Simon S. Lam (林善成)

Regents Chair Emeritus in Computer Science No. 1

Department of Computer Science
The University of Texas at Austin
2317 Speedway, Stop D9500
Austin, Texas 78712-1757

email: lam at cs dot utexas dot edu
phone: 512 471 9531
fax: 512 471 8885
office: GDC 6.418
Internal Mail Code: D9500

Major Awards Biographical sketch Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Networking Research Laboratory Publications

Research contributions with the most useful applications:

1. Invention of secure sockets and prototype implementation of the first secure sockets layer (SNP) in 1993 for Internet applications -- This work was published and presented in the 1994 USENIX Summer Technical Conference. Subsequent secure sockets layers (SSL and TLS), re-implemented several years later using key ideas first presented in SNP, enabled secure e-commerce on WWW and are now widely used to secure email and other Internet applications. For this contribution, Professor Lam and three students in his research project won the 2004 ACM Software System Award. He was elected to National Academy of Engineering in 2007.

2. Invention of ato mic predicates and algorithms for scalable network verification (Software Download) -- This work is being re-implemented by a major technology company for verifying its cloud computing networks.

2012 IEEE ICNP Keynote on Greedy Routing with Guaranteed Delivery and Low Stretch

Courses taught: CS 356 (Fall 2017) CS 396M (Spring 2017)

Some former doctoral students (in order of graduation from UT-Austin)

A. Udaya Shankar (1982), Professor of Computer Science, University of Maryland at College Park

C. Edward Chow (1985), Professor of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Kenneth L. Calvert (1991), IEEE Fellow; Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky; effective May 2016, on leave at the National Science Foundation as Division Director, CISE Division of Computer and Network Systems

Thomas Y. C. Woo (1994), IEEE Fellow, Bell Labs Fellow; Head, Scalable Data Processing, Nokia Bell Labs

Geoffrey G. Xie (1996), Professor of Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA

David K. Y. Yau (1997), Professor of Information Systems, Singapore University of Technology and Design (previous position: Associate Professor of Computer Science, Purdue University)

Y. Richard Yang (2001), Professor of Computer Science, Yale University

Min Sik Kim (2005), Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Washington State University

Chen Qian (2013), Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering, UC Santa Cruz

Supervisor of Simon Lam's doctoral dissertation (1974)

Leonard Kleinrock, Distinguished Professor, UCLA