Hari Sundaram
- Computer Science
Hari Sundaram is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois and holds a joint appointment between Computer Science and Advertising. Prior to Illinois, he was 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. He earned his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (1993), M.S. from Stony Brook University (1995) and Ph.D. from Columbia University (2002), all in Electrical Engineering.
Sundaram’s current research is motivated by the challenge: how can we persuade 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 lead to large scale societal benefits such as reduced healthcare costs, sustainability and a vibrant community. His research interests lie in large scale network analysis, using smartphones and designing wearable sensors for analyzing human activity, and in computational advertising.