Some impact of my work beyond research papers
In the past, I was a founding team member of the world's largest sports portal, CricInfo (acquired by ESPN in 2007). I played the role of CTO in the formative years. We wrote our own webserver (pre-apache), had our own little CDN (pre-Akamai) and have been credited as inventing live blogging. I have written twice for ESPNcricinfo about that period: One night in 1996, on how ball-by-ball commentary was born during the World Cup, and Travis Basevi, my friend who changed the way cricket was consumed, on my Cricinfo partner and the architect of Statsguru.
My PhD thesis developed the first stochastic differential equation (fluid) model of TCP that led to formal control theoretic analysis of congestion control mechanisms on the Internet. We ourselves took the model and proposed the PI controller as a way to better control TCP and manage latencies. Many years later, an engineering team at Cisco developed the PIE (PI Enhanced) controller based on our PI controller that is being used to solve the problem of "bufferbloat" (excessive delays on the Internet because of larger than needed buffers). The PIE controller became part of the DOCSIS 3.1 standard, published as RFC 8034 in 2017, and has been running in cable modems worldwide ever since.
In the summer of 2011, along with my colleague Dan Rubenstein and PhD student Joshua Reich, I founded Infinio (nee Silver Lining), which came out of our work on datacenter storage and networking. The company raised $24 million from Highland Capital, Bessemer, Lightspeed and Osage University Partners, the fund that invests in work coming out of Columbia. It shipped a storage acceleration product for virtualized datacenters and was acquired in 2021.
We built AskCricinfo, a natural language interface to ESPNcricinfo’s structured cricket data. Rather than asking the model to know the answer, we taught it a query language in context, used it to translate the question into a structured query, retrieved the data, and used the model to turn the result back into an answer. It went into production on ESPNcricinfo on September 15, 2021, fifteen months before ChatGPT. The technology became the basis for Ask Here First, which generalizes the approach to natural language search over structured enterprise data.
I played an active role in the Net Neutrality regulations process in India, where the citizen's movement adopted my definition of Net Neutrality and the final regulations that were passed by the regulatory authority, TRAI, were consistent with the definition. I also testified in the Indian parliament on the topic. Coverage of that here. The regulations in India have been called the strongest Net Neutrality protections anywhere. While I have written a lot of papers analyzing the economic ecosystem of the Internet, one particular aspect we have been emphasizing is the importance of competition. In 2011, together with my former student Richard Ma, we wrote a paper proposing a Public Option ISP, via a mechanism like Municipal Broadband to address the issue of Network Neutrality. The idea, also proposed by people from the legal/regulatory side like Susan Crawford, has gained a lot of momemtum with even President Obama getting behind it. Some coverage of my views on the topic is here. R.S. Sharma, who chaired TRAI through the Free Basics debate, has written his own account of that period.
It is not an overstatement to say that Vishal Misra helped write the intellectual foundations of India’s net neutrality framework, even though his name appears nowhere in the Gazette of India.
I continue to work on cricket analytics through Unicorns AI. Recent work: