CAIDA's KC Claffy Named One of the Top 25 Women of the Internet

Published 01/31/2000

Contact:
David Hart, SDSC, dhart@sdsc.edu, 858-534-8314

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO -- KC Claffy, principal investigator of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), has been named one of the Top 25 Women of the Web. The award reflects Claffy's contributions to the analysis of Internet traffic data and promotion of cooperation to help create a more robust Internet. San Francisco Women on the Web (SFWoW) will confer the honor in a ceremony to be held tonight, January 31, 2000.

Claffy is nationally recognized as a leader in the world of networking research and is the founder and principal investigator of CAIDA, based at SDSC on the UC San Diego (UCSD) campus. CAIDA fosters greater cooperation in the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. The organization seeks, through the development of neutral, open tools and methodologies, to promote engineering-level cooperation among Internet Service Providers (ISPs), as well as between industry and the research community. "Service providers face many great challenges today," Claffy said, "not least of which are inter-ISP traffic engineering, analysis, and problem resolution."

Recent CAIDA contributions to the community include an updated version of the cflowd software, used to analyze netflow output from Cisco routers; Gtrace, an interactive tool for geographical visualization of Internet paths; CoralReef, a comprehensive software suite for passive monitoring of Internet traffic; and Skitter, a macroscopic measurement tool that CAIDA has developed and deployed to monitor forward IP paths to many thousands of destinations. Skitter is designed for infrastructure-wide roundtrip-time and routing stability measurement, analysis, and visualization. For more information on CAIDA tools see http://www.caida.org/Tools.

A graduate of UCSD, Claffy's research focuses on collection, analysis, and visualization of wide-area Internet data on topology, workload performance, and routing.

"I'm honored to receive the WoW award," Claffy says. "As a technical woman, I have great respect for my co-honorees who were selected for their contributions toward improving the representation of women in computing and science."

Several hundred women were nominated for WoW's top 25 list, which this year dubbed its awardees "Leaders of the Millennium." Those chosen were singled out for their contributions to the advancement of technology, or for the advancement of women in technology or technology-related fields.

Within CAIDA, Claffy leads a group of researchers that fondly refer to themselves as "elves." "I think a part of the reason for CAIDA's success lies with the fact that we're an extended family," Claffy says. "Everyone in our organization really believes in what we're doing and in the importance of it for the future of the Internet."

Claffy's SFWoW award marks the second year in a row that a woman from CAIDA has been singled out to receive the honor. Last year Evi Nemeth -- a professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who leads CAIDA's Internet Engineering Curriculum Repository project -- received the same distinction.

For more information on SFWoW, see http://www.top25.org/.

The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) is a collaborative undertaking to research and promote greater cooperation in the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. CAIDA provides a neutral framework to support these cooperative endeavors. For more information on CAIDA, see http://www.caida.org.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center ( http://www.sdsc.edu/) is a research unit of the University of California, San Diego, and the leading-edge site of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure ( http://www.npaci.edu/). SDSC is funded by the National Science Foundation through NPACI and by other federal agencies, the State and University of California, and private organizations. For additional information about SDSC, NPACI, and the IBM SP teraflops system, see http://www.sdsc.edu/ or contact David Hart, dhart@sdsc.edu, 858-534-8314.