The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

In 1996, twelve years after making Aliyah to Israel, Danny Lewin graduated from the Technion and came to MIT to study algorithms. Over the next few years, he wrote a prize-winning Master’s Thesis on Consistent Hashing and co-founded Akamai Technologies, which today accelerates the delivery of over 250,000 web sites, including all of the top media and commerce brands on the Web.

In this talk, we will describe some of Danny’s early work on consistent hashing and how such theoretical work on algorithms ultimately led to the creation of an S&P 500 company for accelerating and securing web applications. We will also describe some of the scalability and security challenges that the internet is facing today, and Akamai’s vision for addressing those challenges.

Akamai is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, and through its recent acquisition of Cotendo Networks, Akamai now operates a significant and growing R&D center in Tel Aviv.

The talk is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Lewin, a Technion graduate and entrepreneur, who was killed in the first plane to hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001.