Venkat Arun

Venkat Arun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, College of Natural Sciences. His research focuses on making networked systems robust and performant through the application of formal methods. Previously, he completed his PhD at MIT and undergraduate studies at IIT Guwahati. He co-leads the UT Networked Systems Lab (UTNS) and has developed algorithms deployed at Meta.

His research interests center around networked systems and formal methods, with a focus on developing conceptual, mathematical, and automated tools to design provably performant networked systems. Arun's work spans internet congestion control, video streaming, privacy-preserving computation, wireless networks, and mobile systems. A common theme across his research is using theoretical ideas to gain insights into real-world systems that would be difficult to discover otherwise.

His recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on performance verification and synthesis for networked systems, with significant contributions to congestion control algorithms. His work bridges theoretical foundations with practical implementations, as evidenced by the deployment of his algorithms at Meta. The research spans formal verification techniques, network protocol design, and performance analysis across various networked applications.

Scientific Awards:

• MIT EECS G. M. Sprowls PhD Thesis Award in Computer Science (2024)
• ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award Runner-Up (2024)
• Marconi Society Young Scholar Award (2023)
• ACM SIGCOMM best student paper award (2022)
• ACM SIGCOMM best paper award (2017)
• MIT Jacobs Presidential Fellowship (2017)
• President of India Gold Medal - IIT Guwahati (2017)
• KVPY Government of India Scholarship (2013)

Venkat Arun currently advises three PhD students: Haoyu Li (co-advised with Aditya Akella), Tony (Jia) Pan (co-advised with Isil Dillig), and Saarth Deshpande (co-advised with Neeraja Yadwadkar). His research group is funded by NSF grants including "Nets: Medium: An End-To-End Framework For Network" (2024) and "FMitF: Performance Verification for Networked Systems" (2024), as well as a generous gift from Mibura (2024). The group is managed by Destiny Turner.

He leads several major research projects including Performance Verification and Synthesis, "Solving" Congestion Control, and Metasurfaces with Thousands of Antennas. Arun teaches CS 395T: Performance Analysis of Networked Systems and CS 356: Computer Networks at UT Austin.