Ravi Netravali, 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 that will support his research on improving web access both for users in developed regions who often experience unnecessarily slow web page loads, and users in developing regions whose page loads are frequently incomplete due to insufficient computational resources.
To achieve both goals, Netravali is looking to develop a new web paradigm, called Adaptive Web Execution, or AWE. In contrast to the existing one-size-fits-all page load process that is used today, page loads with AWE will use a combination of analysis and machine learning-based optimizations to best adapt to the available device and network resources.
Netravali joined UCLA in January 2019 from MIT, where he received his doctorate in computer science. His research interests are broadly in 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 a best paper award from the Association of Computing Machinery’s 2019 Symposium on Cloud Computing, and the 2018 Applied Networking Research Prize from the Internet Research Task Force.
