Talk time: A Wknd interview with Marconi Prize winner Hari Balakrishnan

For Hari Balakrishnan, science was a family business. His grandfather KS Venkataraman was a scientist who collaborated with the legendary physicist CV Raman (they co-authored a paper on the determination of the piezo-optical coefficients of liquids, but there is no way to simplify it ).

Balakrishnan’s father V Balakrishnan is a professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras and his mother Radha Balakrishnan is also a theoretical physicist. His maternal uncle, V Rajaraman, organized India’s first Computer Science undergraduate program at IIT-Kanpur and established the Supercomputing Research Center at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His sister Hamsa Balakrishnan is William E. Leonhardt Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As for Hari Balakrishnan, he is a Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in his MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

He is also the latest recipient of the prestigious $100,000 Marconi Prize for groundbreaking contributions to the field of communications.

“Both my sister and I were pretty lucky. We always had access to books, information, etc. It was a wonderful childhood,” says Balakrishnan, 51. And this long line of students came through talking about all sorts of things. Once in, I was inspired to keep up with it. ”

Balakrishnan has a disarming enthusiasm, as if holding something of a boy in his father’s office. I regret that I was denied the opportunity to pursue a career as a researcher because of “She had her doctorate, but she was publishing her papers from home. It was very difficult for talented women to enter research and professional careers.”

He described his time at IIT-Madras as “probably the best four years of my life in India because you have your freedom for the first time and thanks to the group of fellow friends you met.” I’m here.

Balakrishnan moved to the United States in 1993 to pursue his Ph.D. UC Berkeley has been a place of excitement, innovation and discovery, he says. “The Internet has been around for over 20 years, but it was curious and used only by researchers and academics. , the Mosaic browser (the first browser with inline images) was released and that changed everything.”

Balakrishnan remembers seeing an early laptop computer on his desk as he walked into his future advisor, Professor Randy Katz’s office. This was an indication, as Balakrishnan’s next few years would revolve around his doctorate in mobile computing and his wireless networking. “It was a field that didn’t exist at the time,” he says. He remembers working with early wireless LANs, using cards that fit in his slot in a laptop connected to an antenna to form a network. He was also working on his InfoPad, an early version of his computer tablet. “It essentially offloaded the computation to a server, which is what we call cloud computing today. We also used the wireless network to get information and video from this tablet, and to conduct video conferencing. And this was in the mid-1990s, it was an exciting time, wouldn’t it be very cool if this worked? was there.”

he pauses “I’ve been lucky and generally lucky throughout my career in identifying opportunities where I could be the first or potentially one of the first to enter a new subfield. Working with collaborators sometimes makes you lucky, and sometimes you get lucky,” he laughs. “This was him at the time.”

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In 1998, at the age of 26, Balakrishnan moved to MIT to begin research on an indoor GPS system called Cricket. Using the speed difference between radio waves and sound waves, it can accurately identify the position in the room. In 2005, he, along with his fellow MIT professor Sam Madden, decided to use his mobile technology to measure why commutes were getting longer. The result was his CarTel. This is a project in which Balakrishnan attaches sensors to his car to measure how long it takes him to cross a particular segment of the road. Soon CarTel partnered with a Boston taxi company. A key innovation of the CarTel project was the development of Pothole Patrol. It used the cab’s sensors to measure vibrations and automatically determine the quality of the road surface to identify potholes that need fixing.

“The project got a lot of publicity. It was even featured in the Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal,” says Balakrishnan. The coverage prompted him to think about how to commercialize the technology, and Madden and his third partner, Bill His Powers, are working to develop mobiles such as this one using his sensing technology to improve driving quality. founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), a company that measures and improves , detects collisions that require real-time roadside assistance and automates claims processing. Today, CMT is the world’s largest telematics provider, serving millions of people in 25 countries and working with major insurers, rideshare companies and automakers.

More recently, Balakrishnan has been researching mobile sensing for drones, congestion control algorithms for the Internet, and ways to create better digital maps. He still maintains his relationship with IIT-Madras, and when asked what advice he would give to young engineering students, he said they “not only have strong mathematics backgrounds, but also history and We need to pay more attention to humanities such as geography and read papers.” short stories, novels, non-fiction books, and much more than they seem to be doing these days. The ability to communicate well is important, he adds. “The humanities provide excellent training in these valuable skills and teach us new ways of thinking about the world. I urge you to “