ATHULA BALACHANDRAN

I am a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at CMU advised by Prof. Srini Seshan. My research interests are in networks and systems. I am also interested in applied machine learning. Before coming to CMU, I obtained my Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in July 2009.

  • abalachaATcsDOTcmuDOTedu
  • 412-268-3076
  • 7515 Gates Hillman Center

Research Interests

  • My research interests are primarily in networks and systems. I am also interested in applied machine learning. My current research focuses on the design and analysis of Internet-scale video delivery systems. I am looking at using data-driven approaches to understand Internet video viewing behaviors and patterns in the wild and its implications for designing a video delivery system. This research is possible because of the availability of large-scale video datasets - thanks to Conviva.

Professional Experience

  • Research InternJune 2010 - August 2010

    Intel Labs Berkeley

    Designed a network architecture for effectively utilizing the network resources in a disaster zone by leveraging on semantic-level redundancy in information (e.g., photos, texts) that arise from disaster scenes

  • Research InternMay 2008 - July 2008

    Microsoft Research India

    Designed and implemented a test bed to evaluate the benefits of an end to end network traffic redundancy elimination service.

Other Projects

  • Inlona

    Developed a prototype system that crowdsources the collection of images and sensor data from mobile users in order to provide an indoor localization and navigation service.

  • InfoNames

    An information-aware architecture based on semantic naming (i.e. identifying and naming multimedia files that contain the same content but in different format/presentation styles as carrying the same information) for increased flexibility during multimedia content retrieval.

  • Minni

    One of the developers of a light-weight MapReduce framework that can run on low-memory systems. More details can be found here.

Publications

  • Developing a Predictive Model of Quality-of-Experience for Internet Video
    Athula Balachandran, Vyas Sekar, Aditya Akella, Srinivasan Seshan, Ion Stoica, Hui Zhang
    to appear in SIGCOMM 2013
  • Understanding Internet Video Viewing Behavior in the Wild
    Athula Balachandran, Vyas Sekar, Aditya Akella, Srinivasan Seshan
    to appear as Extended Abstract in SIGMETRICS 2013
  • A Quest for an Internet Video Quality-of-Experience Metric
    Athula Balachandran, Vyas Sekar, Aditya Akella, Srinivasan Seshan, Ion Stoica, Hui Zhang
    HotNets 2012
  • CARE: Content Aware Redundancy Elimination for Disaster Communications on Damaged Networks
    Udi Weinsberg, Qingxi Li, Nina Taft, Athula Balachandran, Vyas Sekar, Gianluca Iannacone, Srinivasan Seshan
    HotNets 2012
  • Online Reconfiguration of Channel Assignment in Multi-Channel Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks
    Antony Franklin, Athula Balachandran, Siva Ram Murthy
    Computer Communications Vol. 35, 2012
  • InfoNames: An Information-Based Naming Scheme for Multimedia Content
    Arun Kumar, Athula Balachandran, Vyas Sekar, Aditya Akella, Srinivasan Seshan
    University of Wisconsin-Madison CS Technical Report, 2010
  • The Implications of Network-level Packet Caching
    Ashok Anand, Athula Balachandran, Aditya Akella, Srinivasan Seshan
    GENI GEC8 2010
  • EndRE: An End-System Redundancy Elimination Service for Enterprises
    Bhavish Aggarwal, Aditya Akella, Ashok Anand, Athula Balachandran, Chitra Muthukrishnan,George Varghese, Ram Ramjee
    NSDI 2010
  • Demand Based State Aware Channel Reconfiguration for Multi-Channel Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks
    Athula Balachandran, Antony Franklin, Siva Ram Murthy, Mahesh Marina
    CARMEN at INFOCOM 2010
  • Integrating Traffic Estimation and Dynamic Channel Reconfiguration in Wireless Mesh Networks
    Athula Balachandran, Antony Franklin, Siva Ram Murthy
    ACM/IEEE HiPC 2009

Patents Filed

  • Asymetric End Host Redundancy Elimination for Networks
    with Bhavish Aggarwal, Pushkar Chitnis, Ashok Anand, Chitra Muthukrishnan, George Varghese and Ram Ramjee

Courses

  • Graduate Machine Learning

  • Hot Topics in Networking

  • Algorithms in the Real World

  • Type Systems for Programming Languages

  • Advanced Operating Systems and Distributed Systems

  • Graduate Algorithms

  • Graduate Computer Networks

  • Computer Architecture

Teaching/TA

  • Undergraduate Computer Networks - F11

  • Parallel Computer Architecture and Programming - S11

Service

  • General Secretary, IGSA, 2012

  • Membership Chair, IGSA, 2011

  • Treasurer, Dec/5, 2010-11