Hari Balakrishnan

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Hari Balakrishnan
BornNovember 1971 (age 53)
Alma materIndian Institute of Technology Madras
University of California, Berkeley
Known forCarTel mobile sensor system
Cricket indoor location system
Chord
Resilient Overlay Networks
Cambridge Mobile Telematics
StreamBase
AwardsMarconi Prize (2023), SIGCOMM Award (20221, IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award (2021), Infosys Prize (2020)
Scientific career
FieldsNetworks, Wireless Networks, Mobile Computing
InstitutionsMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis Challenges to Reliable Data Transport over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks  (1998)
Doctoral advisorRandy Katz
Notable studentsMagdalena Balazinska, Keith Winstein, Wendi Heinzelman, Alex Snoeren
Websitenms.csail.mit.edu/~hari/

Hari Balakrishnan is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and the Co-founder and CTO at Cambridge Mobile Telematics.[1]

Early life and career

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Balakrishnan was born in Nagpur, India, and was raised in Bombay (Mumbai) and Chennai. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1993 and his doctoral degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. He has been at MIT since 1998, and leads the Networks and Mobile Systems group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His father, V. Balakrishnan, is a renowned physics educator and researcher in theoretical physics, his mother, Radha Balakrishnan, is also a well-known theoretical physicist, and his sister, Hamsa Balakrishnan, is a Professor and Associate Department Head of MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.[2]

Balakrishnan co-invented the Chord distributed hash table, the RON resilient overlay network (with David Andersen), and the rcc[3] tool for verifiable Internet routing (with Nick Feamster).[4] [5] [6] [7]

The CarTel project (2005-2010) of Hari Balakrishnan and Sam Madden introduced the idea of using sensors attached to mobile assets such as vehicles and user's phones to measure the environment,[8] helping to create the field of mobile sensing. Results from the CarTel project include the Pothole Patrol[9] (with Jakob Eriksson and others), which used the opportunistic mobility of sensor-equipped vehicles to detect the surface conditions of roads, and the VTrack[10] and CTrack algorithms for accurate path and delay inference from noisy position streams.[11][12]

His work on wireless networks includes the TCP Migrate protocol (with Alex Snoeren) for seamless TCP connection migration across IP addresses. His work on spinal codes with Jonathan Perry and Devavrat Shah developed the first rateless codes to nearly achieve Shannon capacity over both Gaussian and binary-symmetric channels with an efficient encoder and decoder, thereby providing a new way to combat time-varying wireless channels.[13]

Balakrishnan's work on Internet security includes the Infranet anti-censorship system, distributed quota enforcement for spam control, the Accountable Internet Protocol (AIP),[14] and guarding against application-level distributed denial-of-service attacks using proof of "network work".[15] His work on router design includes the development of switch scheduling and QoS algorithms for Sandburst's (acquired by Broadcom) switch in the early 2000s, and his research on programmable high-speed routers (Domino and PIFO) with Anirudh Sivaraman, Mohammad Alizadeh, and others, which have influenced the P4 forwarding language. His work on naming systems includes an early empirical study of DNS performance and caching effectiveness[16] and the proposal for a layered naming architecture for the Internet using flat names resolvable using a scalable distributed hash table at the lowest layer.

In 2010, Balakrishnan founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics with Bill Powers and Sam Madden, and serves as the Chairman of its board. In December 2018, the SoftBank Vision Fund invested $500 million in Cambridge Mobile Telematics.

Awards and honors

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References

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  1. ^ "Hari Balakrishnan".
  2. ^ "Hari Balakrishnan". Indiaspora. Retrieved 3 August 2025.
  3. ^ "rcc: BGP Configuration Verifier". nms.lcs.mit.edu. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  4. ^ Tan, Kun; Sridharan, Murari; Bansal, Deepak; Thaler, Dave (11 November 2008). "Compound TCP: A New TCP Congestion Control for High-Speed and Long Distance Networks". Ietf Datatracker. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  5. ^ "Sprout: Stochastic Forecasts Achieve High Throughput and Low Delay over Cellular Networks". alfalfa.mit.edu. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  6. ^ "COPA congestion control for video performance". Facebook Engineering. 18 November 2019. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  7. ^ ABC: A Simple Explicit Congestion Controller for Wireless Networks | USENIX NSDI. ISBN 9781939133137. Retrieved 11 December 2020. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  8. ^ "Cars as traffic sensors". MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 24 September 2010. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  9. ^ Eriksson, Jakob; Girod, Lewis; Hull, Bret; Newton, Ryan; Madden, Samuel; Balakrishnan, Hari (17 June 2008). "The pothole patrol". Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services. MobiSys '08. Breckenridge, CO, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 29–39. doi:10.1145/1378600.1378605. ISBN 978-1-60558-139-2. S2CID 1967050.
  10. ^ Thiagarajan, Arvind; Ravindranath, Lenin; LaCurts, Katrina; Madden, Samuel; Balakrishnan, Hari; Toledo, Sivan; Eriksson, Jakob (4 November 2009). "VTrack". Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. SenSys '09. Berkeley, California: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 85–98. doi:10.1145/1644038.1644048. hdl:1721.1/62831. ISBN 978-1-60558-519-2. S2CID 207176348.
  11. ^ "Cambridge Mobile Telematics | Smartphone Telematics Pioneers". Cambridge Mobile Telematics. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  12. ^ Priyantha, Nissanka B.; Chakraborty, Anit; Balakrishnan, Hari (1 August 2000). "The Cricket location-support system". Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking. MobiCom '00. Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 32–43. doi:10.1145/345910.345917. ISBN 978-1-58113-197-0. S2CID 12731568.
  13. ^ "Rateless Spinal Codes". nms.csail.mit.edu. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  14. ^ Andersen, David G.; Balakrishnan, Hari; Feamster, Nick; Koponen, Teemu; Moon, Daekyeong; Shenker, Scott (17 August 2008). "Accountable internet protocol (Aip)". Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 conference on Data communication. SIGCOMM '08. Seattle, WA, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 339–350. doi:10.1145/1402958.1402997. ISBN 978-1-60558-175-0. S2CID 3735375.
  15. ^ Walfish, Michael; Vutukuru, Mythili; Balakrishnan, Hari; Karger, David; Shenker, Scott (4 August 2010). "DDoS defense by offense". ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 28 (1): 3:1–3:54. doi:10.1145/1731060.1731063. hdl:1721.1/72325. ISSN 0734-2071.
  16. ^ Jaeyeon Jung; Sit, E.; Balakrishnan, H.; Morris, R. (October 2002). "DNS performance and the effectiveness of caching". IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. 10 (5): 589–603. Bibcode:2002ITNet..10..589J. doi:10.1109/TNET.2002.803905. ISSN 1558-2566. S2CID 25659223.
  17. ^ Balakrishnan, Hari (1998). Challenges to reliable data transport over heterogeneous wireless networks (phd thesis). University of California, Berkeley.
  18. ^ "Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award". MIT Institutional Research. Archived from the original on 20 March 2021. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  19. ^ "Professor Hari Balakrishnan". NAE Website. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  20. ^ "Hari Balakrishnan". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  21. ^ "Three from MIT are named 2020 fellows of the IEEE". MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 8 January 2020. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  22. ^ "IEEE Fellows 2020 | IEEE Communications Society".
  23. ^ "Infosys Prize 2020 winners felicitated in six categories". The Hindu.
  24. ^ "Prof. Hari Balakrishnan". www.infosys-science-foundation.com. Retrieved 8 December 2020.
  25. ^ "IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award". IEEE. Archived from the original on 12 April 2018. Retrieved 11 December 2020.
  26. ^ Crowley, Magdalene L. (12 January 2021). "BEARS 2021: Hari Balakrishnan". EECS at UC Berkeley. Retrieved 15 March 2021.
  27. ^ "Creating a Safer, More Resilient Society: 2023 Marconi Prize Awarded to Hari Balakrishnan." Marconi Society. February 21, 2023.
  28. ^ "Hari Balakrishnan awarded Marconi Prize." MIT News. February 28, 2023.
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