Don Towsley Honored with Election to the American Association for the Advancement of Science
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The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the preeminent scientific institution in the United States, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals, has elected Don Towsley, Distinguished Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), as a 2024 Fellow—a distinguished lifetime honor within the scientific community.
Towsley has taught computing at UMass Amherst since 1976, where he founded and leads the Advanced Classical and Quantum Information Research Lab. Towsley is an acknowledged pioneer in digital 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. Fast-forward 26 years, and you’ll find Towsley helping to design the internet of the future by leading UMass Amherst’s efforts in helping to build networks based on quantum computing.
“This AAAS election is an incredibly well-deserved honor for Towsley,” says Laura Haas, Donna M. and Robert J. Manning Dean of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences. “His pioneering work in classical and quantum network tomography has had a tremendous impact on computing and established UMass Amherst as the epicenter of research in this foundational area of the field.”
Towsley’s work on tomography received the prestigious 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 at the University of Arizona. Towsley 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.
Thanks to a seed fund created by anonymous donors, including a gift of $5 million, Towsley is leading the creation of a UMass Amherst center of excellence to support research in quantum information systems. This center, bringing together researchers from CICS, the College of Engineering and the College of Natural Sciences, will work on building quantum computers and developing a quantum internet to provide network security and to connect these new quantum computers.
Previously, Towsley contributed foundational research to the development of modern Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP — a standard the defines the basic rules of the internet and how it delivers data. In a series of papers with colleagues starting in 1998, he developed the first model of the TCP protocol, accurately capturing TCP’s principal features of congestion avoidance and timeouts, and the first fluid model of a network carrying TCP traffic.
With a student and colleagues, Towsley conceptualized a new area of information-theoretic security and established experimentally validated fundamental limits on the number of bits that can be transmitted reliably from a transmitter to an intended recipient without detection by an attentive adversary. This new research area, known as “covert communications,” has application in scenarios where hiding the existence of a signal can be critical.
Towsley has made other pioneering contributions to the field of network modeling and analysis, ranging from the development of stochastic sample path and bounding techniques to the analysis of video streaming systems. He has published more than 500 papers and holds 11 U.S. patents.
Towsley was elected alongside Barbara Zurer Pearson, research associate in linguistics. This article was originally published by the UMass Amherst Offfice of News & Media Relations.