Portrait of Prof. Ethan Katz-Bassett  

Ethan Katz-Bassett

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

CEPSR 712

Tel212-854-3105

Research Interests

Computer networking: Internet reliability and performance, Internet-scale distributed systems, Internet measurement, routing, content delivery, system design and deployment

Ethan Katz-Bassett develops techniques and systems to understand and improve the reliability and performance of Internet services. His research interests include Internet-scale distributed systems, Internet measurement, routing, and content delivery. Because he designs his techniques to be deployable, some of his techniques are in widespread use at companies such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

Designed decades ago, the Internet protocols are not well suited to current demands placed on them by streaming video, mobility, virtual and augmented reality platforms, and, increasingly, critical apps like assistive driving. Due to the distributed nature of the Internet, which is comprised of tens of thousands of independent (and often competing) networks, upgrading the protocols themselves has proved exceptionally challenging.

Katz-Bassett develops solutions to improve Internet performance that individual networks can deploy unilaterally, overcoming the limitations inherent to outdated protocols and distributed administration. His Sibyl system uses a rich model of routing to overcome protocol and vantage point limitations in order to answer a general class of queries, subsuming a range of operational and research needs to provide timely and accurate information. He and his students collaborated with Facebook to measure how the Internet’s limitations negatively impact the social media giant’s services, then designed and deployed a system that dynamically incorporates performance, demand, and application information into Facebook’s decisions of how to route traffic to its 2 billion users—while remaining compatible with the routing protocol used by the Internet.

Katz-Bassett also researches how to deliver Internet services, working on transport protocols that carry content to clients and on content delivery networks (CDNs) and cloud-based distributed systems that host the services. A collaboration with Google sped up client connections by 23% by modifying how Google servers identify and recover from packet loss. Katz-Bassett developed techniques to enumerate and locate all CDN servers, uncovering a massive change in strategy by Google. This finding in turn influenced Microsoft’s strategy, with whom Katz-Bassett and his students collaborated to improve CDN performance for the company’s users.

He joined the faculty of Columbia Engineering in 2017. Previously he worked at Google and taught in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where he was the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair. Katz-Bassett earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Washington in 2012 and his BA from Williams College in 2001.

Professional Experience

  • Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, 2017-
  • Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair, University of Southern California, 2016-2017
  • Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Southern California, 2012-2017
  • Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. 
  • Software Engineer, Mobile performance, Google Inc., 2011-2012

Professional Affiliations

  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
  • ACM SIGCOMM

Honors & Awards

Selected Publications

  • A complete updated list is available at http://www.columbia.edu/~ebk2141/publications.html
  • Odin: Microsoft's Scalable Fault-Tolerant CDN Measurement System. M. Calder, R. Gao, M. Schroder, R. Stewart, J. Padhye, R. Mahajan, G. Ananthanarayanan, E. Katz-Bassett. NSDI 2018.
  • Engineering Egress with Edge Fabric: Steering Oceans of Content to the World. B. Schlinker, H. Kim, T. Cui, E. Katz-Bassett, H. Madhyastha, I. Cunha, J. Quinn, S. Hasan, P. Lapukhov, H. Zeng.
    SIGCOMM 2017. (Awarded Applied Networking Research Prize, IRTF/IETF, 2019.)
  • An Internet-Wide Analysis of Traffic Policing. T. Flach, P. Papageorge, A. Terzis, L. Pedrosa, Y. Cheng, T. Karim, E. Katz-Bassett, R. Govindan. SIGCOMM 2016.
  • Sibyl: A Practical Internet Route Oracle. I. Cunha, P. Marchetta, M. Calder, Y. Chiu, B. Schlinker, B. Machado, A. Pescapè, V. Giotsas, H. Madhyastha, E. Katz-Bassett. NSDI 2016.
  • Are We One Hop Away from a Better Internet? Y. Chiu, B. Schlinker, A. B. Radhakrishnan, E. Katz-Bassett, R. Govindan. IMC 2015 (Internet Measurement Conference).
  • PEERING: An AS for Us. B. Schlinker, K. Zarifis, I. Cunha, N. Feamster, E. Katz-Bassett.
    HotNets 2014 (ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks).
  • Reducing Web Latency: the Virtue of Gentle Aggression. T. Flach, N. Dukkipati, A. Terzis, B. Raghavan, N. Cardwell, Y. Cheng, A. Jain, S. Hao, E. Katz-Bassett, R. Govindan. SIGCOMM 2013.
    Awarded Applied Networking Research Prize, IRTF/IETF, 2014.
  • PoiRoot: Investigating the Root Cause of Interdomain Path Changes. U. Javed, I. Cunha, D. R. Choffnes, E. Katz-Bassett, A. Krishnamurthy, T. Anderson. SIGCOMM 2013.
  • Mapping the Expansion of Google's Serving Infrastructure. M. Calder, X. Fan, Z. Hu, R. Govindan, J. Heidemann, E. Katz-Bassett. IMC 2013 (ACM Internet Measurement Conference).
  • LIFEGUARD: Practical Repair of Persistent Route Failures. E. Katz-Bassett, C. Scott, D. R. Choffnes, I. Cunha, V. Valancius, N. Feamster, H. V. Madhyastha, T. Anderson, A. Krishnamurthy.
    SIGCOMM 2012.
  • Reverse Traceroute. E. Katz-Bassett, H. V. Madhyastha, V. K. Adhikari, C. Scott, J. Sherry, P. van Wesep, T. Anderson, A. Krishnamurthy. NSDI 2010.
    Awarded Best Paper.
  • Studying Black Holes in the Internet with Hubble. E. Katz-Bassett, H. V. Madhyastha, J. P. John, A. Krishnamurthy, D. Wetherall, T. Anderson. NSDI 2008.
  • Consensus Routing: The Internet as a Distributed System. J. P. John, E. Katz-Bassett, A. Krishnamurthy, T. Anderson, A. Venkataramani. NSDI 2008.
    Awarded Best Paper.