Hari Balakrishnan

My research is in the area of networked computer systems. Over the past few years, my interests have spanned overlay and peer-to-peer networks; Internet architecture, routing, and congestion control; wireless and sensor networks; network security; and distributed data management. A somewhat dated summary (from Fall 2005) of some of my research and teaching activities is here (5 pages).

I lead the Networks and Mobile Systems (NMS) group at CSAIL. Most of my papers and group's software are available online. My older (pre-1999) papers and software, are also available.

Current Research

• Wireless networks
• The CarTel mobile sensor network and telematics system, which includes the Cabernet content delivery network for vehicles using opportunistic WiFi for connectivity; the Freeflow traffic monitoring system, and the Pothole Patrol (P2) road surface monitoring system, among other efforts.
• Wavescope: a high data-rate sensor computing system (joint relational data stream and signal processing, with high-rate sensornet protocols).
• Wireless mesh and sensornet MAC and routing protocols; of late, these involve a project on "Bit-Switched Wireless Networks" that builds on the SoftPHY abstraction, conflict maps, and symbol-level network coding for improving wireless concurrency (spatial reuse)
• Network architecture
  • AIP (Accountable Internet Protocol)
• Data management systems
• HRDB, a Heterogeneous Replicated Data Base system that provides high availability by replicating different implementations of a SQL DBMS (e.g., Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, and DB2 could form the replicas). (No modifications to these replicas is required.)
• WaveScope (see above).

Teaching

• 6.02 Intro to EECS-II ("from Fourier transforms to the Internet")
  Spring 08 | Fall 07 | Spring 07

• 6.033 Computer Systems Engineering
  Spring 05 | Spring 04 (50% lectures) | Spring 02 (recitations) | Spring 00 (50% lectures + recitations) | Spring '99 (recitations)
  

• 6.829 Computer Networks
  Fall 05 (HKN review)| Fall 03 (HKN review) | Fall 02 (HKN review) | Fall 01 (HKN review) | Fall 00 (6.899) HKN review | Fall 99 (6.892) HKN review | Fall 98 (6.896) HKN review

Students/Postdocs

• Vladimir Bychkovsky
• Bret Hull
• Kyle Jamieson
• Stan Rost
• Arvind Thiagarajan (with Madden)
• Mythili Vutukuru

Current postdocs: Jakob Eriksson and Ramki Gummadi.

I also work with some PhD students advised by other faculty, notably Ben Vandiver (Liskov) and Yang Zhang (Madden).

Previous PhD and MEng students and their theses are here. Graduated PhD students include:

• David Andersen (December '04, winner of a Sprowls Award for best MIT CS thesis), now Assistant Professor of CS at CMU.
• Magdalena Balazinska (December '05), now Assistant Professor of CSE at the Univ. of Washington.
• Nick Feamster (September '05, Sprowls award Honorable Mention), now Assistant Professor of CS at Georgia Tech.
• Wendi Heinzelman (June '00, co-supervised w/ Prof. Chandrakasan), now Associate Professor of ECE at Rochester.
• Jaeyeon Jung (May 2006), now at Mazu Networks.
• Allen Miu (May 2006), now at Ruckus Wireless.
• Nissanka Bodhi Priyantha (May '05, winner of a Sprowls Award for best MIT CS thesis), now at Microsoft Research.
• Alex Snoeren (December '03, Sprowls Honorable Mention), now Assistant Professor of CSE at UC San Diego.
• Michael Walfish, soon-to-be Assistant Professor of CS at UT Austin (currently postdoc at Stanford).

Can Emre Koksal did a postdoc with me (2002-2004) and is now an Assistant Professor of ECE at The Ohio State University.

Personal Information

• Ph.D. (Berkeley), 1998; M.S. (Berkeley), 1995; B. Tech. (IIT Madras), 1993; High school (KVIIT, Madras), 1989.
• Short bio
• My sister, Hamsa Balakrishnan, is an Assistant Professor at MIT (Aero/Astro). She finished her PhD Stanford in 2006 and was at NASA before coming to MIT in 2007.
• My mother and father are both theoretical physicists.