At a Dean’s Lecture on April 3, Mostafa Ammar looked back at how networking and its research have evolved. Ammar is a Regents' Professor at the School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Ammar noted that in 1985, the year he received his Ph.D., there was only a rudimentary backbone network of a handful of nodes scattered across the US. Today, there are approximately seven million nodes across the globe.

“Today’s reality is that we have shifted focus from connectivity to content,” he remarked.

Ammar’s research interests are in network architectures, protocols and services. He has contributions in the areas of multicast communication and services, multimedia streaming, content distribution networks, network simulation, disruption-tolerant networks, and most recently, in mobile cloud computing and network virtualization. To date, 35 Ph.D. students have completed their degrees under his supervision, and many have gone on to distinguished careers in academia and industry.