Hari Balakrishnan

About

Fujitsu Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, Hari Balakrishnan specializes in security and cryptography, systems and networking. His research areas include designing systems that sense, process, and transmit energy and information, leveraging computational, theoretical, and experimental tools to develop groundbreaking sensors, energy transducers, and physical substrates for computation. He has made significant contributions to the fields of electrical engineering and computer science, focusing on addressing shared challenges facing humanity through innovative system development. Hari Balakrishnan has been recognized for his work with the Marconi Prize, the top honor within the field of communications technology, awarded on February 22, 2023.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Security
• Real-time computing
• Information Retrieval
• Operating system
• Computer network
• Computer vision
• Materials science
• Theoretical computer science

Selected publications

• Sat2Graph: Road Graph Extraction Through Graph-Tensor Encoding

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2020 · 102 citations

  DOI

• MIRIS: Fast Object Track Queries in Video

  2020 · 68 citations

  Video databases that enable queries with object-track predicates are useful in many applications. Such queries include selecting objects that move from one region of the camera frame to another (e.g., finding cars that turn right through a junction) and selecting objects with certain speeds (e.g., finding animals that stop to drink water from a lake). Processing such predicates efficiently is challenging because they involve the movement of an object over several video frames. We propose a novel…

  DOI

• Toward a Marketplace for Aerial Computing

  2021-06-24 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The rapid proliferation of commodity drones has expanded interest in building applications that acquire imagery, video, and sensor data at scale. In addition, recent work on drone programming frameworks have simplified the development of aerial computing apps that gather this data. These advancements have popularized the drones-as-a-service model, where large drone fleets serve multiple apps simultaneously.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Principles for Internet Congestion Management

  2024-07-31 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Given the technical flaws with---and the increasing non-observance of---the TCP-friendliness paradigm, we must rethink how the Internet should manage bandwidth allocation. We explore this question from first principles, but remain within the constraints of the Internet's current architecture and commercial arrangements. We propose a new framework, Recursive Congestion Shares (RCS), that provides bandwidth allocations independent of which congestion control algorithms flows use but consistent wit…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Savaal: Scalable Concept-Driven Question Generation to Enhance Human Learning

  ArXiv.org · 2025-02-18 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Assessing and enhancing human learning through question-answering is vital, yet automating this process remains challenging. While large language models (LLMs) excel at summarization and query responses, their ability to generate meaningful questions for learners is underexplored. We propose Savaal, a scalable question-generation system with three objectives: (i) scalability, enabling question generation from hundreds of pages of text (ii) depth of understanding, producing questions beyond factu…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: CT-T: Towards a More Accountable Internet

  NSF · $300k · 2007–2011

• FIA: Collaborative Research: Architecting for Innovation

  NSF · $200k · 2010–2013

• CPS: Medium: Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems

  NSF · $1.5M · 2009–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Samuel Madden

  47 shared

• Scott Shenker

  University of California, Berkeley

  34 shared

• Nick Feamster

  University of Chicago

  32 shared

• Mohammad Alizadeh

  Amirkabir University of Technology

  25 shared

• David G. Andersen

  Carnegie Mellon University

  21 shared

• Srinivasan Seshan

  Universidad del Noreste

  20 shared

• Mohammad Reza Alizadeh

  20 shared

• Randy H. Katz

  19 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1989

• M.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1985

• B.S., Electrical Engineering

  Indian Institute of Technology, Madras

  1981

Awards & honors

• Marconi Prize

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Regina Barzilayh-94
• Elfar Adalsteinssonh-76
• Marc Baldoh-75