Professor Hari Sundaram

Image of Hari Sundaram, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Professor Sundaram is an associate professor at the University of Illinois and holds a joint appointment between the Department of Computer Science and Advertising. He holds a PhD from Columbia University (2002), MS from Stony Brook University (1995), and BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (1993), all in Electrical Engineering. Prior to Illinois, he served as an associate professor at Arizona State University with appointments in Computer Science and the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering; he helped co-found the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering.

Professor Sundaram’s research interests lie in large scale network analysis, using smartphones and designing wearable sensors for analyzing human activity, and computational advertising. His current research is motivated by the challenge of persuading millions of people to adopt behaviors that would be beneficial to them. Example behaviors include: leading healthy lifestyles; reducing individual energy consumption, and greater civic engagement. The widespread adoption of these behaviors would eventually lead to superordinate large-scale societal benefits such as reduced healthcare costs, sustainability, and a vibrant community.

Professor Sundaram’s research has won several best paper awards from the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). He also received the Eliahu I. Jury Award from Columbia's Electrical Engineering Department for best PhD dissertation in 2002.