Professor
University of Illinois, Computer Science
Hari Sundaram
I am a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with affiliate appointments in the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising, the Institute for Communication Research and the Center for Social & Behavioral Science. My research is motivated by the need to solve large-scale collective-action problems: how do we live in cities with little or no pollution?; avoid infectious disease outbreaks?; decrease traffic congestion? These questions require us to confront a fundamental tension:
How do we reconcile an individual’s desire for agency and choice in what they do, with what everyone wants for society as a whole?
Computer Science has a crucial role to play in addressing these questions. The goal of my research is to understand human behavior at scale, and to empower individual decision making. To do so, my group, Crowd Dynamics Lab develops innovative algorithms, builds systems and performs experiments. Our research contributes to Applied Machine Learning, Network Science and to Human Computer Interaction. Our research has won awards from the ACM and IEEE societies as well as the American Academy of Advertising.
Academic Positions
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Present 2021
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2021 2020
Associate Professor
University of Illinois, Computer Science
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2020 2014
Associate Professor
University of Illinois, Computer Science + Advertising
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2014 2009
Associate Professor
Arizona State University, Arts, Media and Engineering + Computer Science
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2012 2009
Associate Director
Arizona State University, Arts, Media and Engineering
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2009 2002
Assistant Professor
Arizona State University, Arts, Media and Engineering + Computer Science
Education & Training
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Ph.D. 2002
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering
Columbia University
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M.S.1995
M.S. in Electrical Engineering
Stony Brook University
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B.Tech.1993
B.Tech in Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
Awards & Honors
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2020COVID-19 Wall of Recognition in Engineering, for Teaching During COVID-19.
In late 2020, The Grainger College of Engineering asked its faculty and staff to nominate people who had gone “above and beyond” in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers who pivoted to online delivery of classes. Researchers poured themselves into the emergency response. Staff that found a way to keep things running in even the strangest of circumstances. Students who helped in new, unexpected ways. The response to our request was massive—just like the hours, attention, and skill that our college offered the face of a global catastrophe. Hundreds of people’s names were submitted. A plaque recognizing all of them will be installed soon in Engineering Hall.2020Best Article Award, Journal of Interactive Advertising
Joseph T Yun, Brittany RL Duff, Patrick T Vargas, Hari Sundaram, and Itai Himelboim. Computationally analyzing social media text for topics: A primer for advertising researchers. In: Journal of Interactive Advertising 20.1 (2020), pages 47–592020Teacher Ranked as Excellent
CITL: “ These lists are compiled on semester basis and reflect student ratings of instruction. The ratings are based on Instructor and Course Evaluation (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation, Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning. ”2019ACM Distinguished Member
ACM: "The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes up to 10 percent of ACM worldwide membership based on professional experience as well as significant achievements in the computing field. To be nominated, a candidate must have at least 15 years of professional experience in the computing field, 5 years of continuous professional ACM membership, and have achieved a significant level of accomplishment, or made a significant impact in the field of computing, computer science and/or information technology. In addition, it is expected that a Distinguished Member serves as a mentor and role model, guiding technical career development and contributing to the field beyond the norm."2019IEEE Senior Member
IEEE: "A candidate shall be an engineer, scientist, educator, technical executive or originator in IEEE-designated fields; Candidates shall have been in professional practice for at least ten years; Candidates shall have shown significant performance over a period of at least five of those years"2019Honorable Mention Award, ACM CSCW
Himel Dev, Karrie Karahalios, and Hari Sundaram. Quantifying voter biases in online platforms: An instrumental variable approach. In The 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2019., Austin, Texas USA, 2019.2019Best Paper Award, ASONAM
Suhansanu Kumar, Heting Gao, Changyu Wang, Kevin Chang, and Hari Sundaram. Hierarchical multi-armed bandits for discovering hidden populations. In The 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2019), Vancouver, BC, Canada., August 2019.2017Teacher Ranked as Excellent
CITL: “ These lists are compiled on semester basis and reflect student ratings of instruction. The ratings are based on Instructor and Course Evaluation (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation, Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning. ”2016Teacher Ranked as Excellent
CITL: “ These lists are compiled on semester basis and reflect student ratings of instruction. The ratings are based on Instructor and Course Evaluation (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation, Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning. ”2008IBM faculty Award
Develop a novel theoretical framework and develop analysis tools to understand the knowledge dynamics within a large scale media rich social network. In this proposal, we propose to work on two closely related problems: detection of emergent communities of people and their evolution in a large scale media rich network; identification of key roles for both people and media objects.2007Associate Editor of the Year award
Annually, the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMM) honors one member of the Editorial Board with the TOMM Associate Editor of the Year Award. The purpose of the award is the distinction of excellent work for ACM TOMM and hence also for the whole multimedia community in the previous year. Criteria for the award are (1) the amount of submissions processed in time, (2) the performance during the reviewing process and (3) the accurate interaction with the reviewers in order to broader the awareness for the journal.2007IBM faculty Award
Develop novel context-aware event models, and event annotation algorithms with the goal of improving the search quality and annotation results in online social network communities. There are three main contributions: development of event models, and the attendant event algebras; development of representations of event and user context that are query dependent; algorithms that determine user-user correlation given a query, and determining effective recommendations by using the event neighborhood.2007Best Student Paper Award, JCDL
Bageshree Shevade, Hari Sundaram and Lexing Xie, Modeling Personal and Social Network Context for Event Annotation in Images, Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2007, Jun. 2007, Vancouver, Canada.2007Best Student Paper Finalist, ACM Multimedia
Yinpeng Chen, Weiwei Xu, Hari Sundaram, Thanassis Rikakis, and Sheng-Min Liu. Media adaptation framework in biofeedback system for stroke patient rehabilitation. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Multimedia, pages 47–57. ACM, 2007.2006Best Demo Award, ACM Multimedia
Yinpeng Chen, Helen Huang, Weiwei Xu, Richard Wallis, Hari Sundaram, Thanassis Rikakis, Jiping He, Todd Ingalls and Loren Olson, A Real-Time, Multimodal Biofeedback System For Stroke Patient Rehabilitation , Proc. SIG ACM Multimedia 2006, Oct. 2006, Santa Barbara, CA.2006IBM UIMA Innovations Award
Develop a novel collaborative annotative system that exploits the correlation in user context, to enable members of an online social network to effectively annotate images.2006Best Student Paper Finalist, ICASSP
Yinpeng Chen and H. Sundaram, Basis Projection for Linear Transform Approximation in Real-Time Applications, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2006), 1520-6149, II-637-II-640, May 2006, Toulouse, France.2002Best Student Paper Award, ACM Multimedia
Hari Sundaram, Lexing Xie and Shih-Fu Chang, A Utility Framework for the Automatic Generation of Audio-Visual Skims, Proc. 10th SIG ACM Conference On Multimedia, (ACM Multimedia 2002) Juan Les-Pins, France, Dec. 2002.2002Eliahu I. Jury award
Outstanding Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 2002.2000Best Paper Award, IEEE CSVT
Shih-Fu Chang, William Chen Horace Meng, Hari Sundaram and Di Zhong, A Fully Automated Content Based Video Search Engine Supporting Spatio-Temporal Queries, IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Sep.1998.