Parviz Kermani received the B.S. degree from the University of Tehran, Iran in 1969, the Master of Mathematics (M.M.) in mathematics from University of Waterloo in Canada in 1973 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from UCLA in 1977. From 1978 to 2009 he was a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York, USA. Dr. Kermani retired from IBM Research in 2009.
While at UCLA he was a member of the ARPA network research project, which later led to the creation of the Internet. At UCLA he did research in the design and evaluation of switching and flow control techniques in computer communication. His pioneering work on a new switching techniques, the Cut-Though switching, is now used in all innovative switching and networking architectures. His seminal paper on Cut-Through Switching originally published in 1978 in Journal Computer Networks, was the top 10 highest referenced paper in the history of that journal and because of its significant influence, it was republished in June 2014. In December 2014 he was recognized by CUNY for this contribution by a certificate of appreciation.
While with IBM, he has was involved in number of diverse research projects spanning from theoretical works to product developments, all in computer communication areas such as mobile computing, personal system communications, and Internet security, distributed and pervasive computing systems, Multimedia distribution and distance learning, System Management and Autonomic Computing. He has made many contributions to number of IBM communication products for which IBM holds patents.
His last position at IBM was the project manager of the ITA (International Technology Alliance), a $100M, 10 year joint research project between UK and US, funded by the UK MoD (Ministry of Defense) and US ARL (Army Research Lab), involving scientist from 24 universities and industrial research scientist of the two countries, pulling 120 scientists together.
Dr. Kermani is a senior member of IEEE and has many publications in diverse fields of computers and communications. He has organized and chaired number of international conferences.
Dr. Kermani was the General Chair of Infocom 2002, the major conference in computer and communication networks, and Vice Chair of Mobicom, the pioneering conference in mobile computing. He has also chaired number of international conferences and has given lectures in Europe, China and the Middle East. He is the author and co-author of 120 technical and scientific papers majority of them published in major technical and scientific journals. He is the inventor and co-inventor of 15 patents to which IBM holds license.
While a scientist at IBM Research, he was also active in the academia. He was an adjunct professor at the graduate center of Polytechnic University in Westchester, New York, where he taught graduate courses in computer communication networks and other fields of computer science from 1987-2011. In 2009-2010 he was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where he did research and conducted courses in Green Computing and Communication Networks. In 2013 he was an adjunct professor at Manhattan College.
Prior to rejoining UMass, Dr. Kermani was a professor at Stella and Charles Guttman Community College of CUNY (2013-2016), teaching all IT courses at this college.