Professor Ramesh Sitaraman of the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will receive one of India’s highest awards for non-residents, the “Jewel of India,” in a ceremony in New Delhi on Monday, Jan. 25.

The award recognizes his role in pioneering content delivery networks (CDNs) that are key to the modern Internet's functioning.

Senior government and Supreme Court justices, cabinet ministers, international ambassadors, scholars and other dignitaries will be on hand as Sitaraman receives the Hind Rattan, Hindi for “Jewel of India,” given each year on the eve of the country’s Republic Day. The award is given by the government of India and the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) Welfare Society to approximately 25 individuals of Indian origin selected from a pool of more than 25 million who live abroad.

Sitaraman’s research spans all aspects of Internet-scale distributed networks, including algorithms, architectures, performance, energy efficiency and economics. As a principal architect, he helped create the Akamai network, one of the world’s largest CDNs, which currently delivers 15 to 30 percent of all web traffic. CDNs enable web sites to download faster and online videos to play more smoothly with fewer freezes. Today most major enterprises use CDNs to provide better performance for online users.

Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy says, “It is gratifying to see Professor Sitaraman recognized for his innovative research, which has had a far-reaching impact on how people throughout the world access the Internet. Users directly benefit from his research when they use the Internet to read news, watch videos, buy products, play games online or use a social network.”

Sitaraman received a B. Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University.

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