Hari Balakrishnan

Hari Balakrishnan has made seminal contributions in many areas in networked and mobile computer systems, including peer-to-peer systems (he co-invented Distributed Hash Tables through his pioneering work on Chord), Internet architecture (better naming, routing, and DDoS prevention), congestion control (e.g., congestion manager and binomial congestion control), mobile computing and sensing (CarTel and Cricket projects), database systems (streaming databases, encrypted query processing, privacy-preserving methods), and overlay networks (RON was one of the first works to explore the topic). His work on mobile and wireless systems blazed the trail for others to follow. He was the first to develop a deep understanding of, and ways to substantially improve, TCP's performance on wireless networks; this work won the ACM Doctoral Thesis Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2015.