Tel it like it is

The Indian professor at MIT has won the prestigious Marconi Prize for his work in communications. This includes congestion-control codes for the internet, remote-sensing solutions for drones. His most significant invention: a program called CarTel that helps track traffic, driving, and the state of the roads

- K Narayanan

For Hari Balakrishnan, science was the family business. His grandfather KS Venkataraman was a scientist who worked with the legendary physicist CV Raman (they co-authored a paper on the determination of the piezo-optic coefficients of liquids; and no, there's no way to simplify that).

Balakrishnan's father V Balakrishnan is a professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Madras and his mother Radha Balakrishnan is a theoretical physicist too. His maternal uncle, V Rajaraman framed India's first computer-science undergraduate program, at IIT-Kanpur, and also set up the supercomputing research centre at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His sister Hamsa Balakrishnan is the William E Leonhard professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As for Hari Balakrishnan, he's the Fujitsu professor of computer science and artificial intelligence with the department of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

He is also the most recent winner of the prestigious Marconi Prize, a $100,000 honorarium awarded for pathbreaking contributions to the field of communications.

"Both my sister and I were pretty privileged. We've always had access to books and information and all of that. It was a wonderful childhood," says Balakrishnan, 51. "After school, I would go and sit in my father's office. And this long line of students would come through talking about all sorts of things... He was well-loved and still is. I didn't understand most of what they were talking about initially, but as I got into high school, I was following along and I was inspired. I also wanted to go into learning and so that's what happened."