Optimization Problems Related to Internet Congestion Control

I’m going to be talking about a paper by Elias Koutsoupias, Christos Papadimitriou, Scott Shenker and myself, that was presented at the 2000 FOCS Conference [1] related to Internet-congestion control. Some people during the coffee break expressed surprise that I’m working in this area, because over the last several years, I have been concentrating more on computational biology, the area on which Ron Shamir reported so eloquently in the last lecture. I was having trouble explaining, even to myself, how it is that I’ve been working in these two very separate fields, until Ron Pinter just explained it to me, a few minutes ago. He pointed out to me that improving the performance of the web is crucially important for bioinformatics, because after all, people spend most of their time consulting distributed data bases. So this is my explanation, after the fact, for working in these two fields.