Hari Balakrishnan

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 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 →

• Papers
• Group software
• Older (pre-1999) papers & software

• 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 — makes the web faster with fine-grained dependency tracking of web objects.
  • Mahimahi — accurate record-and-replay of HTTP content over emulated network conditions, for browser developers, website authors, and protocol designers.
  • Sprout — a transport protocol for interactive applications such as videoconferencing over variable (e.g. cellular) networks.
• Computer-synthesized protocols with Remy.
• Continuous mobile object recognition: Glimpse.

Some past projects: 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, and Relational Cloud (incl. Kairos). Full list →

In Spring 2016, Sam Madden and I taught a new hands-on course on Mobile and Sensor Computing (6.S062).

• 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 CS undergrads. Spring 15, 05, 04, 02, 00, 99 (recitations).
• 6.829 — Computer Networks (graduate). Spring 13, Spring 08, Fall 05, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98.
• Cloud Computing seminar (6.897) — Spring 11.

Current PhD students: Peter Iannucci, Ravi Netravali, Amy Ousterhout, Vikram Nathan, Akshay Narayan, Frank Cangialosi, Songtao He, Prateesh Goyal.

Current post-doc: Srinivas Narayana.

Graduated PhD students (theses), most recent first, 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, Stanford; ACM SIGCOMM dissertation award.
6. Lenin Ravindranath — June 2014, Microsoft Research.
7. Katrina LaCurts — June 2014, Lecturer, MIT EECS.
8. Arvind Thiagarajan — September 2011, Amazon; previously co-founded Infix.
9. Mythili Vutukuru — June 2010, Asst. Professor of CSE, IIT Bombay.
10. Bret Hull — January 2010, Meraki.
11. Kyle Jamieson — June 2008, Associate Professor, Princeton.
12. Michael Walfish — November 2007, Associate Professor, New York University.
13. Jaeyeon Jung — May 2006, VP Cloud Platform, Samsung.
14. Allen Miu — May 2006, Frontiir.
15. Magdalena Balazinska — December 2005, Associate Professor of CSE, Univ. of Washington; Microsoft Faculty Fellow.
16. Nick Feamster — September 2005, Professor of CS, Princeton; PECASE winner and Sloan Fellow. Sprowls Honorable Mention.
17. Nissanka Bodhi Priyantha — May 2005, Microsoft Research. Sprowls Award.
18. David Andersen — December 2004, Associate Professor of CS, CMU. Sprowls Award.
19. Alex Snoeren — December 2002, Professor of CSE, UCSD. Sprowls Honorable Mention.
20. Wendi Heinzelman — June 2000 (co-supervised w/ Prof. Chandrakasan), Professor of ECE and Dean of Graduate Studies, Rochester.

I also worked closely with Raluca Popa (SM advisor and PhD collaborator, now at UC Berkeley), Godfrey Tan (Frontiir), Sachin Katti (Stanford), Ryan Newton (Indiana), Ben Vandiver (Vertica), Asfandyar Qureshi (Google), Jayashree Subramanian (Bell Labs), Sejoon Lim (Oracle), and Evan Jones.

Past post-docs: Jakob Eriksson (2006–08), Lewis Girod (2006–08), Ramki Gummadi (2007–09), Can Emre Koksal (2002–04), Calvin Newport (2009–11), Evdokia Nikolova (2009–11), Geoffrey Werner-Challen (2010–11), Rohan Murty (2011–12). I also worked closely with Carlo Curino.

• Co-founder and CTO of Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT). A spin-off from the CarTel project, CMT develops mobile sensing technology and data analytics to improve driving behavior and make roads safer worldwide. In 2013 it launched the DriveWell mobile app — an accurate, scalable, customizable telematics solution for auto insurers and their customers that also helps users become better drivers, enabling behavior-based insurance models.
• Advisor, Meraki Networks (acquired by Cisco), 2006–2012. Meraki began by commercializing wireless mesh networking from MIT's Roofnet project, then pioneered cloud-based remote management of wireless access points.
• Co-founder, StreamBase Systems (acquired by TIBCO), 2003–2008. StreamBase commercialized the Aurora and Medusa stream-processing systems from MIT, Brown, and Brandeis, with particular success in financial services.
• Consultant and algorithm architect, Sandburst (acquired by Broadcom), 2000–2003. Developed algorithms and patents for rate guarantees and overload protection, switch scheduling, and packet classification.

• Education: PhD, UC Berkeley, 1998; BTech, IIT Madras, 1993; High school, KVIIT Madras, 1989.
• My sister, Hamsa Balakrishnan, is a 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 popular series of lectures on classical physics and quantum mechanics on YouTube.
• My academic ancestry (in greater depth).