Professor Ravi Netravali, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the agency’s highest honor for faculty members at the start of their research and teaching careers.
This award includes a five-year, $500,000 grant (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1943621) to support his research on improving web access across the diverse resource settings (e.g., developed vs. developing regions) in which pages are loaded. In contrast to the existing one-size-fits-all page load process that is used today, Netravali is looking to develop a new web paradigm called Adaptive Web Execution (AWE). AWE enables page loads to adapt their execution or content based directly on the available resources that the client device and network present. To realize this vision, Netravali aims to develop a suite of algorithms and systems that 1) efficiently and securely collect and expose resource information to page loads, 2) leverage data-driven optimizations that appropriately adapt page loads based on those resources, and 3) ease the burden of generating and debugging adaptive web pages for developers.
Netravali joined UCLA in January 2019. His research interests broadly encompass such computer science divisions as systems and networking, with a recent focus on building practical systems to improve the performance and debugging of large-scale, distributed applications for both users and developers. His research has been recognized by an ACM SoCC 2019 Best Paper Award and an IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize. Prior to joining UCLA, Netravali received his PhD from MIT and his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University.