ASM Rizvi received his Ph.D. in computer science in June 2024, and he was supervised by John Heidemann. He was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He did his undergraduate and master’s studies in the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, then worked with a US-based startup called Veriflow Systems where he became interested in networking and security related devices. 

Why did you choose a computer science field?

I enjoy the process of problem solving. With computer science, I was able to solve many problems and pioneer technologies that have a real-world impact.

Why did you choose ISI? What makes in unique?

At Veriflow Systems, I met a professor who recommended ISI as a good place to network and apply my skills. I visited ISI in 2017 and was amazed by the beautiful Marina Del Rey location and California weather. I also knew that ISI was unique for its contributions to internet research, as the first phase of DNS (domain name system) was designed at ISI and the “God of the Internet” Jon Postel used to be at ISI. With its robust tradition of research and the flexible work culture, ISI was an easy choice for me. 

What's the most impactful project you've worked on?

My research focused on network security and Internet measurement. I used different measurement techniques to improve network performance. For one of my projects, I built a system to mitigate denial of service attacks. During these attacks, servers are overwhelmed with malicious intrusions and since the server is overloaded, it can’t serve legitimate clients anymore. At ISI we have a root server that was frequently susceptible to this type of attack. To deal with this, we built filtering and traffic distribution systems that shifted traffic from an overloaded server to another freer server. In terms of real world impact, this could be used to mitigate big server attacks.

What are your plans after ISI?

I am joining Akamai Technologies as a senior site reliability engineer. When I first started working for Akamai as an intern, we collaborated with ISI and that work became part of my Ph.D. process. In the future, I hope to continue these collaborations if I get the opportunity.