Hari Balakrishnan received his PhD in 1998 from UC Berkeley and a BTech in 1993 from ITT Madras, which named him a distinguished alumnus in 2013. Now, Balakrishnan is the Fujitsu Chair Professor in the EECS department at MIT, the director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing, leads the Networks and Mobile Systems group at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL). Balakrishnan co-founded StreamBase Systems (2003) and Cambridge Mobile Telematics (2010) as well as an advisor to Meraki in 2006. Some of his awards include: ACM dissertation award, a Sloan Fellow, the IEEE Bennett prize, ACM SIGCOMM award, and a ACM Fellow.
Industry Impact
Hari Balakrishnan's research focus is in the area of network computer systems with interests in networking, data management, and mobile devices connections to cloud services running in datacenters.
Recent Works
CarTel
CarTel is a mobile sensor computing system designed to collect, process, deliver, and visualize data from sensors located on mobile units such as automobiles. A CarTel node is a mobile embedded computer coupled to a set of sensors. Each node gathers and processes sensor readings locally before delivering them to a central portal, where the data is stored in a database for analysis and visualization. CarTel provides a simple query-oriented programming interface, handles large amounts of heterogeneous data from sensors, and handles intermittent and variable network connectivity. CarTel nodes rely primarily on opportunistic wireless (e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) connectivity-to the Internet, or to “data mules” such as other CarTel nodes, mobile phone flash memories, or USB keys-to communicate with the portal.
Cricket
Cricket is an indoor location system for pervasive and sensor-based computing environment. Cricket provides fine-grained location information-space identifies, position coordinates, and orientation to applications running on handhelds, laptops, and sensor nodes. This technology is in intended for use indoors or in urban areas where outdoor systems like the Global Positioning System (GPS) do not work properly. It can provide distance ranging and positioning precision of between 1 and 3 cm and is designed for low-power operation and can be used as a location-aware sensor computing node tow which a variety of sensors can be attached.
Robust wide-area Internet Routing
The state-of-the-art for router configuration usually involves logging configuration changes and rolling back to a previous version when a problem arises. The lack of a formal reasoning framework means that router configuration is time-consuming and ad hoc. The research focus is to propose a set of rules, called the routing logic, which can be used to determine whether a routing protocol satisfies various properties. Network operations need tools based on systematic fault detection techniques to ensure that BGP’s operational behavior is consistent with the intended behavior. The aim is to design a verification tool based on a new reasoning framework that helps operators and protocol designers reason about high-level properties of routing protocols.