Hari Balakrishnan
Address:	32-G940, MIT CSAIL The Stata Center 32 Vassar Street Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Phone:	(617) 253-8713 (I rarely check voicemail)
	hari - csail mit edu

I'm the Fujitsu Chair Professor in the EECS Department at MIT and lead the Networks and Mobile Systems group at CSAIL. I'm also a Director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. My research is in the area of networked computer systems, with current interests in networking, data management, and sensing for a world of truly mobile devices connected to cloud services running in datacenters. My past work has contributed to mobile and sensor computing, wireless networks, Internet architecture (congestion control, routing, network security), overlay and P2P networks, and data management (stream processing and secure databases). Short bio.

My papers and group's software.
My older (pre-1999) older papers and software.

Current Research

• Centralized data planes for datacenters and enterprise networks: Fastpass and other such approaches
• Programmable data planes for routers: Domino, PIFO
• App-Centric Transport (ACT) for the Internet, especially with
  • Polaris, which makes the web faster with fine-grained dependency tracking of web objects
  • Mahimahi, a tool for browser developers, website authors, and network protocol designers that provides accurate measurements when recording and replaying HTTP content over emulated network conditions.
  • Sprout, a transport protocol for interactive applications such as videoconferencing over variable networks (e.g., cellular)
• Computer-synthesized protocols with Remy
• Continuous mobile object recognition: Glimpse

Some past projects include: CarTel, Spinal Codes, CryptDB, Snoop (wireless TCP), Congestion Manager, Cricket, RON, Chord, Migrate, INS, Medusa / Borealis, internet routing / rcc, Infranet, SFR, Divert/MRD, DOA, DQE, speak-up, AIP, anomaly detection, HRDB, Wavescope/Wishbone, SoftPHY protocols (SoftRate, MIXIT, conflict-map MAC) AirBlue cross-layer experimentation platform, Relational Cloud (a database-as-a-service for the cloud, incl. Kairos)

Teaching

• 6.02 (Intro to EECS-II: Digital Communication Systems). Taken by all Course VI undergrads. Fall 15, Fall 12, Spring 12, Fall 11, Fall 10, Spring 10, Fall 09, Spring 09, Spring 08, Fall 07, Spring 07.
• 6.033 (Computer Systems Engineering). Taken by most (all?) CS undergrads. Spring 15, Spring 05, Spring 04, Spring 02, Spring 00, Spring 99 (recitations).
• 6.829 (Computer Networks). Graduate course. Spring 13, Spring 08, Fall 05, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98.
• Cloud computing seminar (6.897) (Spring 11).

Students & post-docs

• Current PhD students: Peter Iannucci | Ravi Netravali | Amy Ousterhout | Vikram Nathan | Akshay Narayan | Frank Cangialosi | Songtao He | Prateesh Goyal
• Current post-docs: Srinivas Narayana
• Graduated PhD students (theses) in inverse chronological order, with current affiliations:
  1. Anirudh Sivaraman (June 2017, New York University)
  2. Jonathan Perry (June 2017, Flowtune),
  3. Yu-Han (Tiffany) Chen (June 2017, Waymo),
  4. Shuo Deng (June 2015, CTO care.coach),
  5. Keith Winstein (June 2014, Assistant Professor at Stanford University; ACM SIGCOMM dissertation award),
  6. Lenin Ravindranath (June 2014, Microsoft Research)
  7. Katrina LaCurts (June 2014, Lecturer at MIT EECS)
  8. Arvind Thiagarajan (September 2011, now at Amazon; previously co-founded Infix)
  9. Mythili Vutukuru (June 2010, now at Movik Networks Asst. Professor of CSE at IIT Bombay)
  10. Bret Hull (January 2010, now at Meraki)
  11. Kyle Jamieson (June 2008, Lecturer (= Assistant Professor) at University College, London Associate Professor, Princeton University)
  12. Michael Walfish (November 2007, Associate Professor, New York University. Was: Assistant Professor of CS at UT Austin)
  13. Jaeyeon Jung (May 2006, now at Intel Microsoft Research VP Cloud Platform at Samsung)
  14. Allen Miu (May 2006, now at Ruckus Wireless Frontiir),
  15. Magdalena Balazinska (December '05, now Associate Professor of CSE at the Univ. of Washington, Microsoft Faculty Fellow)
  16. Nick Feamster (September '05, Sprowls award Honorable Mention, now Associate Professor of CS at Georgia Tech Princeton University, PECASE winner and Sloan Fellow)
  17. Nissanka Bodhi Priyantha (May '05, winner of a Sprowls Award, now at Microsoft Research)
  18. David Andersen (December '04, winner of a Sprowls Award for best MIT CS thesis, now Associate Professor of CS at CMU)
  19. Alex Snoeren (December '02, Sprowls Honorable Mention, now Assistant Associate Professor of CSE at UCSD)
  20. Wendi Heinzelman (June '00, co-supervised w/ Prof. Chandrakasan, now Assistant Associate Professor of ECE and Dean of Graduate Studies at Rochester)
  I also worked closely with Raluca Popa (SM advisor and collaborator on her PhD projects, now at UC Berkeley), Godfrey Tan (Intel Frontiier), Sachin Katti (Stanford), Ryan Newton (Indiana), Ben Vandiver (Vertica), Asfandyar Qureshi (Google), Jayashree Subramanian (Bell Labs), Sejoon Lim (Oracle), Evan Jones.
• Past post-docs: Jakob Eriksson (Aug 2006-July 2008), Lewis Girod (Feb 2006-Jan 2008), Ramki Gummadi (2007-2009), Can Emre Koksal (2002-2004), Calvin Newport (2009-11) | Evdokia Nikolova (2009-11) | Geoffrey Werner-Challen (2010-11) | Rohan Murty (2011-12). I also worked closely with Carlo Curino.

Commercial activities

• Co-founder and CTO of Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT). A spin-off from the CarTel project, CMT develops innovative mobile sensing technology and data analytics to improve driving behavior and make roads safer around the world. Its products are used daily by drivers worldwide in popular smartphone applications. In 2013, CMT launched the DriveWell mobile app, providing an accurate, scalable, and customizable telematics solution for automobile insurance providers and their customers. DriveWell not only measures driving behavior, but also helps users become better drivers. It provides a scalable technology for traditional usage-based insurance, but also allows insurers to think in terms of behavior-based models.
• Advisor, Meraki Networks (acquired by Cisco), 2006-2012. Meraki started by commercializing wireless mesh networking based on MIT's Roofnet project. It then pioneered cloud-based remote network management of deployed wireless access points in its products.
• Co-founder, StreamBase Systems (acquired by TIBCO), 2003-2008. StreamBase commercialized the Aurora and Medusa stream processing systems based on research conducted at MIT, Brown, and Brandeis. It developed a leading product for processing massive amounts of streaming data, with success particularly in the financial services.
• Consultant and algorithm architect for Sandburst (acquired by Broadcom), 2000-2003. Developed algorithms (and patents) for rate guarantees and overload protection, switch scheduling, and packet classification.

Personal information

• Education: PhD (UC Berkeley), 1998; BTech (IIT Madras), 1993; High school (KVIIT, Madras), 1989.
• My sister, Hamsa Balakrishnan, is an Assistant Professor at MIT working on improving the airspace system. She finished her PhD at Stanford in 2006 and was at NASA before coming to MIT in 2007.
• My mother and father are both theoretical physicists. My father, V. Balakrishnan, has a series of great lectures on classical physics and quantum mechanics on YouTube, which are quite popular.
• My academic ancestry (in greater depth)