Prof Mark Handley, UCL and CTO Xorp Inc.

Mark Handley joined the Computer Science department at UCL as Professor of Networked Systems in 2003, and holds a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award. He leads the Networks Research Group, which has a long history dating back to 1973 when UCL became the first site outside the United States to join the ARPAnet, which was the precursor to today's Internet. Prior to joining UCL, Professor Handley was based at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, where he co-founded the AT&T Center for Internet Research at ICSI (ACIRI). Professor Handley has been very active in the area of Internet Standards, and has served on the Internet Architecture Board, which oversees much of the Internet standardisation process. He is the author of 22 Internet standards documents (RFCs), including the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is the principal way telephony signalling will be performed in future Internet-based telephone networks.

Professor Handley's research interests include the Internet architecture (how the components fit together to produce a coherent whole), congestion control (how to match the load offered to a network to the changing available capacity of the network), Internet routing (how to satisfy competing network providers' requirements, while ensuring that traffic takes a good path through the network), and defending networks against denial-of-service attacks. He also founded the XORP project to build a complete open-source Internet routing software stack.