This past October, MIT professor and CSAIL principal investigator Manya Ghobadi won the 2022 SIGCOMM Rising Star Award for developing novel architectures in reconfigurable fiber optical networks and improving machine learning applications with reconfigurable and programmable networks. The award recognizes researchers who have made key contributions to the field of communication networks and are within 10 years of receiving their highest university degree.
Earlier in her career, Ghobadi developed technologies now utilized in both Microsoft and Google’s real-world systems. Now, she aims to make large-scale computer networks more efficient, ultimately developing adaptive smart networks. She primarily focuses on optical reconfigurable networks, networks for machine learning, and high-performance cloud infrastructure.
Ghobadi recently worked on “ARROW,” a system that reconfigures optical light from damaged fiber cables to healthy ones. Her project preserves users’ internet connection when fiber optic cables are damaged by weather, accidents, or other issues. She has also worked on making cloud computing more cost-effective for service providers.
"It's such an honor to receive this award,” says Ghobadi, who is the first woman in 11 years to receive the SIGCOMM Rising Star Award. “The intersection of optics and machine learning is an exciting and increasingly important research area, and it's great to see this recognition to keep the momentum around this topic.”
The award is one of many honors for Ghobadi. As an up-and-coming innovator in her field, she has also received the Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science, NSF Career Award, Optica Simmons Memorial Speakership, and best paper awards at the Conference on Machine Learning and Systems (MLSys) and ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC).
