Dr. Nick Duffield, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, was elected to the Board of Directors of the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Sigmetrics.
Sigmetrics is the special interest group of ACM that is concerned with computer systems performance evaluation, and Duffield was one of four candidates elected to the position.
“I feel honored to have been given the opportunity to contribute to the performance analysis community and help with the issues technical societies are facing such as developing their publication channels, making conferences more affordable for junior researchers, increasing the participation of women and minorities and increasing their membership and profile in an increasingly cross-disciplinary environment,” he said.
Duffield received his bachelor's degree in natural sciences in 1982 and a master’s in 1983 from the University of Cambridge, UK. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the University of London, U.K., in 1987.
His research focuses on data and network science, particularly applications of probability, statistics, algorithms and machine learning to the acquisition, management and analysis of large datasets in communications networks and beyond.
Before joining the department, Duffield was a research professor at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University. Prior to that he worked at AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, New Jersey, where he held the position of distinguished member of technical staff and was an AT&T Fellow. He previously held post-doctoral and faculty positions in Dublin, Ireland and Heidelberg, Germany.
Duffield, the author of numerous papers and holder of many patents, is a co-inventor of the smart sampling technologies that lie at the heart of AT&T’s scalable Traffic Analysis Service. He recently was named specialty editor-in-chief of the newly created journal Frontiers in ICT and he was charter chair of the IETF working group on packet sampling. Duffield is an IEEE Fellow and was a co-recipient of the ACM Sigmetrics Test of Time Award in both 2012 and 2013 for work in Network Tomography.
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