Hari Balakrishnan is a Professor in the EECS Department and CSAIL at MIT. His research is in the area of networked computer systems, wireless and sensor networks, network architecture and security, overlay and peer-to-peer networks, and data management. In addition to many widely cited papers, several systems developed as part of his research are available in the public domain, and some are in production or commercial use (e.g., the Cricket location system, the CarTel vehicular network, the Snoop protocol for better TCP over wireless, the RON and MONET overlay networks, the Chord distributed hash table, and the Aurora/Medusa stream processing engine).
Balakrishnan received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1998 and a B.Tech. from IIT Madras in 1993. He is an ACM Fellow (2008), a Sloan Fellow (2002), and an NSF CAREER Award recipient (2000). He received the ACM doctoral dissertation award for his work on TCP over wireless networks (1998), and has co-authored several award-winning papers at various top conferences and journals, including a paper that received the IEEE Communication Society's William R. Bennett Prize (2004). He has also received awards for excellence in teaching and research at MIT (Spira and Junior Bose teaching awards, and the Harold Edgerton faculty achievement award).
In 2003, Balakrishnan co-founded StreamBase Systems, the first high-performance commercial event stream processing (aka complex event processing) engine. Between 2000 and 2003, he helped devise the key algorithms for Sandburst Corporation's (acquired by Broadcom) high-speed network QoS chipset.
