Sam Madden, co-founder of Cambridge Mobile Telematics, in addition to co-leading the CarTel project with Hari Balakrishnan, is a Professor of Computer Science at MIT and the Director of BigData@CSAIL, an industry-university collaboration to explore issues related to managing data that is too big, too fast, or too hard for existing data processing systems to handle. He is known for contributions to the field of database systems, including widely cited papers on topics related to managing sensor data, column-oriented databases, and databases-as-a-service and was a co-founder of Vertica (acquired by HP).