>Imcdc at 16:00, 24 June 2021

2021-06-24T16:00:53Z

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{{Use dmy dates|date=June 2018}}
{{Use Indian English|date=June 2018}}
{{Infobox scientist
| name = Hari Balakrishnan
| image =
| image_size = 400px
| caption = Hari Balakrishnan
| birth_date = November 1971
| birth_place =
| death_date =
| death_place =
| residence =
| citizenship =
| nationality =
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| fields = [[Computer network|Networks]], [[Wireless Networks]], [[Mobile Computing]]
| workplaces = [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]]
| alma_mater = [[Indian Institute of Technology Madras]] [[University of California, Berkeley]]
| doctoral_advisor = [[Randy Katz]]
| academic_advisors =
| doctoral_students =
| notable_students = [[Magdalena Balazinska]], [[Keith Winstein]], [[Wendi Heinzelman]], [[Alex Snoeren]]
| thesis_title = Challenges to Reliable Data Transport over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks
| thesis_year = 1998
| known_for = [[CarTel mobile sensor system]] [[Cricket indoor location system]] [[Chord (peer-to-peer)|Chord]] [[Resilient Overlay Networks]] [[Cambridge Mobile Telematics]] [[StreamBase Systems|StreamBase]]
| author_abbrev_bot =
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| influences =
| influenced =
| awards = [[Infosys Prize]] (2020), [[IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award]] (2021)
| religion =
| signature =
| website = {{URL|http://nms.csail.mit.edu/~hari/}}
| footnotes =
}}
'''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 [https://cmtelematics.com Cambridge Mobile Telematics].<ref>Hari Balakrishnan's [http://nms.csail.mit.edu/~hari/ homepage]</ref>

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|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. His father, [[V. Balakrishnan (physicist)|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.

Balakrishnan is well known for his highly-cited and influential contributions to computer networks, networked systems, and mobile computing. He co-invented the [[Chord (peer-to-peer)|Chord]] [[distributed hash table]], the [[Overlay network#Resilience|RON resilient overlay network]] (with David Andersen), and the rcc<ref>{{Cite web|title=rcc: BGP Configuration Verifier|url=http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/rcc/|access-date=2020-12-11|website=nms.lcs.mit.edu}}</ref> tool for verifiable Internet routing (with Nick Feamster). His contributions to Internet congestion control architecture include the [http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/cm/ Congestion Manager] to share congestion information across flows, the [https://ccp-project.github.io/ Congestion Control Plane] to write sophisticated algorithms at user level but run at hardware speeds, and the [http://fastpass.mit.edu/ Fastpass] system (with Jonathan Perry) for nearly zero-queue data transport in datacenters. His congestion control algorithms include [https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/infcom/2001/00916251/12OmNCykmbm binomial congestion control] with Deepak Bansal (this method is now a component in Microsoft's Compound TCP<ref>{{Cite web|last1=Tan|first1=Kun|last2=Sridharan|first2=Murari|last3=Bansal|first3=Deepak|last4=Thaler|first4=Dave|title=Compound TCP: A New TCP Congestion Control for High-Speed and Long Distance Networks|url=https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sridharan-tcpm-ctcp-02.html|access-date=2020-12-11|website=tools.ietf.org|language=en}}</ref>), the [https://web.mit.edu/remy/ Remy computer-synthesized congestion controller] with [[Keith Winstein]], the Sprout<ref>{{Cite web|title=Sprout: Stochastic Forecasts Achieve High Throughput and Low Delay over Cellular Networks|url=http://alfalfa.mit.edu/|access-date=2020-12-11|website=alfalfa.mit.edu}}</ref> method for cellular networks (also with Winstein), [https://web.mit.edu/copa/ Copa]<ref>{{Cite web|date=2019-11-18|title=COPA congestion control for video performance|url=https://engineering.fb.com/2019/11/17/video-engineering/copa/|access-date=2020-12-11|website=Facebook Engineering|language=en-US}}</ref> (with Venkat Arun), and the ABC scheme for cellular networks (with Prateesh Goyal, Ravi Netravali, and Mohammad Alizadeh).<ref>{{Cite web|title=ABC: A Simple Explicit Congestion Controller for Wireless Networks {{!}} USENIX NSDI|url=https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi20/presentation/goyal|access-date=2020-12-11|website=www.usenix.org}}</ref>

The [http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/cartel-sensys06.pdf CarTel project] (2005-2010) of Hari Balakrishnan and [[Samuel Madden (computer scientist)|Sam Madden]] introduced the idea of using sensors attached to mobile assets such as vehicles and user’s phones to measure the environment in a scalable way,<ref>{{Cite web|title=Cars as traffic sensors|url=https://news.mit.edu/2010/cars-sensors-0924|access-date=2020-12-11|website=MIT News {{!}} Massachusetts Institute of Technology|language=en}}</ref> helping to create the field of mobile sensing. These ideas have had significant academic and commercial success. Noteworthy results from the CarTel project include the Pothole Patrol<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Eriksson|first1=Jakob|last2=Girod|first2=Lewis|last3=Hull|first3=Bret|last4=Newton|first4=Ryan|last5=Madden|first5=Samuel|last6=Balakrishnan|first6=Hari|date=2008-06-17|title=The pothole patrol: using a mobile sensor network for road surface monitoring|url=https://doi.org/10.1145/1378600.1378605|journal=Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services|series=MobiSys '08|location=Breckenridge, CO, USA|publisher=Association for Computing Machinery|pages=29–39|doi=10.1145/1378600.1378605|isbn=978-1-60558-139-2|s2cid=1967050}}</ref> (with Jakob Eriksson and others), which used the opportunistic mobility of sensor-equipped vehicles to detect the surface conditions of roads, and the VTrack<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Thiagarajan|first1=Arvind|last2=Ravindranath|first2=Lenin|last3=LaCurts|first3=Katrina|last4=Madden|first4=Samuel|last5=Balakrishnan|first5=Hari|last6=Toledo|first6=Sivan|last7=Eriksson|first7=Jakob|date=2009-11-04|title=VTrack: accurate, energy-aware road traffic delay estimation using mobile phones|url=https://doi.org/10.1145/1644038.1644048|journal=Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems|series=SenSys '09|location=Berkeley, California|publisher=Association for Computing Machinery|pages=85–98|doi=10.1145/1644038.1644048|isbn=978-1-60558-519-2|s2cid=207176348}}</ref> and [http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/index.php?detail=203 CTrack] algorithms for accurate path and delay inference from noisy position streams. The project also developed new ways to compute [http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/index.php?detail=210 aggregate statistics over location data] while [http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/vpriv.pdf preserving location privacy]. The company they co-founded from the CarTel project, [https://cmtelematics.com Cambridge Mobile Telematics] (CMT),<ref>{{Cite web|title=Cambridge Mobile Telematics {{!}} Smartphone Telematics Pioneers|url=https://www.cmtelematics.com/|access-date=2020-12-11|website=Cambridge Mobile Telematics|language=en-US}}</ref> is today the world’s largest mobile telematics provider supporting many leading insurance and rideshare companies in 25 countries, helping to reduce the millions of road crashes that occur annually. The SenSys 2006 paper on CarTel received the [https://www.sigmobile.org/grav/awards/test-of-time-paper ACM SIGMOBILE "Test of Time" award in 2018], while the 2009 paper on VTrack received the [http://sensys.acm.org/tot/ ACM SenSys "Test of Time" award in 2019].

Between 1999 and 2004, his work on the [http://cricket.csail.mit.edu/ Cricket indoor location system] (with Nissanka Priyantha) showed how to combine radio and ultrasound for precise (3–5 cm) indoor location. Cricket was licensed to several companies and several hundreds of thousands of Cricket devices were built and used in projects and products in 16 countries. The MobiCom 2000 paper<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Priyantha|first1=Nissanka B.|last2=Chakraborty|first2=Anit|last3=Balakrishnan|first3=Hari|date=2000-08-01|title=The Cricket location-support system|url=https://doi.org/10.1145/345910.345917|journal=Proceedings of the 6th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking|series=MobiCom '00|location=Boston, Massachusetts, USA|publisher=Association for Computing Machinery|pages=32–43|doi=10.1145/345910.345917|isbn=978-1-58113-197-0|s2cid=12731568}}</ref> on the Cricket system won the [https://www.sigmobile.org/grav/awards/test-of-time-paper ACM SIGMOBILE "Test of Time" award in 2017].

Balakrishnan's work on wireless networks cuts across the different layers of the protocol stack. His papers in the 1990s were among the first to develop a deep understanding of, and ways to substantially improve, TCP’s performance on wireless networks, for which he won the [[ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award|ACM doctoral dissertation award]] in 1998. 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<ref>{{Cite web|title=Rateless Spinal Codes|url=http://nms.csail.mit.edu/papers/index.php?detail=209|access-date=2020-12-11|website=nms.csail.mit.edu}}</ref> 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. His work with Kyle Jamieson on [https://web.archive.org/web/20190611170027/http://nms.csail.mit.edu/projects/softphy/ SoftPHY] systematically exploited demodulation confidence to improve bit rate adaptation, contention management, and parsimonious retransmissions for partial packet recovery, and his papers on sensor network protocols such as [[Low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy|LEACH]] (with [[Wendi Heinzelman]] and [[Anantha P. Chandrakasan|Anantha Chandrakasan]]) and [http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/projects/leach/#:~:text=SPIN%20is%20a%20family%20of,redundant%20information%20throughout%20the%20network. Spin] were the first to consider overall system longevity as an important design goal, and have been cited many thousands of times by subsequent papers.

Balakrishnan's work on Internet security includes the [http://nms.csail.mit.edu/infranet/ Infranet anti-censorship system], [http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/dqe/ distributed quota enforcement for spam control], the Accountable Internet Protocol (AIP),<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Andersen|first1=David G.|last2=Balakrishnan|first2=Hari|last3=Feamster|first3=Nick|last4=Koponen|first4=Teemu|last5=Moon|first5=Daekyeong|last6=Shenker|first6=Scott|date=2008-08-17|title=Accountable internet protocol (aip)|url=https://doi.org/10.1145/1402958.1402997|journal=Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 Conference on Data Communication|series=SIGCOMM '08|location=Seattle, WA, USA|publisher=Association for Computing Machinery|pages=339–350|doi=10.1145/1402958.1402997|isbn=978-1-60558-175-0|s2cid=3735375}}</ref> and guarding against application-level distributed denial-of-service attacks using proof of "network work".<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Walfish|first1=Michael|last2=Vutukuru|first2=Mythili|last3=Balakrishnan|first3=Hari|last4=Karger|first4=David|last5=Shenker|first5=Scott|date=2010-08-04|title=DDoS defense by offense|url=https://doi.org/10.1145/1731060.1731063|journal=ACM Transactions on Computer Systems|volume=28|issue=1|pages=3:1–3:54|doi=10.1145/1731060.1731063|hdl=1721.1/72325|issn=0734-2071|hdl-access=free}}</ref> 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 ([http://web.mit.edu/domino/ Domino] and [http://web.mit.edu/pifo/ PIFO]) with Anirudh Sivaraman, Mohammad Alizadeh, and others, which have influenced the [[P4 (programming language)|P4]] forwarding language. His work on naming systems includes an early empirical study of DNS performance and caching effectiveness<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Jaeyeon Jung|last2=Sit|first2=E.|last3=Balakrishnan|first3=H.|last4=Morris|first4=R.|date=October 2002|title=DNS performance and the effectiveness of caching|url=https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1041066|journal=IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking|volume=10|issue=5|pages=589–603|doi=10.1109/TNET.2002.803905|s2cid=25659223|issn=1558-2566}}</ref> and the proposal for a [http://nms.csail.mit.edu/papers/layerednames-sigcomm04.html layered naming architecture for the Internet] using flat names resolvable using a scalable distributed hash table at the lowest layer.

With [[Magdalena Bałazińska|Magdalena Balazinska]] and others, Balakrishnan developed methods for distributed load balancing and [http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/borealis-sigmod05.pdf fault-tolerance in stream processing systems]; this work received the [https://sigmod.org/sigmod-awards/sigmod-test-of-time-award/#:~:text=The%20ACM%20SIGMOD%20Test%20of,methodology)%20over%20the%20intervening%20decade. ACM SIGMOD "Test of Time" award in 2017]. With Raluca Ada Popa and Nickolai Zeldovich, he helped develop [https://css.csail.mit.edu/cryptdb/ CryptDB], a system for performing SQL queries over encrypted data.

== Awards and honors ==
In December 2020, Balakrishnan received the [[Infosys Prize]] for Engineering and Computer Science, the most prestigious award that recognizes achievements in science and research in India, ''for his broad contributions to computer networking, his seminal work on mobile and wireless systems, and for commercial use of mobile telematics to improve driver behavior and make roads safer around the world.''<ref>{{Cite news|title=Infosys Prize 2020 winners felicitated in six categories|work=The Hindu|url=https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/infosys-prize-2020-winners-felicitated-in-six-categories/article33232504.ece}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title=Prof. Hari Balakrishnan|url=http://www.infosys-science-foundation.com/prize/laureates/2020/hari-balakrishnan.asp|access-date=2020-12-08|website=www.infosys-science-foundation.com|language=en}}</ref> He received the 2021 [[IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award]] for ''broad contributions to computer networking and mobile and wireless systems''.<ref>{{Cite web|title=IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award|url=https://www.ieee.org/about/awards/technical-field-awards/kobayashi.html|access-date=2020-12-11|website=www.ieee.org}}</ref> He was elected to the US [[National Academy of Engineering]] in 2015<ref>{{Cite web|title=Professor Hari Balakrishnan|url=https://nae.edu/130136/Professor-Hari-Balakrishnan|access-date=2020-12-11|website=NAE Website}}</ref> for contributions to networks and distributed systems, and to the [[American Academy of Arts and Sciences]] in 2017.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Hari Balakrishnan|url=https://www.amacad.org/person/hari-balakrishnan|access-date=2020-12-11|website=American Academy of Arts & Sciences|language=en}}</ref> He was elected as a [[Fellow of the IEEE]] in 2020,<ref>{{Cite web|title=Three from MIT are named 2020 fellows of the IEEE|url=https://news.mit.edu/2020/three-from-mit-are-named-ieee-fellows-0108|access-date=2020-12-11|website=MIT News {{!}} Massachusetts Institute of Technology|language=en}}</ref> a [[ACM Fellow|Fellow]] of the [[Association for Computing Machinery]] (ACM) in [[List of fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery|2008]], and as a Fellow of the [[Sloan Research Fellowship|Sloan Foundation]] in 2002. He received MIT’s prestigious [[Harold Eugene Edgerton|Harold E. Edgerton]] prize for research and teaching excellence in 2003.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award|url=https://ir.mit.edu/harold-e-edgerton-faculty-achievement-award|access-date=2020-12-11|website=MIT Institutional Research|language=en-US}}</ref> His PhD thesis on reliable data transport over wireless networks<ref>{{Cite thesis|title=Challenges to reliable data transport over heterogeneous wireless networks|url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/928597|publisher=University of California, Berkeley|date=1998|degree=phd|first=Hari|last=Balakrishnan}}</ref> won the 1998 [[ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award|ACM doctoral dissertation award]] for best thesis in computer science. He has also received several best paper awards including the 2004 IEEE [https://www.comsoc.org/about/awards/paper-awards/ieee-communications-society-william-r-bennett-prize William R. Bennett Prize], and six "test of time" awards for papers with long-term impact. In 2021, he received the [https://eecs.berkeley.edu/research/bears/2021/alumni/balakrishnan Distinguished Alumnus Award in Computer Science]<ref>{{Cite web|last=Crowley|first=Magdalene L.|date=2021-01-12|title=BEARS 2021: Hari Balakrishnan|url=https://eecs.berkeley.edu/research/bears/2021/alumni/balakrishnan|access-date=2021-03-15|website=EECS at UC Berkeley|language=en}}</ref> from the EECS Department of the University of California at Berkeley, and in 2013, he received the [https://alumni.iitm.ac.in/alumnus%20award/2013-distinguished-alumnus-awards/ Distinguished Alumnus Award] from the [[IIT Madras|Indian Institute of Technology, Madras]].

== Industry ==
In 2010, Balakrishnan founded [https://www.cmtelematics.com/ Cambridge Mobile Telematics] with Bill Powers and [[Samuel Madden (computer scientist)|Sam Madden]], and serves as the Chairman of its board. In December 2018, the [[SoftBank Vision Fund]] invested [https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005339/en/Cambridge-Mobile-Telematics-Raises-500M-from-the-SoftBank-Vision-Fund $500 million in Cambridge Mobile Telematics]. He is also an advisor to several companies including [[YugabyteDB|Yugabyte]], [https://www.flowmill.com/ Flowmill] (acquired by Splunk), [https://www.valtix.com/ Valtix], and [https://perch.fit/ Perch]. He was a founding advisor to [[Cisco Meraki|Meraki]] Networks in 2006 until its acquisition in 2012. In 2003, he co-founded [[StreamBase Systems]], commercializing academic research with [[Mike Stonebraker]] and others. He served on the Scientific Council of [[IMDEA]] Networks between 2007 and 2014.

== References ==
{{reflist}}

== External links ==
* [http://nms.csail.mit.edu/~hari/ ''Hari Balakrishnan's CSAIL homepage'']
* {{MathGenealogy|id=83472}}
*[https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Qf4bw4UAAAAJ&hl=en Hari Balakrishnan's Google Scholar profile]
* [https://zbmath.org/authors/?q=ai:balakrishnan.hari Author profile] in the database [[Zentralblatt MATH|zbMATH]]

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Balakrishnan, Hari}}
[[Category:MIT School of Engineering faculty]]
[[Category:IIT Madras alumni]]
[[Category:UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni]]
[[Category:Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences]]
[[Category:1971 births]]

Hari Balakrishnan - Revision history

>Imcdc at 16:00, 24 June 2021