Aaron Falk will provide support to GENI as Interim Engineering Architect and Lead System Engineer. Aaron will ensure that GENI’s end-to-end architecture is fully defined, that it satisfies the community’s research requirements, and that GENI’s construction plans are satisfactory to the community. Aaron will work with the research community, through the GSC, technical working groups, advisory boards and other outreach mechanisms to refine the GENI vision and ensure that the proposed infrastructure meets the (evolving) research needs of the community. Aaron will define the working group structure, operations, charters, and staffing to ensure proper coordination of Working Group plans with end-to-end GENI system planning, providing uniformity of system engineering processes and products across the project.

Aaron is a degreed system engineer with a strong background in building and managing networking projects. An IETF leader for over ten years, Aaron managed the DCCP, PILC, and TCPSAT working groups as they developed standards-track Internet protocols and advisory documents. He was chosen for his organizational insight and articulation to participate in developing new management strategies for the IETF as part of the PROTO team and set technical and political direction for the RFC Editor standards publication service. As chair of the Internet Research Task Force, Aaron oversees management of fourteen research groups, each with hundreds of members drawn from the research and standards communities. He made the previously laconic organization more active, expanding the number of groups by over 25% and instituting a process for publishing IRTF RFCs. Aaron led development of a key subsystem of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) MREFC project, Embedded Cyberinfrastructure (ECI), involving software development for real-time system, system integration, and field testing. An important activity in NEON has been planning for field testing the ECI system to validate robustness. Aaron has also led kernel and simulation implementation, testing, and specification of the eXplicit Congestion control Protocol (XCP), a high-performance network protocol.