Balaji Prabhakar
Professor Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stanford University
Biography
Balaji Prabhakar is VMware Founders Professor of Computer Science and a faculty member in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and, by courtesy, in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His research interests are in computer networks; notably, in Data Center Networks and Cloud Computing Platforms. His work spans network algorithms, congestion control protocols, and stochastic network theory. He has also worked on Societal Networks, where he has developed “nudge engines” to incentivize commuters to travel in off-peak times so that congestion, fuel and pollution costs are reduced.
Balaji has been a Terman Fellow at Stanford University, and a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, IEEE and ACM. He has received the NSF CAREER Award, the Erlang Prize from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, the Rollo Davidson Prize given to young Statisticians and Probabilists, and delivered the Lunteren Lectures of the Dutch Operations Research Society. He is the inaugural recipient of the IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award which recognizes “significant technological achievements and contributions to the establishment, development and proliferation of innovative societal infrastructure systems.” He has received the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award for his work on Computer Networks and the ACM Sigmetrics Award for his work on Stochastic Networks. He is a co-recipient of a few best paper and test of time awards. During 2005–07 he was Switch Architect at Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco Systems in 2008) where he developed the fabric scheduling and line card algorithms of Cisco’s Nexus 5000 family of data center Ethernet switches. In 2011 he co-founded Urban Engines (acquired by Google in 2016) and is currently on leave at Clockwork.io where he is co-founder and CEO.
