I'm a fourth year PhD student in MIT
CSAIL, working with Professor Hari
Balakrishnan and Professor Sam
Madden.
I graduated from IIT Madras in July 2005 with a B.Tech in Computer Science, and received my Masters from MIT in September 2007. My research interests are in database systems and data management.
I am currently working on new data management techniques and algorithms to efficiently process huge volumes of streaming data from a large number of geo-spatial data sources (e.g., hundreds of cars or airplanes). My specific current focus is on developing efficient streaming algorithms for real-time traffic congestion prediction over high-rate streaming data from Cartel, a telematics system at MIT which collects location and sensor data from a deployment of taxicabs in the Boston area.
Recently, I have worked on FunctionDB, a relational database system that allows users to query mathematical functions as first-class citizens. This is a useful abstraction for many applications, such as sensor networks, which need to deal with noisy, error-prone and potentially incomplete data which is a continuous function of time or space. This is in contrast to traditional relational data, which typically consists of discrete rows or tuples. This is a logical extension of the MauveDB project.
Previously, I have also worked on Wavescope, a platform for high data rate sensor computing and streaming applications and helped build XStream, a high data-rate signal processing system which is part of Wavescope.
I have also worked on systems research projects during my summer internships at Yahoo! Research (Summer 2008) and Google (Summer 2007). More details forthcoming.
I am an avid follower and rasika of Carnatic Music, the classical music of South India, an amazingly rich and diverse art form. I am a member and officer of MIT Swara, a student group which is interested in promoting appreciation and performance of this art form on the MIT campus. Do check out our events!
I am also interested in speaking Samskritam (Sanskrit), one of the oldest and richest languages of India and the world. We have a student group, MIT Samskritam dedicated to promoting and speaking this wonderful language, and we meet weekly on Wednesdays for spoken Sanskrit classes. I currently help teach the beginner class for this group.