MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Prof. Hari Balakrishnan wins ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

January 4, 1999

Just goes to show what a great hiring decision our Faculty Search Committee made! Soon after arriving at the Lab for Computer Science last September to begin his faculty position, Hari Balakrishnan received news of being awarded the 1998 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. This prestigious award is presented annually to the author of the best doctoral dissertation in computer science and engineering. Prizes include $1000 and publishing of the thesis by Springer-Verlag.

The winning thesis, entitled "Challenges to Reliable Data Transport over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks," centered on reliable transport and TCP. One component, the Berkeley Snoop Protocol, was designed to significantly improve TCP performance over error-prone wireless links. Other components included studying the effects of bandwidth and latency asymmetry and the effects of small window sizes on TCP performance. Hari devised and evaluated protocols to improve performance in these situations, producing research which has influenced commercial products.

Hari is by no means the first MIT EECS faculty member or doctoral student to be recognized by this award. Since the award’s inception in 1982, other EECS affiliates include Charles Leiserson (1982), Ellen Hildreth (1983), Ben-Zion Chor (1985), Daniel Hillis (1985), John Canny (1987), Robert Schapire (1991), Madhu Sudan (1993), David Karger (1994), and Carl Waldspurger (1996). For more information about the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, check out http://www.acm.org/awards.