Dr. Nick Duffield, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, was appointed a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).
The IET, which is based in the United Kingdom, is one of the world’s largest engineering institutions with more than 167,000 members in 127 countries. It is also the most multidisciplinary – to reflect the increasingly diverse nature of engineering in the 21st century.
IET Fellowship is awarded to individuals who have sustained high levels of achievement, for example through leadership, influence, senior responsibility, innovation and professional service, at the forefront of engineering, technology or cognate disciplines for a period of five years or more.
“I am honored to be recognized as a Fellow by the IET,” Duffield said. “I intend to use my relations with the IET Fellow community to help build international connections in my research fields of communications networking and data science.”
Duffield, who also has a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and is director of the Texas A&M Engineering Big Data Initiative, received his bachelor's degree in natural sciences in 1982 and a master’s in 1983 from the University of Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the University of London in 1987. His research focuses on data and network science, particularly applications of probability, statistics, algorithms and machine learning to the acquisition, management and analysis of large datasets in communications networks and beyond.
Before joining the department, Duffield worked at AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, New Jersey, where he held the position of distinguished member of technical staff and was an AT&T Fellow. He previously held post-doctoral and faculty positions in Dublin, Ireland and Heidelberg, Germany.
Duffield, the author of numerous papers and holder of many patents, is co-inventor of the smart sampling technologies that lie at the heart of AT&T’s scalable Traffic Analysis Service. He is specialty editor-in-chief of the journal Frontiers in ICT and he was charter chair of the IETF working group on packet sampling. Duffield is an IEEE Fellow and serves on the board of directors of ACM SIGMETRICS. He is an associate member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance.
The goal of IET is working to engineer a better world by inspiring, informing and influencing its members, engineers and technicians, and all those who are touched by, or touch, the work of engineers.