Washington University in St. Louis as an Associate Professor in Sept 1993 where he is currently a Professor of Computer Science. He will join the Computer Science department at the University of California, San Diego as Professor of Computer Science in Sept 1999.
He has served on the program committee for the leading conferences on networking (SIGCOMM, INFOCOM) and distributed algorithms (PODC). He has taught a SIGCOMM 95 tutorial on reliable protocols, a SIGCOMM 96 and SIGMETRICS 98 tutorial (best tutorial award) on efficient protocol implementations, and a PODC 98 tutorial on Internet protocols.
His research interests are in two areas: first, applying the theory of distributed algorithms to the design of fault-tolerant protocols for real networks; second, the design of efficient algorithms to speed up protocol implementations. He was one of two computer scientists who received the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 1996. Several of his inventions have found their way into commercial systems. These include timing wheels, Deficit Round Robin, Compressed Tries, Threaded Indices (essentially tag switching), load balancing techniques, fast IP lookup algorithms and fast filter algorithms.
updated 23 Aug 1999