Biography
Ethan Blanton is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo.
He has been influential in the Internet protocol suite, having spent significant time and effort on documentation and standardization with the Internet Engineering Task Force. Standards that he co-authored are cited and implemented by the Linux kernel, macOS, FreeBSD, QUIC, and many other systems. His work is also cited in widely-circulated textbooks such as James Kurose and Keith Ross's Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach.
His first contributions to Free, Libre, and Open-Source Software were in the mid-1990s, and he has continued to contribute code, time, and material support to FLOSS projects ever since.
Ethan holds a Ph.D. and MS from Purdue University, and a BS from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University.
Ethan's academic interests are in networking, operating systems, and compilers and runtimes. He is not currently research active and does not accept Ph.D. or Masters advisees or operate a lab.
Teaching
I am currently teaching or scheduled to teach:
- CSE 486/586: Distributed Systems (Spring 2026)
I have previously taught:
- CSE 199: How the Internet Works (Fall of 2017, 2018, and 2019)
- CSE 220: Systems Programming (many offerings)
- CSE 410/510: Special Topics (Fall 2018, Spring 2025)
- CSE 486/586: Distributed Systems (many offerings)
If you are considering taking one of my courses, please consult this information to get an idea of how the course will be run. While I reserve the right to change course details at any time, this should give you an indication of what to expect.
Please note that due to Federal accessibility regulations, syllabi and lecture slides from my course offerings prior to Spring of 2026 have been removed from this web site. These regulations require markup that is not present in the older PDF files, and retroactively inserting the markup into hundreds of files is not practical. University guidance is that files which cannot be made technically compliant should be removed from the web.
Policies
My personal policies (which may differ from department or University policy):
Education and Generative AI
Current generative AI technology, including large language models, produces low-quality content that is far from ideal for the educational environment. In addition, these technologies entail enormous externalized costs and have significant ethical shortcomings. Until or unless these considerations change significantly, I will not be using large language models or generative AI in my classrooms.
Contact
Office: 334 Davis Hall
Email: eblanton@buffalo.edu
Personal Pages: Lost Bits, kb8ojh.net