1985/BT/EE Distinguished University Professor and Associate Dean, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Chief Consulting Scientist, Akamai Technologies.
Prof. Ramesh K. Sitaraman is a globally recognized expert in internet-scale distributed systems, content delivery networks, cloud computing, and sustainable computing. Over the past few decades, he has been a major force in shaping the global internet as we know it today. Nearly all internet users benefit directly from his research when they go online to read the news, watch videos, attend teleconferences, purchase products, use social networks, or download software.
Prof. Sitaraman is renowned for pioneering content delivery networks (CDNs), which now serve most of the world’s web content, streaming videos, and online applications. He played a pivotal role in creating the Akamai Content Delivery Network, the world’s first major CDN. His work on CDNs has transformed the internet, facilitating faster and more reliable downloads of web pages, videos, and applications for billions of users worldwide. CDNs have since become a core component of the modern internet, with a market sector valued at tens of billions of dollars. His research on adaptive bitrate streaming and carbon-aware computing has also been widely integrated into contemporary online services, enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of internet infrastructure.
Prof. Sitaraman earned his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1985, followed by a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1993. His B.Tech project, supervised by Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, introduced him to networking research. His doctoral thesis, advised by Turing Laureate Prof. Robert E. Tarjan, focused on the theoretical foundations of reliable, fault-tolerant networks.
Prof. Sitaraman has received numerous accolades for his groundbreaking work. He was elected a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. He is a recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award for his contributions to the Akamai CDN, the IMC Test-of-Time Award for his research on video stream quality, an Excellence in DASH award for his work on the MPEG-DASH standard, and the IEEE William R. Bennett Prize for his development of adaptive bitrate algorithms for video streaming, which are widely utilized in practice. Additionally, he has been awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA), the highest recognition for teaching at his university.
For his extraordinary contributions to computer science and his lasting impact on the global internet ecosystem utilized daily by billions of people, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and its alumni proudly confer upon Prof. Ramesh K. Sitaraman, the Distinguished Alumni Award for the year 2025.
