Venkat Arun

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT VENKAT ARUN

I am an assistant professor at UT Austin. My work spans internet congestion control, video streaming, privacy-preserving computation, wireless networks, and mobile systems. Across these areas, a unifying theme of my work is to bridge between heuristics that systems use in practice and proofs of how well they work. I have shown that current heuristics fail to provide performance guarantees, and I have used proofs to design more robust systems. My principal contribution is a set of tools and techniques to prove performance properties of real-world heuristics running in real-world conditions.The methods I developed to prove performance properties of network algorithms and protocols have sparked interest among researchers, with groups from CMU, UT Austin, Georgia Tech, MIT, Microsoft Research, and Waterloo all working on related projects. I am collaborating with several of them. It has also impacted industrial practice. For instance, the CCAC paper proposed a modification to BBR, a widely deployed CCA developed by Google. Facebook uses this modification for a vast majority of their user-facing traffic. In addition, for live video uploads, Facebook uses Copa.