Hari Balakrishnan is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He is also a co-founder and chief technology officer at Cambridge Mobile Telematics.

Early life and career

Balakrishnan was born in Nagpur, India, and grew up in Bombay (now called Mumbai) and Chennai. He earned 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 worked 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 well-known physics teacher and researcher in theoretical physics. His mother, Radha Balakrishnan, is also a well-known theoretical physicist. His sister, Hamsa Balakrishnan, is a professor and associate department head of MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Balakrishnan co-invented the Chord system for organizing data, the RON resilient overlay network (with David Andersen), and the rcc tool for verifying Internet routing (with Nick Feamster).

The CarTel project (2005–2010), led by Hari Balakrishnan and Sam Madden, introduced the idea of using sensors attached to mobile objects like vehicles and phones to measure the environment, creating the field of mobile sensing. Results from the CarTel project include Pothole Patrol (with Jakob Eriksson and others), which used vehicles with sensors to detect road conditions, and the VTrack and CTrack algorithms for accurately tracking movement and delays from noisy location data.

His work on wireless networks includes the TCP Migrate protocol (with Alex Snoeren) for smoothly moving TCP connections between different IP addresses. His research on spinal codes with Jonathan Perry and Devavrat Shah created the first rateless codes that nearly reach the maximum efficiency of communication channels, providing a new way to handle unstable wireless signals.

Balakrishnan's work on Internet security includes the Infranet system to bypass Internet censorship, methods to control spam through distributed quotas, the Accountable Internet Protocol (AIP), and techniques to prevent attacks by verifying "network work." His work on router design includes developing scheduling and quality-of-service algorithms for Sandburst's (acquired by Broadcom) switches in the early 2000s. He also researched programmable high-speed routers (Domino and PIFO) with Anirudh Sivaraman, Mohammad Alizadeh, and others, which influenced the P4 forwarding language. His work on naming systems includes early studies of how the Domain Name System (DNS) performs and how caching improves efficiency, as well as proposing a layered naming system for the Internet using flat names that can be resolved through a scalable distributed hash table.

In 2010, Balakrishnan founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics with Bill Powers and Sam Madden and serves as its board chairman. In December 2018, the SoftBank Vision Fund invested $500 million in Cambridge Mobile Telematics.

Awards and honors

• 1998: His doctoral thesis on reliable data transport over wireless networks won the ACM's award for the best doctoral thesis in computer science.
• 2002: He was chosen as a Fellow of the Sloan Foundation.
• 2003: He received MIT's Harold E. Edgerton prize for outstanding research and teaching.
• 2008: He was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
• 2013: He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
• 2015: He was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering for contributions to networks and distributed systems.
• 2017: He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• 2020: He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to the design and application of mobile sensing.
• 2020: He received the Infosys Prize for Engineering and Computer Science, which is the most prestigious award recognizing achievements in science and research in India, for his work in computer networking, important research on mobile and wireless systems, and using mobile telematics to improve driver behavior and increase road safety worldwide.
• 2021: He received the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award for broad contributions to computer networking and mobile and wireless systems.
• 2021: He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award in Computer Science from the EECS Department of the University of California at Berkeley.
• 2023: He received the Marconi Prize from the Marconi Society, which is widely considered the top honor in communications technology.