Deb Agarwal

Deb Agarwal was honored in the May 2000 cover story of Upside magazine as one of the Top 25 Women of the Web. She received the award for her work to provide reliable multicast communication for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty monitoring system.

Deb Agarwal is an accomplished computer scientist whose broad interests include cybersecurity, scientific dataservers, and network protocals.  She currently works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on several projects to improve communication between scientists using the web.  One such project, the Distributed Collaboratories Project, develops technology to allow scientists to access and even control experiments being conducted at remote facilities.

Some of her most exciting work was on the technology behind the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, an international agreement to prohibit the usage or testing of nuclear weapons.   The computing challenges of this treaty to monitor any potential nuclear blasts were enormous: thousands of sensors from across the world had to feed data simultaneously to the central computer in Vienna, which again had to send it out again to computers in all member countries.  Luckily, Deb wrote her  PhD on "reliable multicasting", a method to securely stream data from a single source to multiple places without losing any crucial information or causing network congestion.  She was called in as an expert on the project.  Her excitement for the project was infectious.  She commented, "I could end up having a significant impact on how the communications system is built to verify that no one conducts another nuclear test. That's cool!"

Deb received a BA from Purdue and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in electrical and computer engineering. She wrote her thesis on reliable multicasting and later worked with this groundbreaking technology at the Department of Energy.

Sources:
http://www.lbl.gov/CS/Archive/headlines4-9-99.html
http://www.girlgeeks.org/innergeek/inspiringwomen/agarwal.shtml
http://acs.lbl.gov/~deba/