Stanford Engineering professor honored for innovation in societal infrastructure

Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has been named the first recipient of the IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award.

He was cited for demonstrating "innovative use of information technology and distributed computing systems to solve long-standing societal problems in areas ranging from transportation to healthcare and recycling."

Prabhakar's research focuses on the design, analysis and implementation of data networks: both wireline and wireless. He has been interested in designing network algorithms, problems in ad hoc wireless networks and designing incentive mechanisms. He has a long-standing interest in stochastic network theory, information theory, algorithms and probability theory.

Prabhakar has received the CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Erlang Prize and the Rollo Davidson Prize. He has been a Terman Fellow at Stanford and a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

In 2012, Prabhakar collaborated with Stanford biology professor Deborah Gordon to reveal that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet. He also directed a project that used interactive technology to reward Stanford drivers who avoid arriving on or departing from campus during peak traffic hours.