Gun Sirer

Emin Gün Sirer, Cornell associate professor of computer science, has been named one of Popular Science magazine's annual "Brilliant Ten."

Selections for the list are made, the magazine says, from hundreds of nominations by academic department heads, professional organizations and journal editors who are asked to name people doing "the most creative and important research in the country."

Sirer studies and builds operating systems, from those that make individual computers work to those that manage networks. Last spring he attracted national attention by pointing out that the Internet's domain name system -- the network phonebook -- is insecure and could allow hackers to spoof an address, sending surfers to, say, a fake version of www.fbi.gov, even if the address had been entered correctly. He also is working on an operating system to enable "trusted computing" by guaranteeing that a program actually does what it claims to do.

He currently teaches a graduate course on peer-to-peer filesharing systems.