Hari Balakrishnan


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.

Early life and career

Balakrishnan was born in Nagpur, India, and was raised in Bombay 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.
Balakrishnan co-invented the Chord distributed hash table, the RON resilient overlay network, and the rcc tool for verifiable Internet routing.
The CarTel project 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, helping to create the field of mobile sensing. Results from the CarTel project include the Pothole Patrol, which used the opportunistic mobility of sensor-equipped vehicles to detect the surface conditions of roads, and the VTrack and CTrack algorithms for accurate path and delay inference from noisy position streams.
His work on wireless networks includes the TCP Migrate protocol 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.
Balakrishnan's work on Internet security includes the Infranet anti-censorship system, distributed quota enforcement for spam control, the Accountable Internet Protocol, and guarding against application-level distributed denial-of-service attacks using proof of "network work". His work on router design includes the development of switch scheduling and QoS algorithms for Sandburst's switch in the early 2000s, and his research on programmable high-speed routers 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 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