Azer Bestavros

About

Azer Bestavros is the inaugural Associate Provost for Computing & Data Sciences and the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Boston University. Prior to his appointment in 2019 to lead the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, he was the Founding Director of the Center for Reliable Software.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Distributed computing
• Engineering
• Political Science
• Operating system
• Real-time computing
• Embedded system
• Mathematical economics

Selected publications

• Accessible Privacy-Preserving Web-Based Data Analysis for Assessing and Addressing Economic Inequalities

  2018-06-20 · 34 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  An essential component of initiatives that aim to address pervasive inequalities of any kind is the ability to collect empirical evidence of both the status quo baseline and of any improvement that can be attributed to prescribed and deployed interventions. Unfortunately, two substantial barriers can arise preventing the collection and analysis of such empirical evidence: (1) the sensitive nature of the data itself and (2) a lack of technical sophistication and infrastructure available to both a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Neuroflight: Next Generation Flight Control Firmware

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2019-01-19 · 25 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Little innovation has been made to low-level attitude flight control used by uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), which still predominantly uses the classical PID controller. In this work we introduce Neuroflight, the first open source neuro-flight controller firmware. We present our toolchain for training a neural network in simulation and compiling it to run on embedded hardware. Challenges faced jumping from simulation to reality are discussed along with our solutions. Our evaluation shows the ne…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• User-centric distributed solutions for privacy-preserving analytics

  Communications of the ACM · 2017-01-23 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How can cryptography empower users with sensitive data to access large-scale computing platforms in a privacy-preserving manner?

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reinforcement Learning for UAV Attitude Control

  ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems · 2019-02-13 · 19 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Autopilot systems are typically composed of an “inner loop” providing stability and control, whereas an “outer loop” is responsible for mission-level objectives, such as way-point navigation. Autopilot systems for unmanned aerial vehicles are predominately implemented using Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control systems, which have demonstrated exceptional performance in stable environments. However, more sophisticated control is required to operate in unpredictable and harsh environment…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Peafowl

  2020 · 16 citations

  The traffic load sent to key-value (KV) stores varies over long timescales of hours to short timescales of a few microseconds. Long-term variations present the opportunity to save power during low or medium periods of utilization. Several techniques exist to save power in servers, including feedback-based controllers that right-size the number of allocated CPU cores, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), and c-state (idle-state) mechanisms. In this paper, we demonstrate that existing pow…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• SaTC: TTP: Small: Modular Platform for Web-based Secure Multi-Party Analytics

  NSF · $516k · 2017–2022

• ITR: Internet Flows as First-Class Values: Support for Dynamic, Flexible Internet Services

  NSF · $1.7M · 2002–2008

• CISE Research Infrastructure: SENSORIUM: Research Infrastructure for Managing Spatio-Temporal Objects in Video Sensor Networks

  NSF · $1.4M · 2002–2009

Frequent coauthors

• Ibrahim Matta

  57 shared

• Frank Mueller

  North Carolina State University

  38 shared

• Jan Van Leeuwen

  Utrecht University

  36 shared

• Gerhard Goos

  36 shared

• A. J. Kfoury

  36 shared

• Andrei Lapets

  31 shared

• Vatche Ishakian

  26 shared

• Shudong Jin

  Stony Brook University

  22 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  Boston University

  1993

• M.S., Computer Science

  Boston University

  1989

• B.S., Computer Science

  Boston University

  1987

Awards & honors

• William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Computer…

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Kate Saenkoh-89
• Ran Canettih-78
• Stan Sclaroffh-69