Devavrat Shah

Devavrat Shah is a professor with the department of electrical engineering and computer science, MIT. He is a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and Operations Research Center (ORC), and the Director of the newly formed Statistics and Data Center in IDSS.  His research focus is on theory of large complex networks, which includes network algorithms, stochastic networks, network information theory and large-scale statistical inference. Prof. Shah was awarded the first ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star Award 2008 for his work on network scheduling algorithms. He received the 2010 Erlang Prize from INFORMS, which is given to a young researcher for outstanding contributions to applied probability. He is currently an associate editor of Operations Research.

Prof. Shah’s research is driven by a desire to engineer a socially integrated network where a typical user may connect through a smart-phone, socialize through Facebook, learn from Wikipedia and help bring socio-political change through Twitter. Such a “social network” is in dire need of better network infrastructure; a typical user is anxious for help to be able to cope with the information overload; and scalable computational systems are required to process large amounts of data. As a network theorist, his contributions towards addressing these challenges involve designing better wireless access network and processing social data and scalable algorithms that can operate in data center like facility.