Sylvia Ratnasamy

Sylvia Ratnasamy (born c. 1976) is a Belgian-Indian computer scientist. She is best known as one of the inventors of the distributed hash table (DHT). Her doctoral dissertation proposed the content-addressable networks, one of the original DHTs. She is currently an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ratnasamy received her Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Pune in 1997. She began doctoral work at UC Berkeley advised by Scott Shenker during which time she worked at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA. She graduated from UC Berkeley with her doctoral degree in 2002.

For her doctoral thesis, she designed and implemented what would eventually become known as one of the four original Distributed Hash Tables, the Content addressable network (CAN).

Ratnasamy was a lead researcher at Intel Labs until 2011, when she began as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. In recent years, Ratnasamy has focused her research on programmable networks including the RouteBricks software router and pioneering work in Network Functions Virtualization.

Ratnasamy lives in Berkeley, CA with her family. Her father is noted chemist Paul Ratnasamy.

Ratnasamy has been awarded numerous accolades, including:

• Grace Murray Hopper Award
• Sloan Fellowship
• ACM SIGCOMM Test-of-Time Award
• ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award