Hari Balakrishnan awarded Marconi Prize
The 2023 Marconi Prize has been awarded to Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu Professor in MIT’s Division of Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science (EECS) and a principal investigator within the MIT Laptop Science and Synthetic Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
The Marconi Prize, broadly thought of to be the highest honor inside the area of communications know-how, is given yearly to “innovators who’ve made vital contributions to growing digital inclusivity by means of the development of data and communications know-how.”
“Hari’s distinctive contributions have formed the course of analysis and discovery in a number of fields, saved lives, and enabled customers to have higher experiences with network-based companies,” says Vint Cerf, chair of the Marconi Society and 1998 Marconi Fellow. “His give attention to scientific excellence that creates constructive affect at scale, alongside together with his humanitarian contributions, makes him an ideal alternative for the Marconi Prize.”
Balakrishnan’s analysis has centered on enhancing the reliability, efficiency, and effectivity of pc programs, with particular emphasis on networking, cell computing, and distributed programs. Presently, his analysis focuses on networking, sensing, and notion for sensor-equipped cell units linked to edge and cloud companies, and on designing architectures for extra resilient networked programs.
His analysis in networking has led to raised communication protocols for cell units speaking over the web, such because the strategies he developed to know and enhance the efficiency of information transport over wi-fi networks. He has made vital contributions to community congestion management, overlay and peer-to-peer networks, sturdy routing, and web structure, growing strategies which have discovered their means into a number of business merchandise and community requirements. He has additionally developed new methods to enhance the reliability and efficiency of large-scale distributed programs, that are pc programs with a number of impartial elements that work collectively on a shared aim.
Between 1999 and 2004, Balakrishnan led the event of Cricket, an indoor location system utilizing a novel method to distance estimation utilizing ultrasonic and radio alerts. Beginning in 2004, collaborating with Sam Madden, he led a gaggle that developed the CarTel cell sensing system by instrumenting automobiles with cell sensors to measure highway and driving circumstances. In 2010, he co-founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) based mostly on the findings of the CarTel undertaking. CMT offers a platform to make driving safer utilizing myriad strategies together with cell sensing, sign processing, machine studying, and behavioral science.The platform measures and improves driving habits to scale back danger, automates roadside help with proactive crash detection, and creates a linked insurance coverage claims course of. CMT is as we speak the world’s largest telematics service supplier, serving tens of millions of customers in 18 international locations.
Balakrishnan acquired his PhD in 1998 from the College of California at Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science Division, which named him a distinguished alumnus in 2021. He additionally earned a BTech in 1993 from the Indian Institute of Know-how at Madras, which named him a distinguished alumnus in 2013. He was elected to the Nationwide Academy of Engineering in 2015 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. Balakrishnan’s honors embody the IEEE Kobayashi Computer systems and Communications Award (2021), fellow of the ACM (2008), fellow of the IEEE (2020), Sloan Fellow (2002), and the ACM dissertation award (1998). He has acquired a number of best-paper awards together with the IEEE Bennett paper prize (2004) and 6 “Take a look at of Time” or “Corridor of Fame” awards for papers with long-term affect from ACM SIGCOMM (2011), SIGOPS (2015), SIGMOD (2016), SIGMOBILE (2017, 2018), and SenSys (2019). In 2020, he was awarded the celebrated Infosys Prize in Engineering and Laptop Science, and in 2021, he was awarded the SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award.
Balakrishnan has additionally been honored for excellence in analysis and instructing at MIT with the Harold E. Edgerton school achievement award (2003), the HKN greatest teacher award (2018), the Jamieson award (2012), the Junior Bose instructing award (2002), and the Spira instructing award (2001). He has graduated practically 30 PhD college students and 10 postdocs who presently innovate at most of the most prestigious universities and corporations on the planet.
Balakrishnan joins an extended listing of Marconi Prize recipients with robust connections to MIT, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Bob Gallager, James Killian (MIT’s tenth president and the primary Marconi Prize recipient in 1975), David Forney, Tom Leighton, Bob Metcalfe, and Ron Rivest.