Sitaraman to Receive India’s Prestigious Hind Rattan Award
Ramesh Sitaraman, professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences, will receive India's prestigious Hind Rattan Award in recognition of contributions to the field of computer science. This award is given annually to approximately 25 individuals of Indian origin, selected from a pool of over 25 million people who are of Indian descent, but live abroad.
The "Hind Rattan" (a Hindi phrase, which translates to English as "Jewel of India") is granted by the Government of India and the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) Welfare Society. Sitaraman will receive the award in New Delhi on January 25, 2016, the eve of the 67th Republic Day of India, at a ceremony attended by senior members of India's government and Supreme Court, cabinet ministers, international ambassadors, scholars, and other dignitaries.
Professor Sitaraman's award recognizes his role in pioneering content delivery networks (CDNs). Such networks are now key to the functioning of the modern Internet. As a principal architect, he helped create the Akamai network, one of the world's largest CDNs, that currently delivers 15-30% of all web traffic. CDNs enable web sites to download faster and online videos to play more smoothly with fewer freezes. CDNs are pervasive today, as most major enterprises use CDNs to provide better performance for their online users.
Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy says, "It is gratifying to see Professor Sitaraman recognized for his innovative research, which has had a far-reaching impact on how billions of people around the world access the Internet. Almost every Internet user in the world directly benefits from his research when they go online to read the news, watch videos, buy products, play games, or use a social network."
Sitaraman received a B. Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University. His current research at UMass Amherst focuses on all aspects of Internet-scale distributed networks, including algorithms, architectures, performance, energy efficiency and economics.