The Future of Intelligent Networking: Mobile Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems

Hari Balakrishnan is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science at MIT. His research is in networked computer systems, with current interests in networking, sensing, and perception for sensor-equipped mobile devices connected to cloud or edge services. He has made many contributions to mobile and sensor computing, overlay and peer-to-peer networks, congestion control, Internet routing, and data management systems.

In 2010, based on the CarTel project, Balakrishnan co-founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT). CMT's mission is to make the world's roads and drivers safer. Using mobile sensing and IoT, signal processing, machine learning, and behavioral science, CMT's platform measures driving behavior to improve driving behavior and reduce risk, provides crash alerts and roadside assistance, and creates a smooth connected claims process. Today, CMT is the world's leading telematics and analytics provider, serving many millions of users in 17 countries by partnering with insurers (including powering consumer telematics programs at 21 of the top 25 US insurers), gig drivers/operators, automotive manufacturers, and personal safety providers.

Balakrishnan received his PhD in 1998 from the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, which named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 2021, and a BTech in Computer Science in 1993 from IIT Madras, which named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 2013. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2015) and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017). His honors include the ACM SIGCOMM Award for lifetime contributions to communication networks (2021), the IEEE Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award (2021), the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the New England region (2021), the Infosys Prize for Engineering and Computer Science (2020), Fellow of the IEEE (2020), Fellow of the ACM (2008), Sloan Fellow (2002), and the ACM doctoral dissertation award for Computer Science (1998). He has received several best-paper awards including six test-of-time awards for papers with long-term impact and the IEEE Bennett paper prize (2004). At MIT, he has received several honors including the Harold E. Edgerton faculty achievement award for research, teaching, and service (2003), the HKN best instructor award (2018), the Jamieson teaching award (2012), the Junior Bose teaching award (2002), and the Spira teaching award (2001). He has graduated 26 PhD students and 10 postdocs, who have made their mark in research and industry at leading universities and companies.

Balakrishnan was an advisor to Meraki from its inception in 2006 to its acquisition by Cisco in 2012. In 2003, Balakrishnan co-founded StreamBase Systems (acquired by TIBCO), the first high-performance commercial stream processing (aka complex event processing) engine. Between 2000 and 2003, he helped devise the key network QoS algorithms for Sandburst (acquired by Broadcom).

Title: Efficient and Sustainable NLP
Abstract: Much of the recent transformative advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including ChatGPT, are driven by advances in language models and deep neural networks. However, these advances have come with staggering computational and energy costs... [Further details of the talk can be added here]

Aruna Balasubramanian is an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University (and currently a visiting faculty at SUNY Korea). She received her Ph.D from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her dissertation won the UMass outstanding dissertation award and was the Sigcomm dissertation award runner up. She works in the area of networked systems. Her current work consists of three threads: (1) making AI efficient and sustainable, (2) improving usability, accessibility, and privacy of mobile applications, and (3) designing measurement-driven approaches to improve performance of next generation networks. She is the recipient of the SIGMobile Rockstar award, a Ubicomp best paper award, a Computing Innovation Fellowship, a VMWare Early Career award, several Google research awards, and the Applied Networking Research Prize. She is passionate about improving the diversity in Computer Science and leads the diversity committee in the department, is the faculty advisor for the WiCS and WPhD groups at Stony Brook, and is an active member of the N2Women group.

Title: Efficient and Sustainable NLP
Abstract: Much of the recent transformative advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including ChatGPT, are driven by advances in language models and deep neural networks. However, these advances have come with staggering computational and energy costs... [Further details of the talk can be added here]

Praveen Jayachandran is a senior technical staff member and senior manager of the Hybrid Cloud operations department at IBM Research, India. His work spans network management, observability, and managing systems and data at scale, specifically for multi-cloud and Edge environments. He is an IBM Master Inventor, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, and a senior member of IEEE. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Praveen is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department, at IIT-Hyderabad. Before IITH, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, USA. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2018. He broadly works at the intersection of Systems, Networks, and Security. His current focus is on designing and building networked systems that make networks easy to manage, secure, and robust, by using exciting emerging technologies such as Software-Defined Networking and Programmable Data Planes. Praveen has received the best paper award at ACM SIGCOMM SOSR, IBM academic award, TiHAN faculty fellowship award, and IITH teaching excellence award.

Sushmita Ruj is Faculty of Engineering Lead of UNSW Institute for Cybersecurity, IFCYBER and Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW, Sydney. Her research interests are in applied cryptography, post quantum cryptography, blockchains and privacy enhancing technologies. She designs practical, efficient, and provably secure protocols that can be deployed in real-world applications. She has won several competitive grants like Samsung GRO Award, NetApp Faculty Fellowship, Cisco Academic Grant. She is an Associate Editor of the Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. Before joining UNSW, she was a Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO's Data61, an Associate Professor at Indian Statistical Institute and an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, Indore. Sushmita is a senior member of both ACM and IEEE.

Gaurav is a motivational team leader with an ability to energize teams to highest performance levels and is a firm believer in establishing a culture based on mutual trust and individual empowerment, through the organization. Gaurav is a technologist who believes in market-in approach to use technology to solve market/customer problems. Gaurav brings a wealth of real-world experience in driving innovation and business transformation in both startups and large mature corporations and is a master in the "Art of Prioritization" and passionate about sharing his experience based knowledge with other business leaders to help them grow.

Mythili Vutukuru is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. Before joining IITB in 2013, I obtained my Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 and 2006 respectively. I was advised by Prof. Hari Balakrishnan. After my Ph.D., I worked at Movik Networks, a startup in the telecom space, for 3 years before joining IITB. Earlier, I obtained a Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2004

Title: How to mess up a standardization opportunity
Abstract: This presentation follows the journey of a (purely fictitious) character, called Humpty Dumpty (HD), trying to scale the "global standardization wall". The trials and tribulations of HD as he maneuvers across different hurdles are sketched with (purely fictitious) case studies. Ignoring the best practices and lack of collaboration with a thriving local standards community, brings HD down. The moral of the story includes key points from our experiences at TSDSI, mentoring and handholding global contributions to standards, as we collectively scale the wall and aim for pioneering innovations in global standards.