About

Hakim Weatherspoon is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and serves as the Associate Director for the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture (CIDA). He is also the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Co-Founder of Exotanium, Inc. His professional activities include leadership roles in digital agriculture initiatives, diversity and inclusion efforts within computer science, and advancing cloud computing technologies. Over the years, Professor Weatherspoon has been recognized for his contributions to computer science research and education, including receiving awards such as the Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER award, and Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Program award. He has been actively involved in fostering diversity in computing through programs like CSMore and SoNIC, and has contributed to the development of innovative cloud software and digital tools to address challenges in agriculture and computing infrastructure. His work has been featured in popular press outlets and has earned significant research funding, including a $25 million center to research digital tools for plant communication.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Distributed computing
• Computer network
• Mathematics
• Combinatorics
• Embedded system
• Geography
• Telecommunications
• Operating system

Selected publications

• Socially inclusive governance and technical advances can unlock the power of agricultural data

  Environmental Research Letters · 2026-05-13

  articleOpen access

  Abstract NA

  PublisherDOI

• Transdisciplinary Collaborations for Advancing Sustainable and Resilient Agricultural Systems

  Global Change Biology · 2025-04-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access

  Feeding the growing human population sustainably amidst climate change is one of the most important challenges in the 21st century. Current practices often lead to the overuse of agronomic inputs, such as synthetic fertilizers and water, resulting in environmental contamination and diminishing returns on crop productivity. The complexity of agricultural systems, involving plant-environment interactions and human management, presents significant scientific and technical challenges for developing sustainable practices. Addressing these challenges necessitates transdisciplinary research, involving intense collaboration among fields such as plant science, engineering, computer science, and social sciences. Five case studies are presented here demonstrating successful transdisciplinary approaches toward more sustainable water and fertilizer use. These case studies span multiple scales. By leveraging whole-plant signaling, reporter plants can transform our understanding of plant communication and enable efficient application of water and fertilizers. The use of new fertilizer technologies could increase the availability of phosphorus in the soil. To accelerate advancements in breeding new cultivars, robotic technologies for high-throughput plant screening in different environments at a population scale are discussed. At the ecosystem scale, phosphorus recovery from aquatic systems and methods to minimize phosphorus leaching are described. Finally, as agricultural outputs affect all people, integration of stakeholder perspectives and needs into research is outlined. These case studies highlight how transdisciplinary research and cross-training among biologists, engineers, and social scientists bring diverse expertise to tackling grand challenges in sustainable agriculture, driving discovery and innovation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 61. The Cornell Agricultural Systems Testbed and Demonstration site (CAST) for the farm of the future

  Animal - science proceedings · 2025-10-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Semi-Oblivious Reconfigurable Datacenter Networks

  2024-11-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Reconfigurable datacenter networks use fast optical circuit switches to provide high bandwidths at low cost, therefore emerging as a compelling alternative to packet switching. These switches offer micro- and nano-second reconfiguration, and reacting to demand at this time scale is infeasible. Proposed designs have therefore largely been oblivious, supporting arbitrary traffic patterns. However, this imposes a fundamental latency-throughput tradeoff that significantly limits the benefits of these switches.

  PublisherDOI

• Transdisciplinary collaborations for advancing sustainable and resilient agricultural systems

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-09-18 · 3 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Feeding the growing human population sustainably amidst climate change is one of the most important challenges in the 21st century. Current practices often lead to the overuse of agronomic inputs, such as synthetic fertilizers and water, resulting in environmental contamination and diminishing returns on crop productivity. The complexity of agricultural systems, involving plant-environment interactions and human management, presents significant scientific and technical challenges for developing sustainable practices. Addressing these challenges necessitates transdisciplinary research, involving intense collaboration among fields such as plant science, engineering, computer science, and social sciences. Here, we present five case studies from two research centers demonstrating successful transdisciplinary approaches toward more sustainable water and fertilizer use. These case studies span multiple scales. Starting from whole-plant signaling, we explore how reporter plants can transform our understanding of plant communication and enable efficient application of water and fertilizers. We then show how new fertilizer technologies could increase the availability of phosphorus in the soil. To accelerate advancements in breeding new cultivars, we discuss robotic technologies for high-throughput plant screening in different environments at a population scale. At the ecosystem scale, we investigate phosphorus recovery from aquatic systems and methods to minimize phosphorus leaching. Finally, as agricultural outputs affect all people, we show how to integrate stakeholder perspectives and needs into the research. With these case studies, we hope to encourage the scientific community to adopt transdisciplinary research and promote cross-training among biologists, engineers, and social scientists to drive discovery and innovation in advancing sustainable agricultural systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Shale: A Practical, Scalable Oblivious Reconfigurable Network

  2024-07-31 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Circuit-switched technologies have long been proposed for handling high-throughput traffic in datacenter networks, but recent developments in nanosecond-scale reconfiguration have created the enticing possibility of handling low-latency traffic as well. The novel Oblivious Reconfigurable Network (ORN) design paradigm promises to deliver on this possibility. Prior work in ORN designs achieved latencies that scale linearly with system size, making them unsuitable for large-scale deployments. Recent theoretical work showed that ORNs can achieve far better latency scaling, proposing theoretical ORN designs that are Pareto optimal in latency and throughput.

  PublisherDOI

• Towards Swap-Free, Continuous Ballooning for Fast, Cloud-Based Virtual Machine Migrations

  2024-11-14 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  We have a production need to reduce the time for customers to live migrate their application virtual machine (VM) in the cloud. A single customer of ours migrates their nested, cloud-based, user virtual machines tens of thousands of times a month.

  PublisherDOI

• A Decentralized SDN Architecture for the WAN

  2024-07-31 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  Motivated by our experiences operating a global WAN, we argue that SDN's reliance on infrastructure external to the data plane has substantially complicated the challenge of maintaining high availability. We propose a new decentralized SDN (dSDN) architecture in which SDN control logic instead runs within routers, eliminating the control plane's reliance on external infrastructure and restoring fate-sharing between control and data planes. We present dSDN as a simpler approach to realizing the benefits of SDN in the WAN. Despite its much simpler design, we show that dSDN is practical from an implementation viewpoint, and outperforms centralized SDN in terms of routing convergence and SLO impact.

  PublisherDOI

• Realtime optimization and management system (ROAM): A decision support system for digital agriculture systems

  Smart Agricultural Technology · 2024-04-20 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The growing disparity between food supply and demand requires innovative Digital Agriculture (DA) systems to increase farm sustainability and profitability. However, current systems suffer from problems of complexity stemming from the challenge of integrating diverse, often non-interoperable hardware and software components. In order to tackle these complexities to increase farm efficiency and understand the tradeoffs of these new DA innovations we developed Realtime Optimization and Management System (ROAM), which is a decision-support system developed to find a Pareto optimal architectural design to build DA systems. To find the Pareto optimal solution, we employed the Rhodium Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA), which systematically evaluates the trade-offs in DA system designs. Based on data from five live deployments at Cornell University, each DA design can be analyzed based on user defined objectives and evaluated under uncertain farming environments with ROAM. Paired with this, we develop a web interface that allows users to define personalized decision spaces and visualize decision tradeoffs. To help validate ROAM, it was deployed to a commercial farm where the user was recommended a DA architecture design method to increase farm efficiency. ROAM allows users to quickly make key decisions in designing their DA systems to increase farm profitability.

  PublisherDOI

• Breaking the VLB Barrier for Oblivious Reconfigurable Networks

  2024-06-10 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In a landmark 1981 paper, Valiant and Brebner gave birth to the study of oblivious routing and, simultaneously, introduced its most powerful and ubiquitous method: Valiant load balancing (VLB). By routing messages through a randomly sampled intermediate node, VLB lengthens routing paths by a factor of two but gains the crucial property of obliviousness: it balances load in a completely decentralized manner, with no global knowledge of the communication pattern. Forty years later, with datacenters handling workloads whose communication pattern varies too rapidly to allow centralized coordination, oblivious routing is as relevant as ever, and VLB continues to take center stage as a widely used — and in some settings, provably optimal — way to balance load in the network obliviously to the traffic demands. However, the ability of the network to rapidly reconfigure its interconnection topology gives rise to new possibilities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Towards Inter-Datacenter Communication for Next-Generation Networks

  NSF · $600k · 2011–2016

• CSR: Small: Plug into the SuperCloud

  NSF · $600k · 2014–2018

• Parallacs: Research in Storage and Compute Cloud Diversity

  NSF · $200k · 2011–2014

Frequent coauthors

• John Kubiatowicz

  University of California, Berkeley

  22 shared

• Robbert van Renesse

  Cornell University

  19 shared

• Kenneth P. Birman

  16 shared

• Ki Suh Lee

  Kitware (United States)

  15 shared

• Tudor Marian

  Google (United States)

  15 shared

• Gloire Rubambiza

  13 shared

• Patrick Eaton

  13 shared

• Vishal Shrivastav

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  13 shared

Labs

• Hakim Weatherspoon Research GroupPI

Awards & honors

• Sloan Research Fellowship
• NSF CAREER Award
• DARPA Young Faculty Award
• NSF Future Internet Architecture award
• NetApp Faculty Fellowship