We are honored to announce industry luminary and academic elite Hari Balakrishnan as the keynote speaker for Netdev conf 0x15.

From an industry perspective: Hari is currently the co-founder and CTO at Cambridge Mobile Telematics which raised $500M funding[1] (yes, you heard that right) from The SoftBank Vision Fund. Over his illustrious career Hari has played the role of founder or advisor to many companies - typically created by his students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

From an academic perspective: if you are involved in computer networks, networked systems, and/or mobile computing you are very likely to have come across Hari's contributions which are highly cited; he has an h-index of 125. To give you perspective of what 125 means: According to Hirsch[2], a person with 20 years of research experience with an h-index of 20 is good, 40 is great, and 60 is remarkable. You do the math;->

He is a recipient of many many awards, to highlight a few: Early days: - His PhD thesis on reliable data transport over wireless networks won the 1998 ACM doctoral dissertation award for best thesis in computer science.

- Several best paper awards including the 2004 IEEE William R. Bennett Prize, and six "test of time" awards for papers with long-term impact.

More recent: - the Infosys Prize for Engineering and Computer Science, the most prestigious award "... for his broad contributions to computer networking, his seminal work on mobile and wireless systems, and for commercial use of mobile telematics to improve driver behavior and make roads safer around the world"

- The 2021 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award for "broad contributions to computer networking and mobile and wireless systems."

Hari is currently the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

More details can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Balakrishnan

So when Hari makes time to speak, pay attention. What does he want to talk to us about?

He would like to describe the impact of new work he is involved in on _Site-to-Site Internet Traffic Control_.

To quote: " Queues allow network operators to control traffic: where queues build, they can enforce scheduling and shaping policies. In the Internet today, however, there is a mismatch between where queues build and where control is most effectively enforced; queues build at bottleneck links that are often not under the control of the data sender. To resolve this mismatch, we propose a new kind of middlebox, called Bundler, which moves queues away from uncontrollable network locations to edge devices.

This talk will describe how the use of signal processing methods in congestion control, combined with Linux kernel tricks, can enable an effective and scalable site-to-site traffic controller using Bundler. I will also describe some recent work in using verification methods to improve congestion control robustness. "

Please come listen, hear him and engage him.

cheers, jamal

[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181219005339/en/Cambridge-Mobile-Te... [2] https://paperpile.com/g/what-is-a-good-h-index/