University Of Massachusetts Amherst Distinguished Professor Receives 2023 Euler Award From The Network Science Society
Distinguished Professor Don Towsley of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) is this year’s recipient of the Euler Award from the Network Science Society for his foundational contributions to network tomography in classical and quantum communication networks.
The Euler Award is given annually for outstanding research discoveries in the field of network science, especially those that changed paradigms or assumptions.
Towsley, who has taught computing at UMass Amherst since 1976, is an acknowledged pioneer in networking. In 1999, he developed the first rigorous methodology for performing internet tomography, a technique for inferring internal network behavior based solely on end-to-end measurements.
The key idea in developing internet tomography was to use the correlation inherent in the performance observed in multicast packets to develop maximum likelihood estimates of link-level metrics such as loss rates and delay statistics, as well as a network’s internal topology. This work received the ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award in 2012 and has stimulated considerable research in industry and peer academic institutions.
In 2020, Towsley and colleagues received a five-year, $26 million initial grant from the National Science Foundation to form a new Engineering Research Center, the Center for Quantum Networks, where he co-leads one of three research thrusts focused on quantum network architecture and performs research on fundamental performance limits of quantum networks. A major direction of his research within the center is extending and applying the earlier tomography techniques to quantum networks.
The following year a seed fund created by anonymous donors, including a $5 million gift, was received to help Towsley and fellow faculty members implement a UMass Amherst center of excellence to support research in quantum information systems. The center will bring together researchers from CICS, the College of Engineering, and the College of Natural Sciences to work on building quantum computers, develop a ‘quantum internet’ to provide network security and connect these new quantum computers.
Towsley also founded and leads the Advanced Classical and Quantum Information Research Lab at UMass. He has also served as a visiting professor and researcher at Université Pierre et Marie Curie and INRIA in France; Christ’s College, U.K.; and research labs at AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft.
His UMass Amherst awards include university distinguished professor of computer science in 1998; distinguished faculty lecturer in 2002; the UMass Amherst College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics faculty research award in 2003; the Samuel F. Conti faculty fellowship award in 2008, and an outstanding accomplishments in research and creative activity award in 2008.