2024 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award
CPCC accepts nominations for the CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award. The award is an annual award presented to a CPCC alumnus. CPCC members (faculty, students, and alumni) are invited to submit nominations for the 2024 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award. CPCC alumni listed on the CPCC Alumni website (http://www.cpcc.uci.edu/alumni.php) are eligible to be nominated. The nomination should include the CV of the nominee and a letter from the nominator explaining why the nominee is deserving of this award based on their scholarly achievements or societal/industry impact in the years during and/or after their study at UCI. Self-nominations are not permitted. The deadline for the nominations is March 10, 2024. Please email your nominations to CPCC Director, Hamid Jafarkhani, (hamidj [at] uci [dot] edu).
CPCC Member received the IEEE Communications Society Joseph LoCicero Award for Exemplary Service to Publications
CPCC faculty Prof. Ender Ayanoglu has received the 2023 IEEE Communications Society Joseph LoCicero Award for Exemplary Service to Publications. He was cited "for outstanding contributions to IEEE Communications Society journals as Editor, Editor-in-Chief (EiC), and Founding EiC." Prof. Ayanoglu served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 2004 to 2008. He was the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications - Series on Green Communications and Networking, 2015-2016. After leading the efforts to convert this series into an IEEE journal, he was the Founding Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, 2016-2020.
CPCC Members Awarded Multiple NSF Grants
Four esteemed CPCC members have been awarded prestigious grants by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their innovative research projects. These projects aim to revolutionize wireless communication networks, enhance emergency response systems, and pave the way for future generations of wireless technology.
Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani recieved an NSF research grant titled "Asynchrony and Limited Feedback in Next Generation Multiple Access". This grant will be active from 2023 to 2026. Prof. Jafarkhani's project delves into addressing challenges in the next generation of wireless networks. As wireless communication demands soar, the project aims to explore more efficient multiple access methods that allow simultaneous access to wireless resources. By tackling issues of asynchrony and limited feedback, the research seeks to design and analyze systems for improved transmission efficiency.
Prof. Payam Heydari has been listed as a co-PI of an NSF research grant titled "Reconfigurable Aerial Power-Efficient Interconnected Imaging and Detection (RAPID) Cyber-Physical System". This grant will be active from 2023 to 2026. Leading this project is Prof. Hamidreza Aghasi from UCI, serving as the PI. Prof. Heydari and Prof. Magnus Egerstedt, also from UCI, are co-PIs. This project aims to aid first responders by deploying a cooperative network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with cutting-edge sensing and imaging technologies. These UAVs will swiftly gather critical information, aiding responders in managing and preventing natural or man-made incidents, especially in challenging environments.
Prof. Syed Jafar recieved an NSF research grant titled "Generic Building Blocks of Communication-efficient Computation Networks". This grant will be active from 2023 to 2025. Prof. Jafar's research targets the growing domain of computation networks, exploring fundamental limits of their communication efficiency. By investigating the capacity of essential building blocks in these networks, the project seeks to establish a comprehensive information theory for computation networks, crucial for future technological advancements.
Prof. Lee Swindlehurst recieved an NSF research grant titled "Enabling Beyond-5G Wireless Access Networks with Robust and Scalable Cell-Free Massive MIMO". This grant will be active from 2023 to 2026. Prof. Lee Swindlehurst's project focuses on redefining wireless networks by eliminating cell boundaries, introducing a "cell-free" approach. This novel architecture aims to combat interference and provide more uniform coverage. The research will develop advanced methods for resource allocation and signal processing in less favorable scenarios, advancing beyond-5G/6G wireless technology.
CPCC Student is a 2023 IEEE SPS Scholarship Program recipient
CPCC PhD student Tomas Ortega received an IEEE Signal Processing Society Scholarship. The award includes a financial stipend, a certificate of recognition, and a complimentary one-year student membership in IEEE and the Signal Processing Society. The IEEE Signal Processing Society Scholarship Committee identified Tomas as a high-achieving student with commitment to exploring the signal processing engineering field through both coursework and career experiences. Under supervision of CPCC member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani and as a PhD candidate, Tomas studies distributed machine learning algorithms.
CPCC Member Receives a CHIPS and Science Act Award
CPCC faculty member Chancellor's Prof. Payam Heydari received an award under the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act. In a momentous announcement on September 20, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks declared the allocation of $238 million for the fiscal year 2023 under the CHIPS and Science Act. This substantial funding represents the largest award ever granted through the CHIPS and Science Act and is designated for the establishment of eight regional innovation hubs focused on microelectronics. The Southern California super-hub led by the University of Southern California (USC) was named one of the hub leaders for the Microelectronics Commons program. Prof. Heydari is the principal investigator representing the University of California, Irvine.
The recipient of the 2023 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award was selected
The 2023 recipient of the CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award is Dr. Vipul Jain. The award celebrates the achievements of the center's alumni. The award is an annual award presented to a CPCC alumnus based on the scholarly achievements or societal/industry impact in the years during and after the study at UCI. Dr. Jain has been selected "for contributions to mm-wave technologies."
Dr. Jain received the B. Tech. degree in electronics engineering from Kamla Nehru Institute of Technology, India, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Irvine. From 2009 to 2013, he was with SaberTek, where he led the development of 60GHz WiGig, mmWave imaging and WiFi products. Then he joined Anokiwave and helped build it into a leading silicon provider for mmWave 5G and satcom phased-arrays. He is currently a senior director at Skyworks Solutions, leading the product development of complex highly-integrated wireless modules for high-volume consumer electronics. Dr. Jain is a co-author/co-inventor on 50+ publications and patents in the area of RF/wireless circuits and systems.
CPCC Member awarded the Henry Samueli Chair in Engineering
CPCC faculty Member Chancellor's Prof. Syed Jafar has been awarded the Henry Samueli Chair in Engineering. This is in recognition of his outstanding performance in research, teaching, and service and effective July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2028.
CPCC Student recognized by IEEE Communications Society
CPCC PhD student Carles Diaz-Vilor was selected as a finalist for the IEEE Communications Society's Three-Minute-Thesis (3MT) Competition. As part of the competition, he was invited to explain his thesis to a non-specialist audience in just three minutes during the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) in Rome, Italy. He also received a $2,000 travel grant from IEEE ComSoc to present his research at ICC on May 29, 2023.
CPCC Member receives a Distinguished Educator Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Payam Heydari received the 2023 Distinguished Educator Award from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S). The award is given to a distinguished educator in the field of microwave engineering and science who exemplifies the special human qualities of the late Fred J. Rosenbaum who considered teaching a high calling and demonstrated his dedication to the MTT-S through tireless service. The citation for Prof. Heydari's award reads: "For Outstanding Achievements as an Educator, Mentor, and Role Model for Microwave Engineers and Engineering Students." The awrd was presented at the annual Society Awards Banquet during the International Microwave Symposium in San Diego, CA on June 14, 2023.
CPCC Student recognized by the Catalan Society of Mathematics
CPCC PhD student Tomas Ortega received an honorable mention at the 2023 Evariste Galois Award for his MS thesis on Low Density Parity Check codes. This award, offered by the Catalan Society of Mathematics, recognizes the best mathematical research project that may have been developed in a MS thesis or in the initial phase of the doctorate, and is either written or contains an abstract in Catalan.
CPCC Member Receives NSF Career Award
CPCC member Prof. Zhiying Wang received the NSF CAREER award entitled "Coding for Composite DNA Storage." The grant will be active from 2023 to 2028. The grant is sponsored by the NSF's Communications and Information Foundations (CIF) program. The main objective of the project is to eliminate the cost bottleneck of DNA storage through the utilization of composite DNA letters. This project seeks to investigate optimal information representation over the composite DNA storage channel by information- and coding-theoretic techniques, in order to achieve reliable, secure, and large-scale data storage.
CPCC Member Receives IEEE Signal Processing Society's Technical Achievement Award
CPCC member Prof. Lee Swindlehurst has received the 2022 IEEE Signal Processing Society's Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award. He was cited for his “contributions to multiuser and multiantenna communications and sensor array signal processing." The award is named after two of the most influential electrical engineers of the 20th century. Harry Nyquist made fundamental contributions to feedback control theory and digital sampling, and Claude Shannon is known as the father of information theory. Prof. Swindlehurst is one of two individuals to receive the honor, given to those who, over a period of years, have made outstanding technical contributions to theory and/or practice in technical areas as demonstrated by publications, patents or impact on the field.
The award will be presented to Prof. Swindlehurst at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), which will take place June 4-9, on the island of Rhodes in Greece.
CPCC member receives the 2022 Signal Processing and Computing for Communications Technical Recognition Award
CPCC member and director Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani has received the 2022 Signal Processing and Computing for Communications Technical Recognition Award from the IEEE Communications Society. He was recognized for “his pioneering contributions to signal processing for multi-antenna wireless communication systems.” The award was presented at the IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom).
CPCC Member Recognized as one of 35 Brightest Young Minds in Technology Innovation
CPCC member Prof. Yanning Shen has been named one of 35 Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review Asia. The annual list recognizes the brightest young minds working in technology today. Prof. Shen is one of 35 Asia Pacific honorees -- entrepreneurs, humanitarians, inventors and researchers tackling tough cross-industry challenges making advances in biotech, AI, materials science, energy, computing and quantum technology. Her research focuses on algorithms, analysis and application of machine learning, optimization and statistical signal processing tools to data science and network science. MIT Technology Review Asia noted, “Shen’s research on scalable and trustworthy machine learning algorithms from high-dimensional network data paves the way for building trustworthy intelligence over interconnected systems.” Launched in 1999, MIT Technology Review annually selects and recognizes a group of leading talents worldwide who have demonstrated profound influence on the future of humanity. Since 2014, MIT Technology Review has produced a list specifically targeting the Asia-Pacific region to celebrate rising talent on an international stage.
CPCC Member Recives Research Support from Tower Semiconductor Inc.
CPCC member Prof. Payam Heydari has received in kind research support from Tower Semiconductor Inc. The support is in kind research support and allows Prof. Heydari to use Tower Semiconductor's fabrication facilities. This is in addition to Tower Semiconductor's similar generous support in previous years.
CPCC Member Named Fellow by the National Academy of Inventors
CPCC member Prof. Payam Heydari has been named a fellow of The National Academy of Inventors. He was recognized for inventions that have made tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. His research group has made ground-breaking innovations in the design of radio frequency, millimeter wave and terahertz integrated microchips. In a time when the semiconductor field is coming up to the limits of Moore's Law, Heydari's techniques and chip architectures have pushed silicon-based integrated circuits to unprecedented levels of speed and performance.
CPCC Members Receive New NSF Research Grants
CPCC members Prof. Lee Swindlehurst, Prof. Ahmed Eltawil, and Hamid Jafarkhani received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "SMAC-FIRE: Closed-Loop Sensing, Modeling and Communications for WildFIRE." The grant will be active from 2022 to 2025. The grant is sponsored by the NSF's Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) program. This is a multi-disciplinary project in collaboration with Prof. Tirtha Banerjee and Prof. Zak Kassas from UC, Irvine and Dr. Janice Coen from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and in connection with the Orange County Fire Authority (OFCA). The main objective of this collaborative research project is to enable more rapid localization and situational awareness of wildfires at their earliest stages, better predictions of both local, near-term and event-scale behavior, better situational awareness and coordination of personnel and resources, and increased safety for fire fighters on the ground.
CPCC members Prof. Lee Swindlehurst received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the award is "Energy-Efficient THz Communications Across Massive Dimensions" and will be active from 2022 to 2025. This project will address the fundamental physical-layer challenges associated with energy-efficient THz communications in beyond-5G systems.
CPCC members Prof. Yanning Shen and Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the award is "Distributed and Quantized Kernel-Based Learning over Interconnected Sensing Systems" and will be active from 2022 to 2025. The main goal is to design robust distributed and quantized kernel learning algorithms over distributed sensing systems that only need to communicate with neighboring nodes and are less sensitive to network characteristics, like network topology and delays.
CPCC member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani received a SWIFT research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Dynamic Spectrum Sharing via Stochastic Optimization" that will be active from 2022 to 2025. This is in collaboration with Prof. Ali Pezeshki from Colorado State University and Prof. Vahid Tarokh from Duke University. This collaborative research is focused on developing a new paradigm in which spectrum sharing moves from hard deterministic constraints to stochastic schemes with desired low probability of harmful interference. The overall project goal is to improve spectrum efficiency and co-existence. A key component to enable this development is an accurate characterization of the mutual interference and performance tradeoffs among coexisting radar and communication nodes.
The recipient of the 2022 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award was selected
The 2022 recipient of the CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award is Dr. Amitav Mukherjee. The award celebrates the achievements of the center's alumni. The award is an annual award presented to a CPCC alumnus based on the scholarly achievements or societal/industry impact in the years during and after the study at UCI. Dr. Mukherjee has been selected "for contributions to the theory of physical layer security and 5G standards."
Dr. Mukherjee most recently served as Sr. Director of 5G R&D at Charter Communications, where he led the 5G air interface standards team and was a PHY SME for Charter's greenfield 5G deployment. At Verizon, he was the RAN architect for the Onsite private LTE/5G network service launched in 2020. At Ericsson, he led the R&D teams that designed the world's first 4G systems that operate in unlicensed spectrum (MulteFire and LAA-LTE). He is an inventor on 118 patents and an author of a book on 5G NR and 72 publications in wireless communications. He received his Ph.D. in ECE from UC Irvine in 2012 an MBA from the Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2022.
2022 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award
CPCC accepts nominations for the CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award. The award is an annual award presented to a CPCC alumnus. CPCC members (faculty, students, and alumni) are invited to submit nominations for the 2022 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award. CPCC alumni listed on the CPCC Alumni website (http://www.cpcc.uci.edu/alumni.php) are eligible to be nominated. The nomination should include the CV of the nominee and a letter from the nominator explaining why the nominee is deserving of this award based on their scholarly achievements or societal/industry impact in the years during and/or after their study at UCI. Self-nominations are not permitted. The deadline for the nominations is March 15, 2022. Please email your nominations to CPCC Director, Hamid Jafarkhani, (hamidj [at] uci [dot] edu).
CPCC Member Named Distinguished Lecturer
CPCC faculty Prof. Ender Ayanoglu has been named a 2022-23 Distinguished Lecturer by the IEEE Communications Society. The Distinguished Lecturer Program provides a means for IEEE Chapters and other organizations to identify and arrange lectures by renowned authorities on IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) topics. Prof. Ayanoglu's lectures will be on different topics including the applications of machine learning in wireless communications, wave-controlled metasurface-based reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, and the tradeoff between spectral and energy efficiency in cellular wireless networks. The lectures will be both online and in person.
CPCC Member Receives New NSF Research Grant
CPCC members Prof. Lee Swindlehurst received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled " Exploiting New Degrees-of-Freedom in Wireless Networks with Reprogrammable Intelligent Metagratings." The grant will be active from 2021 to 2025. The project explores the impact of reprogrammable intelligent metagratings (RIMs) on next-generation wireless systems. Several fundamental issues related to the use of RIMs in wireless networks will be addressed, such as RIM integration, interference management, resource allocation and multiple access. This research effort will enhance metasurface technology and wireless communication/networking systems, opening new perspectives and solution concepts for RIM-enhanced wireless systems.
CPCC Member receives a Best Paper Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Lee Swindlehurst and CPCC Postdoctoral Scholar Alumni Amine Mezghani received the 2021 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for a paper entitled "Channel Estimation and Performance Analysis of One-Bit Massive MIMO Systems" that was published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 1 August 2017. The paper is co-authored by Yongzhi Li, Cheng Tao, Gonzalo Seco-Granados, and Liu Liu. The award will be presented by the IEEE Signal Processing Society President to the authors during the Awards Ceremony at ICASSP 2022 in Singapore.
The paper presents an approach for channel estimation that is applicable for both flat and frequency-selective fading, based on the Bussgang decomposition that reformulates the nonlinear quantizer as a linear function with identical first- and second-order statistics and derives closed-form expressions for the achievable rate.
CPCC Member Named Chancellor's Professor
CPCC faculty Member Prof. Payam Heydari has been awarded the title of Chancellor's Professor. The Chancellor's Professor title is designed for persons who have earned the title of Professor and who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement is unusually high. Chancellor's Professors are faculty who have achieved acclaim for their accomplishments and who are highly likely to continue producing notable achievement in scholarship.
CPCC Member receives a Microsoft Security Research Artificial Intelligence Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Yanning Shen received a Microsoft Security Research Artificial Intelligence Award. This is in collaboration with Prof. Zhou Li from UC, Irvine. The two faculty are developing a new system to automatically detect spear-phishing emails, so the damage to an individual or organization can be contained. Spear-phishing is a type of cyber-attack that sends personalized emails to targeted individuals and organizations attempting to convince the victims to perform some action, such as transferring money, logging into a website or sharing data, which the attacker can then use illicitly.
The recipient of the 2021 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award was selected
The 2021 recipient of the CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award is Dr. Afshin Momtaz. The award is established to celebrate the achievements of the center's alumni. The award is an annual award presented to a CPCC alumnus based on the scholarly achievements or societal/industry impact in the years during and after the study at UCI. Dr. Momtaz has been selected "for contributions to multi-GHz transceiver design."
Dr. Momtaz received the B.S.E.E. from Cal Poly Pomona, M.S.E.E degree from UCLA, and the Ph.D. degree from UC Irvine. From 1992 to 1996, he was with Western Digital designing disk-drive read channel AFE. He later joined Adaptec corporations where he worked on 1Gbps fiber channel transceiver chips. In 1998, he joined the NewPort Communications, where he was involved with design of industry's first OC192/10GE CMOS transceivers. Since the acquisition of NewPort Communications by Broadcom in 2000, he has been focusing on various multiGHz wireline transceiver designs for optical, copper, chip-to-chip and backplane applications. He is currently the senior director of engineering and a Broadcom fellow. Dr. Momtaz has authored/coauthored more than 40 journal/conference papers and has 114 issued U.S. patents in the area of multi-GHz mixed signal circuits and systems.
CPCC Member Receives a Global Foundries Research Grant
CPCC member Prof. Payam Heydari has received in kind research support from GLOBALFOUNDRIES Inc. The support is in kind research support and allows Prof. Heydari to use the company's fabrication facilities.
CPCC Member Receives an ONR Grant
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar was awarded a single-investigator research grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for his project on "Towards a Third Generation of Interference Alignment - Low Latency Interactive Directional Networking."
CPCC Member receives an Outstanding Invited Paper Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Payam Heydari received an Outstanding Invited Paper Award for a paper entitled "Transceivers for 6G Wireless Communications: Challenges and Design Solutions" at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) held in April 2021. IEEE CICC is a premier conference devoted to IC development. The conference program is a blend of oral presentations, exhibits, panels and forums. The conference sessions present original first published technical work and innovative circuit techniques that tackle practical problems.
CPCC Member receives the 2020 Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award
CPCC faculty member Hamid Jafarkhani received the 2020 IEEE Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award. The annual award is given to a person with a high degree of visibility and contribution in the field of Wireless and Mobile Communications Theory, Systems, and Networks. Prof. Jafarkhani's award was presented for fundamental contributions to MIMO wireless communications.
CPCC Member receives an Innovative Education Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Payam Heydari received the 2021 Innovative Education Award from the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. The award recognizes and honors Solid-State Circuits Society members in their early/mid-career, who are making significant contributions to education in the field of solid-state circuits using innovative approaches. The award aims to highlight distinguished and unique educational methods or programs that have a broad impact on the education of our community.
CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award established
CPCC has established the CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award. The award is an annual award presented to a CPCC alumnus. CPCC members (faculty, students, and alumni) are invited to submit nominations for the newly instituted 2021 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award. CPCC alumni listed on the CPCC Alumni website (http://www.cpcc.uci.edu/alumni.php) are eligible to be nominated. The nomination should include the CV of the nominee and a letter from the nominator explaining why the nominee is deserving of this award based on their scholarly achievements or societal/industry impact in the years during and after their study at UCI. Self-nominations are not permitted. The deadline for the nominations is April 30, 2021. Please email your nominations to CPCC Director, Hamid Jafarkhani, (hamidj [at] uci [dot] edu).
CPCC Member Receives the 2020 School of Engineering Excellence in Research Senior Career Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Lee Swindlehurst received the 2020 School of Engineering Excellence in Research Senior Career Award. This recognition is given to senior faculty members who have conducted exceptional fundamental or applied research in one or more areas, or who have made a single or unique contribution to engineering concepts, and in which the research is responsive to or has an impact on society as a whole.
CPCC Member Named Chancellor's Professor
CPCC faculty Member Prof. Syed Jafar has been awarded the title of Chancellor's Professor. The Chancellor's Professor title is designed for persons who have earned the title of Professor and who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement is unusually high. Chancellor's Professors are faculty who have achieved acclaim for their accomplishments and who are highly likely to continue producing notable achievement in scholarship.
CPCC Member Recognized as UCI Beall Applied Innovation Faculty Innovation Fellow
CPCC faculty Member Prof. Payam Heydari has been recognized as a UCI Beall Applied Innovation Faculty Innovation Fellow. The program was established to acknowledge UCI faculty members who have a record of translating their society-impacting research as well as to make them ambassadors for UCI's innovation culture. As part of the two-year appointment, fellows receive a stipend and will work toward increasing engagement and excitement around innovation across the campus community, which includes acting as advisors and knowledge experts for entrepreneurs and others within the university.
CPCC Member Elected as IEEE Fellow
CPCC member Athina Markopoulou has been elected as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow effective January 1, 2021. Election to the IEEE Fellow Grade is the highest member grade the IEEE, world's largest engineering society, can bestow on a member. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon an IEEE member with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth percent of the total voting Institute membership.
Prof. Markopoulou's citation is for contributions to network coding systems and network measurement.
CPCC Members Receive New NSF Research Grants
CPCC member Prof. Athina Markopoulou received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Protecting Personal Data Flow on the Internet." The grant will be active from 2020 to 2025. The grant is sponsored by the NSF's Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Frontier program. This is a multi-campus grant in collaboration with Scott Jordan and Gene Tsudik from UC, Irvine. This Frontier project is a collaboration across four institutions (UC Irvine, Northeastern, USC, and Univ. of Iowa) with 12 senior personnel, and includes international collaborators (IMDEA) and advisors. The lead institution is UC Irvine. The main objective of this collaborative research project is to address the urgent need for protection of personal data flow on the Internet. This SaTC Frontier effort brings together a multidisciplinary team of outstanding researchers that will build fundamentals, create new technologies, and inform policy, so as to improve the transparency and control of personal data.
CPCC members Prof. Ender Ayanoglu and Prof. Lee Swindlehurst received a SWIFT research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Design and Operating Principles of a Wave-Controlled Holographic MIMO System" that will be active from 2020 to 2023. This is in collaboration with Prof. Filippo Capolino from UC, Irvine. The proposal uses the assistance of novel "intelligent reflecting surfaces" (IRS) that can adaptively modify the spatial characteristics of the MIMO channel. The overall project goal is to improve spectrum efficiency and co-existence. To achieve this goal, the proposed device employs a metasurface with cells whose reflection properties can be programmed to take an impinging electromagnetic field and reshape the reflected field. For coexistence, a narrow beam of energy impinging on the IRS could be redirected towards a receiver that might otherwise be blocked from the transmission.
CPCC member Prof. Lee Swindlehurst received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the award is "Exploiting Interference via Data-Dependent Precoding" and will be active from 2020 to 2023. The proposal is focused on a new symbol-level precoding paradigm that has recently emerged in which not only the channel state information is exploited, but also knowledge of the symbols to be transmitted. This approach provides a powerful extra dimension for optimization that can yield dramatic improvements in performance. While most precoding methods try to eliminate interference, symbol-level precoding (SLP) exploits useful or "constructive" interference and repurposes it as energy for the desired signals. This project seeks to study methods for reducing the complexity of SLP, operation of the algorithms in scenarios with constrained radio-frequency front ends (e.g., low-resolution quantization, per-antenna power constraints), physical layer security, user selection in large networks, theoretical analyses of performance, network settings other than broadcast, etc.
CPCC member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the award is "Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access with Imperfect Assumptions." This project will study the effects of imperfect timing synchronization in multi-user Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) systems and design high performance NOMA systems.
CPCC Member receives a Best Paper Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Lee Swindlehurst received a Best Paper Award for a paper entitled "SVM-based Channel Estimation and Data Detection for Massive MIMO Systems with One-Bit ADCs" at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) conference held in June 2020. IEEE ICC is the flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society. The paper is co-authored by Ly Van Nguyen and Duy Nguyen.
CPCC Member Selected as a Distinguished Fellow of IETI
CPCC Member Hamid Jafarkhani has been selected as a Distinguished Fellow of the International Engineering and Technology Institute (IETI). "The primary criteria for election are excellence in the domain and a proved record of continued accomplishment." In 2020, only 22 IETI Distinguished Fellows have been selected. Prof. Jafarkhani is also a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS.
CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member
Dr. Yanning Shen joined CPCC and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in August 2019. Her research interests span the areas of machine learning, network science, data science, and statistical-signal processing.
Dr. Shen received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), in 2011 and 2014, respectively, and her Ph.D degree from the University of Minnesota (UMN) in 2019. She received the UESTC distinguished B.Sc. thesis Award in 2011, and distinguished M.Sc. Thesis Award in 2014. She was a Best Student Paper Award finalist of the 2017 IEEE International Workshop on Computational Advances in Multi-Sensor Adaptive Processing, and the 2017 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers. She was selected as Rising Stars in EECS by Stanford University in 2017, and received the UMN Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in 2018.
CPCC Member Named Distinguished Lecturer
CPCC faculty Prof. Syed Jafar has been named a 2019-21 Distinguished Lecturer by the IEEE Information Theory Society. The Distinguished Lecturer Program provides a means for IEEE Chapters and other organizations to identify and arrange lectures by renowned authorities on IEEE Information Theory Society topics.
CPCC Member Named Chancellor's Fellow
CPCC faculty member Prof. Athina Markopoulou has been selected as a UC Irvine Chancellor's Fellow. Established in 2001, Chancellor's Fellows are faculty with tenure whose recent achievements in scholarship show extraordinary promise for world-class contributions to knowledge, and whose pattern of contributions evidences a strong trajectory to distinction. Prof. Markopoulou's research interests are in the area of computer networks, and the recent focus in her group is on mobile and IoT devices and privacy.
CPCC Members receive a Best Paper Award
CPCC student Arash Gholami Davoodi and CPCC faculty member Prof. Syed Jafar received the 2018 IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award for a paper entitled "Aligned Image Sets Under Channel Uncertainty: Settling Conjectures on the Collapse of Degrees of Freedom Under Finite Precision CSIT" which appeared in the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY, vol. 62, no. 10, pp. 5603-5618, October 2016. The IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, which consists of a plaque and an honorarium, is given annually for outstanding papers relevant to both societies published in any publication of either society in the previous three calendar years.
CPCC Member receives a Best Paper Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani received a Best Paper Award for a paper entitled "A New Reconfigurable Antenna MIMO Architecture for mmWave Communication" at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) conference held in May 2018. IEEE ICC is the flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society. The paper is co-authored by Mojtaba Ahmadi Almasi, Hani Mehrpouyan, Vida Vakilian, and Nader Behdad.
CPCC Member recieves American Heart Association Award
CPCC faculty Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani and Prof. Arash Kheradvar recived a research award from American Heart Association. Their proposal is tiled "AI-based Platform to Automatically Analyze Pediatric Heart MRIs" and is active from 2019 to 2021. In addition, Amazom provides in kind support for the project by allowing PIs to use free AWS services for the project.
CPCC Members Receive New NSF Research Grants
CPCC member Athina Markopoulou received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Privacy-Preserving Mobile Crowdsourced Data." The grant will be active from 2019 to 2023. The main objective of this collaborative research project is to develop principled techniques for controlling the privacy-utility tradeoff for mobile data. The focus is on data reported from mobile devices, including information about the wireless network, as well as personal/user data. The goal is to develop privacy-preserving techniques to obfuscate reported data, while still providing guarantees for the quality of the provided service.
CPCC member Athina Markopoulou received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "N-Body Algorithms for Mobile and Social Data." The grant will be active from 2019 to 2022. This project is based on the core insight that many problems in the above space can be framed in terms of pairwise interactions among spatially embedded entities, traditionally the domain of N-body problems in the physical sciences. As a consequence, revisiting and adapting N-body algorithms specifically to mobile and social data analysis and learning can increase our capacity to (i) work with such data at scale and (ii) do so in a privacy-preserving way.
CPCC member Payam Heydari received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Integrative Approaches to Study the Role of Early Life Sleep Disruption in Brain Development and Autistic Behaviors." The grant will be active from 2019 to 2023. The objectives in this project are as follows: 1) Develop and test wired, enzyme-based flexible integrated dual-sensor probes to assess L-glutamate and GABA levels in prairie voles in order to examine E:I balance in the brain during complex social interactions. 2) Develop and test a wireless system with an integrated L-glutamate and GABA flexible dual-sensor probe to study changes in the E:I balance the brain during complex social interactions. 3) Develop and test a wireless dual sensor probe integrated with EEG as a way to investigate effects of ELSD on EEG gamma oscillations as a functional readout of E:I balance during complex social interactions
CPCC member Syed Jafar received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Fundamental Limits of Privacy, Security, Structure and Alignment through the Lens of Private Information Retrieval." The grant will be active from 2019 to 2022. Motivated by increasing privacy concerns in the modern era of big data, distributed storage and cloud computing, this project focuses on the problem of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) where the goal is to allow users to efficiently retrieve desired records from remotely stored datasets without revealing any information to the servers about which records are desired, even if the servers are computationally unbounded. The project is comprised of seven research thrusts centered around the capacity of PIR with upload constraints, data dependencies, partial privacy, limited computation, data security, coded storage, and the dualities that allow exchange of ideas across different problems that are connected through PIR.
CPCC Member Named Distinguished Lecturer
CPCC faculty Prof. Payam Heydari has been named a 2019-22 Distinguished Lecturer by the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S). The Distinguished Lecturer Program provides a means for IEEE Chapters and other organizations to identify and arrange lectures by renowned authorities on IEEE MTT-S Society topics. Dr. Heydari's lectures will be about fundamentals of mm-Wave and terahertz frequency generation, synthesis, and radiation in silicon technologies. Dr. Heydari formerly served as the Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS). Only a handful of electrical engineering scientists across the world have served as the distinguished lecturer of more than one major IEEE society. Dr. Heydari is among these selected group of scholars.
CPCC Member Receives an ARL Grant
CPCC faculty Prof. Syed A. Jafar was awarded a single-investigator research grant from the Army Research Lab (ARL) for his project on "Secure Topological Interference Management for Tactical Wireless Networks." The grant will be active from 2019 to 2022.
CPCC Member receives the 2017 Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Lee Swindlehurst received the 2017 Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society for the following paper he co-authored with colleagues from Georgia Tech, Bell Labs and the National University of Singapore: "An Overview of Massive MIMO: Benefits and Challenges," published in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, October 2014. The award honors a journal article of broad interest to the signal processing community that has had substantial impact over several years on a subject related to the society's technical scope. Massive MIMO (for multiple-input, multiple-output) wireless communications refers to the idea of equipping cellular base stations with a very large number of antennas, and has been shown to potentially allow for orders of magnitude improvement in spectral and energy efficiency using relatively simple (linear) processing. The paper presents a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research on the topic, which has recently attracted considerable attention.
CPCC Member Receives a SRC Grant
CPCC member Prof. Nader Bagherzadeh has received a Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) grant entitled "3D IC Thermal Management Based on TSV Placement Optimization and Novel Materials". This research grant is in collaboration with researchers at the University of Texas."
CPCC Member is the 2017 Innovation Hall of Fame Inductee at School of Engineering, University of Maryland
CPCC faculty member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani was inducted to the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering Innovation Hall of Fame "for outstanding contributions to the development of space-time methods and algorithms for multi-antenna wireless communication systems and networks." The hall features innovations that have had a positive impact on society. Every year, University of Maryland recognizes the achievements of one selected innovator whose work is described in a special panel mounted in the hall. The hall is located on the first floor of the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building. During the 2017 Innovation Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, Prof. Jafarkhani was presented with a medallion by the President of the University of Maryland at College Park, President Wallace Loh. The ceremony was followed by the Charles and Helen White Symposium on Engineering Innovation. In the honor of the inductee, the title of the 2017 symposium was "Paradigm Shifts in Wireless Communications."
CPCC Member Receives an ONR Grant
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar was awarded a single-investigator research grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for his project on "Extracting Structure from Chaos: Interference Alignment for Tactical Wireless Networks."
CPCC member receives an AFOSR Grant
CPCC member Prof. Michael Green has been awarded a research grant by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The award grant covers three years from 2018. Dr. Green's project is on "Advanced Optical Technologies for Defense Trauma and Critical Care."
CPCC Members Receive New NSF Research Grants
CPCC member Athina Markopoulou received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "A Multi-Layer Learning Approach to Mobile Traffic Filtering." The grant will be active from 2018 to 2021. The main objective of this collaborative research project is to defend against abuses in the mobile ecosystem, such as the leak of sensitive user information, through real-time on-device filtering of network traffic on a mobile device.
CPCC members Lee Swindlehurst and Michael Green received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Energy Efficient Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO Wireless Communications" that will be active from 2018 to 2021. Advances in nanofabrication have allowed for the creation of tiny sensors and actuators that require only very small amounts of energy or minimal access to their environment in order to operate. However, the physical constraints associated with analog electronic conversion, amplification and communication have been slower to be overcome. The goal of this project is to help remedy this gap, and develop simple, low-power, low-complexity radio-frequency devices that can be used in conjunction with sophisticated software to enable the Internet of Things (IoT) vision to become a reality.
CPCC member Hamid Jafarkhani received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Energy-Aware Location Optimization in Emerging Wireless Networks" that will be active from 2018 to 2021. This is in collaboration with Prof. Erdem Koyuncu from the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is a former CPCC researcher. The project will study the problem of energy-efficient node deployment in heterogeneous, multi-tiered, and mobile wireless networks, taking into account connectivity and autonomy. The project suggests the use of quantization theory, a seemingly-unlikely candidate that is originally developed for signal compression, as a tool to address these challenges.
CPCC Member Awarded 2017 School of Engineering Mid-Career Excellence in Research Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Payam Heydari received the School of Engineering Mid-Career Excellence in Research Award for 2017. This recognition is given to mid career faculty members who have conducted exceptional fundamental or applied research in one or more areas, or who have made a single or unique contribution to engineering concepts, and in which the research is responsive to or has an impact on society as a whole.
CPCC Members Receive New NSF Research Grants
CPCC member Payam Heydari received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "A Bi-Directional Brain-Computer Interface for Restoration of Walking and Lower Extremity Sensation after Spinal Cord Injury." The grant is sponsored by the NSF's Cyber-Physical Systems Frontier program and will be active from 2017 to 2022. This is a multi-campus grant in collaboration with Zoran Nenadic and An Do from UC, Irvine, Richard Andersen from Caltech, and Charles Liu from USC. Impairment or complete loss of gait function and lower extremity sensation are common after spinal cord injury. A new cyber-physical system can be realized as a permanently implantable bi-directional brain-computer interface which translates walking intentions from brain signals into commands for a leg prosthesis, and converts prosthesis sensor signals into electrical stimulation of the brain for artificial leg sensation. The main objective of the project is to design, develop, and test a wearable analogue of a fully implantable electrocorticogram (ECoG)-based bi-directional brain-computer interface for walking and leg sensation.
CPCC member Ahmed Eltawil received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Dynamic Full-Duplex single-channel wireless communication systems." The grant will be active from 2017 to 2021. The main objective of this research project is to to lay out the basic framework for a thorough understanding of the potential of Full Duplex (FD) systems, especially in conditions where the wireless channel is rapidly evolving and it becomes extremely challenging to maintain the isolation between transmit and receive paths.
CPCC member Syed Jafar received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Enabling Real-Time Interference Alignment - From Theory to Practice." The grant will be active from 2017 to 2020. Funded under the NSF SpecEES program, the goal of the project is to bring interference alignment closer to practice, by exploring and expanding upon the idea of blind interference alignment, for example, through the use of reconfigurable antennas.
CPCC member Michael Green received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Theory and implementation of exceptional points of degeneracy for oscillators and array radiators based on spatial combiners." The grant will be active from 2017 to 2021. The project aims at providing first a theoretical foundation of microwave and millimeter wave (mm-wave) circuits that are based on the exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) in coupled-mode circuits and transmission lines.
CPCC member Lee Swindlehurst received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Low Resolution Sampling with Generalized Thresholds" that will be active from 2017 to 2021. This is in collaboration with Jian Li from the University of Florida and Mojtaba Soltanalian from the University of Illinois at Chicago. This research project aims to gain fundamental insights into the novel paradigm of low resolution sampling with general thresholds, devising novel signal processing algorithms, including effective and efficient sparse signal recovery techniques and parametric maximum likelihood methods for enhanced performance, and evaluating and demonstrating the performance using measured data.
CPCC Member Receives an ONR Grant
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar was awarded a single-investigator research grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for his project on "A New Frontier in Tactical Communication Networks: Unlocking Spectral Efficiencies by Exploiting Information Dependencies."
CPCC Member Receives a new Gift
CPCC faculty Athina Markopoulou received a new gift from the Data Transparency Lab. The gift was awarded to 6 projects out of about 50 applicants this year. Prof. Markopoulou's gift was awarded for the AntMonitor project. The project aims at increasing data transparency for mobile devices. It has developed a tool for monitoring and analysis of all network traffic on mobile devices from user space, in a way that is fast and energy efficient. The project increases users' awareness about where mobile data is going (e.g. legitimate vs. ad servers and trackers), detect possible privacy leaks and take control.
CPCC Members Recognized by IEEE Transactions on Computer
A paper by CPCC faculty Nader Bagherzadeh and his CPCC students received the distinguished highlighted journal paper for the February 2017 of the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Computer. The paper is entitled "Deadlock Verification of Cache Coherence Protocols and Communication Fabrics" and is authored by Freek Verbeek, Pooria M. Yaghini, Ashkan Eghbal, and Nader Bagherzadeh. In this paper, they present a unique and an effective way of evaluating deadlock detection where communication and cache coherency combined effects are considered simultaneously for the first time.
CPCC Members Receive New NSF Research Grants
CPCC member Prof. Athina Markopoulou received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the award is "A New Framework for Mobile Network Monitoring, Learning and Control" and the grant will be active from 2016 to 2018. This project will build and deploy AntMonitor - a system for collection and analysis of fine-grained, large-scale, passive network measurements from mobile devices. Design challenges that will be addressed include high performance in terms of network throughput and battery consumption, and modular design so as to support different applications including (i) privacy leaks detection and prevention (ii) learning of user and app behavior and anomaly detection and (iii) network performance monitoring.
CPCC members Payam Heydari and Hamid Jafarkhani received a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Novel Terahertz Phased-Array Wireless Transmitters with Beamforming Capability Enabling Point-to-Point 50 Gbps Data Rates." The grant will be active from 2016 to 2019. This is in collaboration with Prof. Omeed Momeni from UC, Davis who is a former CPCC researcher. The main objective of this interdisciplinary research project is to study, design, and implement novel integrated phased-array wireless transmitter architectures that are amenable to frequency scaling and will be the core enabling blocks for a wireless infrastructure that can potentially achieve 50 Gbps line-of-sight (LOS) wireless connectivity over a 20-50m link range.
CPCC member Syed Jafar received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Fundamental Limits of Robust Interference Management -- Between the Extremes." The grant will be active from 2016 to 2020. The research combines the theoretical pursuit of capacity limits with the practical concern for robustness.
CPCC member Hamid Jafarkhani is part of a four institution research team that received one of the NSF EARS research grants. The NSF recently announced 11 EARS awards, totaling $12 million, "to support activities aimed at enhancing the public's access to the radio frequency spectrum, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum used to facilitate telecommunications and modern information systems essential for public safety, transportation and national defense." The research grant is entitled "Overcoming Propagation Challenges at Millimeter-Wave Frequencies via Reconfigurable Antennas" and will be active from 2016 to 2019. The project's goal is to leverage the additional degrees of freedom provided by a new reconfigurable antenna design to establish new beamforming and beamsteering methodologies that overcome substantive propagation challenges at mm-wave frequencies.
CPCC member Zhiying Wang received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the award is "Multi-version Distributed Storage - from Instantaneous to Evolving Information" and the grant will be active from 2016 to 2019. The research objective of this project is to study the fundamental problem of storing evolving information in distributed networks through coding-based distributed computing. The project leverages coding theory and distributed computing, combined with information-theoretic and algorithmic arguments, of use in understanding other distributed algorithms as well. The project will educate students through research and graduate course development, and will provide online materials for a non-expert audience.
CPCC Member Elected as IEEE Fellow
CPCC member Payam Heydari has been elected as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow effective January 1, 2017. Election to the IEEE Fellow Grade is the highest member grade the IEEE, world's largest engineering society, can bestow on a member. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon an IEEE member with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth percent of the total voting Institute membership.
Dr. Heydari's citation is for contributions to silicon-based millimeter-wave integrated circuits and systems.
CPCC Member Elected Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences
CPCC member Prof. Lee Swindlehurst has been elected as Foreign Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences is one of the oldest engineering societies in the world with some 1300 Fellows and 300 Foreign Fellows.
CPCC Member Receives 2016 School of Engineering Excellence in Research Senior Career Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani received the 2016 School of Engineering Excellence in Research Senior Career Award. This recognition is given to senior faculty members who have conducted exceptional fundamental or applied research in one or more areas, or who have made a single or unique contribution to engineering concepts, and in which the research is responsive to or has an impact on society as a whole.
CPCC Members Receive New DTRA Research Grant
CPCC faculty member, Prof. Nader Bagherzadeh, has received a 1 million-dollar award from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The title of the award is "Radiation Characterization of STT-RAM Devices" and the grant will be active from 2016 to 2019. Prof. Bagherzadeh's co-PIs are Prof. Ozdal Boyraz, Prof. Ilya Krivorotov, and Prof. Mikael Nilsson. Spin Transfer Torque Random Access Memory (STT-RAM) is a promising non-volatile memory technology that provides faster operations, better endurance, and lower power than existing nonvolatile memories such as the NAND flash used in a typical memory stick. Because of all these great advantages it is projected that this technology will be used in the near future for many systems related to civilian and military applications. Understanding the impact of radiation on the STT-RAM memory devices is considered an important topic of study which requires a detailed characterization of radiation effects on these memory devices. Based on these studies researchers can potentially find various ways of dealing with radiation induced memory failures. The goals of this multidisciplinary fundamental research are: (1) to identify radiation induced damages on these devices, (2) apply laser based techniques to rapidly test devices, and (3) find circuit based solutions to remedy damages caused by radiation and recover the stored data.
CPCC Member Receives an ARL Grant
CPCC faculty Prof. Syed A. Jafar was awarded a single-investigator research grant from the Army Research Lab (ARL) for his project on "Optimal Use of Multiple Antennas in Tactical Interference Networks - MIMO, IA and Beyond." The grant will be active from 2016 to 2019.
CPCC Members Receive New NSF Research Grants
CPCC members Prof. Lee Swidlehurst and Prof. Ender Ayanoglu received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the award is "Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO: A New Frontier for Enhanced Radio Access" and the grant will be active from 2015 to 2018. This research grant focuses on three symbiotic technological directions that are emerging to achieve dramatic improvements in wireless capacity and spectral efficiency: (1) a push to greater frequency reuse through the creation of smaller and smaller cells, (2) a consideration of millimeter wave (MMW) frequencies where the spectrum is less crowded and greater bandwidths are available, and (3) massive MIMO - access points equipped with a very large number of antennas that can accommodate many co-channel users.
CPCC member Prof. Athina Markopoulou received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the award is "Network Sampling and Construction Methods for Inference and Anonymization" and the grant will be active from 2015 to 2019. This project will study big network data, including but not limited to those generated by communication using mobile devices and online social media.
CPCC member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the award is "Challenges and Opportunities of Timing Mismatch in Multi-User Wireless Networks" and the grant will be active from 2015 to 2018. This project will analyze the effects of timing mismatch on the performance of multi-user wireless networks, from the viewpoint of sampling diversity, with the aim to explore its benefits in the presence of timing mismatch.
CPCC Member Awarded the 2015 Blavatnik National Laureate in Physical Sciences and Engineering
CPCC member Prof. Syed Jafar was awarded the 2015 Blavatnik National Laureate in Physical Sciences and Engineering, recognized for “fundamental contributions to studies of capacity limits of wireless networks and discoveries in interference alignment”. The Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences, annually award three National Laureates, one each in Chemistry, Life Sciences and Physical Sciences & Engineering. Envisioned by Len Blavatnik as a “Nobel Prize for young scientists”, these awards honor the nation’s most exceptional young scientists and engineers, celebrating their extraordinary achievements and recognizing their outstanding promise. Each of the three National Laureates receives a medal and a cash prize of $250,000 in a black-tie ceremony at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The three National Laureates for 2015 were selected from the nominations submitted by the nation’s leading universities and research institutions. Each institution was invited to nominate one chemist, one life scientist and one physical scientist or engineer. The 300 nominees were narrowed down to the three National Laureates, following a rigorous review by a judging panel including Nobel Prize winners, National Medal of Science recipients and members of the National Academy of Sciences. The basis for judging is the quality, impact, novelty and promise of the nominees’ work as a principal investigator in charge of their own research program. The “Physical Sciences & Engineering” category includes applied mathematics, astrophysics and cosmology, atmospheric and oceanic sciences, atomic, molecular and optical physics, computer science, condensed matter physics, geology and geophysics, materials science and nanotechnology, nuclear and particle physics, plasma physics, theoretical physics, and civil, electrical, mechanical and aeronautical engineering.
CPCC Member Awarded 2015 School of Engineering Mid-Career Excellence in Research Award
CPCC faculty member Prof. Syed Jafar received the School of Engineering Mid-Career Excellence in Research Award for 2015. This recognition is given to mid career faculty members who have conducted exceptional fundamental or applied research in one or more areas, or who have made a single or unique contribution to engineering concepts, and in which the research is responsive to or has an impact on society as a whole.
CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member
Dr. Zhiying Wang has joined CPCC and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor as of September 2015. Her research interests include information theory, theoretical and applied aspects of coding for data storage, as well as compression and computations on genomic data. Dr. Wang received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology in 2009 and 2013, respectively, and B.Sc. degree in Information Electronics and Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2007. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University from 2013 to 2015. She is the recipient of an NSF Center for Science of Information (CSoI) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2013.
CPCC Members Receive 2015 Heinrich Hertz Paper Award
CPCC former student, Tiangao Gou and CPCC faculty member Prof. Syed Jafar received the 2015 IEEE Communication Society Heinrich Hertz Best Paper Award for their paper entitled "Optimal Use of Current and Outdated Channel State Information – Degrees of Freedom of the MISO BC with Mixed CSIT" published in IEEE Communications Letters in July 2012. This paper closes an intriguing gap between the best known inner and outer bounds on the degrees of freedom (DoF) of a vector broadcast channel where the transmitter has imperfect knowledge of the current channel state and perfect knowledge of past channel states is available after some delay. In order to close the gap the work improved upon both the existing inner bound as well as the existing outer bound, and showed that the improved bounds match. This award is given to an outstanding manuscript published in any letter journal financially sponsored or co- sponsored by the Communications Society during the previous 3 calendar years which opens new lines of research, envisions bold approaches to communication, formulates new problems to solve, and essentially enlarges the field of communications engineering. The basis for judging is quality, exposition, novelty and impact. The prize consists of a plaque and honorarium of $500 per author.
CPCC Member Receives the Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research
CPCC member Prof. Syed Jafar received the 2015-2016 Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research. The Distinguished Faculty Awards are the UCI Academic Senate's highest honors. The awards are given to UC Irvine faculty who have achieved excellence through their activities in research, teaching and service. The Academic Senate's Distinguished Faculty awards are selected by the Committee on Scholarly Honors and Awards.
CPCC members receive the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award
CPCC former students Tiangao Gou and Chenwei Wang received the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award for the paper entitled “Aiming Perfectly in the Dark - Blind Interference Alignment through Staggered Antenna Switching” published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing in June 2011. The paper was written when they both were CPCC students and was co-authored by CPCC faculty Prof. Syed Jafar.
This paper showed how the benefits of interference alignment, previously believed to be accessible only with perfect channel knowledge, remain surprisingly available to devices equipped with reconfigurable antennas, even when no knowledge of channel realizations is available to the transmitter beyond the knowledge of pre-determined antenna switching patterns alone. The Young Author Best Paper Award honors the author(s) of an especially meritorious paper dealing with a subject related to the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s technical scope and appearing in one of the Society’s solely owned transactions or the Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing and who, upon the date of submission of the paper, is less than 30 years of age. The prize consists of $500 per young author and a certificate.
CPCC Members Receive New NSF Research Grants
CPCC faculty member, Prof. Payam Heydari, has received a 1 million-dollar Cyber-physical Systems Synergy award from the National Science Foundation for his collaborative research entitled “A Signal-Aware-Based Low-Power, Fully Human Implantable Brain-Computer Interface System to Restore Walking after Spinal Cord Injury” which will be active from 2014 to 2018. This ground-breaking research focuses on implanting a cyber-physical system to bypass the spinal cord, enabling direct brain control of prostheses. The project combines efforts of nanoscale communication integrated circuits (NCIC) labs affiliated with the CPCC, biomedical engineering and Neurology Dept. in collaboration with Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center.
CPCC member Prof. Ahmed Eltawil received a new research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to pursue research on a collaborative proposal: "Project Smart-Recon: Smart Device-Enabled Reconnaissance after Earthquakes" with University of Michigan, Ann Arbor which will be active from 2014 to 2017. Whenever a catastrophic event occurs, reconnaissance teams are deployed within the affected areas to conduct visual inspections of buildings. The teams tag the buildings red, yellow or green to indicate their probable condition and permitted use. This function often takes weeks. The central premise of this work is that widespread citizen ownership of smartphones and devices can be leveraged to automate and significantly accelerate this first reconnaissance effort. Under this project, research will be conducted on how to integrate measurements performed by sensors that are typically part of most modern smart devices (e.g. accelerometers, gyroscopes, etc.) to infer information about their motion during a seismic event. By increasing the speed and accuracy with which building damage may be assessed in the aftermath of natural disasters, the proposed reconnaissance technology will reduce potential hazards and hardships to citizens and will provide enormous cost savings. Knowing this information will also enable first responders to optimize their response and physical inspection teams to prioritize their efforts, thereby minimizing confusion in the aftermath of a disaster. On the educational front, this project will have a substantial impact on the development of human resources. By bridging civil and electrical engineering, the students who will work on this project will attain a multi-disciplinary education at the intersection of both disciplines.
Broadcom Foundation Gifts Support CPCC Research
Broadcom Foundation has provided gifts to support the research of CPCC faculty Michael Green and Hamid Jafarkhani. Broadcom is one of the original sponsors of CPCC and has continued his support through generous gifts to the center and his faculty members.
CPCC member receives a grant from SAIT
Prof. Heydari, a CPCC Faculty member, is the recipient of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) grant. The 100K grant supports Prof. Heydar’s research idea on “A Novel Integrated Non-Invasive Terahertz Sensor in Nanoscale Silicon Technologies for Biometric/Bio-Data Verification.” The award is for one year and started on 09/1/2014.
CPCC member receives an AFOSR Young Investigator Award
CPCC member Prof. Anima Anandkumar has been awarded the 2015 Young Investigator Award (YIP) by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The award grant covers three years. Dr. Anandkumar's proposal is on " Learning Mixed Membership Community Models: A statistical and a Computational Framework." The objective of this program is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and to increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering.
CPCC Member Wins a Best Paper Award
CPCC faculty Hamid Jafarkhani is the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication. The award is given to an outstanding paper published in any IEEE Communications Society publication in the previous 15 calendar years. Papers that open new lines of work, envision bold approaches to communication, formulate new problems to solve, and essentially enlarge the field of communications engineering are eligible. The 2014 award was given to the paper entitled "Space-Time Block Coding for Wireless Communications: Performance Results" published in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications in March 1999. Dr. Jafarkhani co-authored the paper with Dr. Vahid Tarokh and Dr. Rob Calderbank. The award was presented by the IEEE Communication Society President during the IEEE Globecom conference in Dec. 2014.
CPCC Member Receives an International Award
CPCC faculty Ender Ayanoglu is the recipient of the 2014 Outstanding Service Award of the Communication Theory Technical Committee. The award recognizes members of the Communication Theory Technical Committee who have a distinguished record of service to the community, including leadership roles within the community, and promoting communication theory activities and interests in the broader research community.
CPCC Members Win a Best Paper Award
CPCC student Arash Gholami Davoodi and CPCC faculty Syed Jafar are the recipients of a Best Paper Award for their paper entitled "Settling Conjectures on the Collapse of Degrees of Freedom under Finite Precision CSIT" at the IEEE Globecom conference held in Dec. 2014. IEEE Globecom is the flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society. In the same conference, another CPCC paper written by CPCC student Sina Poorkasmaei and CPCC faculty Hamid Jafarkhani entitled "Asynchronous Orthogonal Differential Modulation for MAC Systems" was chosen as one of the Best of Globecom'14 papers.
CPCC members receive a new DARPA research grant
CPCC members Hamid Jafarkhani and Homayoun Yousefi'zadeh have received a new research grant from DARPA titled "Network Connectivity: A General Mathematical Model Using Graph Theory". The proposal studies the connectivity of wireless networks using realistic connectivity models and graph theory. The models will be used to maximize the connectivity of networks while optimally allocating network resources.
CPCC member receives new ONR research grant
CPCC member Prof. Anima Anandkumar has received a new research grant from the office of naval research titled "Learning High Dimensional Latent Variable Models: Scalable Tensor and Graphical Approaches" that will be active from 2014 to 2017. The proposal considers modeling high-dimensional data by incorporating latent or hidden variables and/or graphical relationships among the variables at hand. Latent variables are present in almost every conceivable measurement scenario and it is crucial to incorporate them in modeling. In addition, it is important to succinctly represent the relationships among the variables, e.g. Markov relationships. Graph structures and their extensions are natural objects to express such relationships. The proposal develops efficient and guaranteed learning methods for discovering latent variables and graph structures in high dimensions.
CPCC Member and her Student Receive an Award
CPCC student Blerim Cici and CPCC faculty Athina Markopoulou are the recipients of an award at the 2014 UbiComp held in September 2014, at Seattle, WA. The title of the award-winning paper was "Assessing the Potential of Ride-Sharing Using Mobile and Social Data-- A Tale of Four Cities" and was co-authored by Enrique Frias-Martinez and Nikolaos Laoutaris. The paper was one of the 23 (5% of submissions) that has won the Best Paper Nominee award.
CPCC Student Selected as a Finalist
CPCC student Hua Sun was selected as a finalist in the 2014 Broadcom Student Competition. Hua Sun's project was on Robust Interference Management Principles. He presented his results which included the simplest topological interference management setting where non-Shannon information inequalities are necessary and a closed form condition for optimality of treating interference as noise in parallel K user interference channels. As a finalist, he received $1000 prize during the Broadcom Technical Conference on June 5. Hua Sun's PhD advisor is CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar.
CPCC Member Receives Faculty Research Excellence Award
CPCC faculty Athina Markopoulou received the 2014 Mid-Career Faculty Research Excellence Award from The Henry Samueli School of Engineering. The awards were given based on exceptional fundamental or applied research (either in scope or originality) in one or more areas of endeavor conducted in the School of Engineering, or a single or unique contribution to engineering concepts, which is responsive to or has an impact on society as a whole. The award was presented during the School of Engineering's faculty meeting on June 3.
CPCC Member Presents a Keynote Talk
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar presented a keynote talk at the 27th Biennial Symposium on Communications, hosted by Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, on June 1-3, 2014. Prof. Jafar's talk on "Topological Interference Management" presented a summary of recent results on interference alignment and an information theoretic view of the robust principles of avoiding interference when it is strong and treating it as noise when it is weak.
CPCC Member Wins a Teaching Award
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar won the EECS Professor of the Year award for 2014 given by the Engineering students council at the Engineering Week Award Banquet. Prof. Jafar has won this undergraduate teaching award a total of 5 times, in 2006, 2009, and 2011, 2012 and 2014. During these years, Professor Jafar has taught Network Analysis (EECS 70A), Continuous Time Signals and Systems (EECS 150A) and Engineering Probability (EECS 140).
CPCC Member Receives an Early-Career Sloan Research Fellowship
CPCC faculty Anima Anandkumar has been awarded a 2014 Early-Career Sloan Research Fellowship. She received the award for her work at the interface of theory and practice of large-scale machine learning and high-dimensional statistics. Bestowed annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the two-year fellowships go to 126 early-career scientists and scholars in the U.S. and Canada whose achievements and potential identify them as the next generation of scientific leaders.
CPCC Member Receives an International Award
CPCC faculty Nader Bagherzadeh is a recipient of the Khwarizmi International Award. It is awarded for outstanding achievements in research, innovation and invention, in fields related to science and technology. Prof. Bagherzadeh received the award for his contributions to computer architecture.
CPCC Member Named Distinguished Lecturer
CPCC faculty Hamid Jafarkhani has been named a 2014-15 Distinguished Lecturer by the IEEE Communications Society. The Distinguished Lecturer Program provides a means for IEEE Chapters and other organizations to identify and arrange lectures by renowned authorities on IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) topics. The topics of Dr. Jafarkhani's lectures are distributed beam-forming in wireless relay-interference networks, cooperative communications, limited feedback beam-forming in MIMO, and distributed space-time coding.
CPCC Member Named Distinguished Lecturer
CPCC faculty Prof. Payam Heydari has been named a 2014-15 Distinguished Lecturer by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. The Distinguished Lecturer Program provides a means for IEEE Chapters and other organizations to identify and arrange lectures by renowned authorities on IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society topics. Dr. Heydari's lectures will be about the design and analysis of novel terahertz, millimeter-wave and radio-frequency integrated circuits.
CPCC Member Receives a Best Paper Award
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar is the recipient of the IEEE COMSOC Best Tutorial Paper Award for the paper entitled "Breaking Spectrum Gridlock with Cognitive Radios: An Information Theoretic Perspective" published in the Proceedings of IEEE in May 2009. Dr. Jafar co-authored this invited paper with Prof. Andrea Goldsmith, Dr. Sudhir Srinivasa, and Dr. Ivana Maric. Dr. Jafar received this award during the IEEE Globecom conference in Dec. 2013.
CPCC Member Receives an IEEE Technical Field Award
CPCC faculty Hamid Jafarkhani is a co-recipient of the 2013 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award. IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award is the IEEE's technical field award that recognizes outstanding contributions to communications technology. The citation for the 2013 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award is "For contributions to block signaling for multiple antennas." The award consists of bronze medal, certificate, and honorarium. It was presented by IEEE President during the IEEE Globecom conference in Dec. 2013.
CPCC Members Elected as IEEE Fellows
CPCC members Nader Bagherzadeh and Syed Jafar have been elected as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellows effective January 1, 2014. Election to the IEEE Fellow Grade is the highest member grade the IEEE, world's largest engineering society, can bestow on a member. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon an IEEE member with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth percent of the total voting Institute membership.
Dr. Bagherzadeh's citation is for contributions to the design and analysis of coarse-grained reconfigurable processor architectures. Dr. Jafar's citation is for contributions to analyzing the capacity of wireless communication networks.
Broadcom Foundation Gifts Support CPCC Research
Broadcom Foundation has provided gifts to support the research of CPCC faculty Michael Green, Syed Jafar and Hamid Jafarkhani. Broadcom is one of the original sponsors of CPCC and has continued his support through generous gifts to the center and his faculty members.
CPCC Members Receive New NSF Research Grants
CPCC member Prof. Anima Anandkumar has received a new research grant from National Science Foundation (NSF) under the new program on "Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science & Engineering (BIGDATA)" on a collobarative proposal titled "Measurement and Learning in Large-Scale Social Networks." Prof. Carter Butts from the department of Sociology will be a co-PI on the grant. The proposal aims to to develop methods to integrate probabilistic graphical models and exponential family random graph models to address three key problems in the context of Big Network Data: (i) learning and inference of network structure via sampling, (ii) learning and inference for co-evolving selection and influence processes specially in the presence of hidden data, and (iii) scalable measurement strategies in networks by identifying weakly coupled subgraphs.
CPCC member Prof. Syed A. Jafar received a new research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to pursue research on a collaborative proposal: "Exploring Synergies of Multi-State Networks" with Prof. Bobak Nazer at Boston University. The traditional approach in information theory has been to reduce a problem into its fundamental states, which are then studied in isolation. This is motivated by the conventional wisdom that 1) understanding each state in isolation is easier than studying the states jointly, and that 2) by understanding each state we can understand the aggregate behavior of a communication network. Supported by their recent work, in this project Jafar and Nazer make the case that conventional wisdom is inaccurate on both counts. Multi-state networks not only possess synergistic gains that cannot be accessed through any constituent state by itself, but also multi-state networks often allow simpler coding schemes by appealing to the symmetries of complementary states.
CPCC member Prof. Syed A. Jafar is also the sole PI on another NSF grant entitled "Topological Interference Management" that will be active for 3 years. While there has been rapid recent progress in interference management from an information theoretic perspective, the idealized assumptions of channel knowledge at the transmitting nodes have been difficult to translate into practice. Dr. Jafar's research pursues a complementary perspective, shifting the focus away from finer forms of channel knowledge, to a coarse knowledge of the topology of the network. The research will identify optimal interference avoidance principles with very little channel knowledge at the transmitters.
CPCC Members Dr. Ender Ayanoglu and Dr. Ahmed Eltawil received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of this award is "Achieving Two Orders of Magnitude Reduction in Cellular Network Energy Inefficiency" and the grant will be active from 2013 to 2016. The objective of this joint research is to develop a set of algorithms to increase the energy efficiency of cellular wireless networks. These networks were originally designed without paying sufficient attention to their efficiency, calculated to be less than 10%. With cellular traffic increasing at exponential rates, the experts believe that in one decade the traffic will be 1000 times today's traffic. A number of algorithms will be developed to improve energy efficiency. Examples are new modulation techniques, new link adaptation algorithms, or algorithms for the cellular network to adapt to changing traffic conditions such that cells with small traffic use only as much energy as needed, or cells shut down, their coverage to be taken over by their neighboring base stations.
CPCC Member Presents a Plenary Talk
Professor Heydari gave a talk on a highly attended panel held at the 2013 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC). The panel discussed the future systems and integrated circuits supporting high speed connectivity. Today, applications such as video streaming and data sharing/backup are driving demand for increased device-to-device data transfer bandwidth for in/adjacent-room communication on the order of 10-20 meters. While the demand for higher data rates is growing, consumers are also becoming accustomed to and beginning to expect broadband wireless connectivity for their devices. To replace electrical cable-based links, wireless links will need to demonstrate competitive or superior data rates, energy efficiency, reliability, cost, and in some applications, latency. On the other hand, optical interconnects offer the flexibility of traditional electrical cable-based systems at potentially higher data rates and lower power and latency. However, the reliability and cost of optical cable systems are open issues. The panel aimed to answer the question: "Do You Need to Plug In to Get Your Fill of Bits?" In other words, can future wireless systems support the 10+ Gigabit-per-Second data rates that future systems will demand? If not, what is best approach? Traditional electrical or emerging optical cable solutions?
Professor Heydari provided a compelling supportive statement favoring both millimeter-wave wireless as well as ultra-high speed wired connectivity. In his speech, he made a strong case for both wireless and wired systems to drive exciting applications that involve distributed cloud/distributed data connectivity as well as on-the-fly video/data streaming. He also presented case studies developed in the Nanoscale Communications Integrated Circuits (NCIC) Labs at UCI, which showcased the world's first 210 GHz wireless transceiver in CMOS technologies enabling 20 Gigabit-per-Second wireless data transfer over short distance.
The IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference is a premier conference devoted to IC development. The conference program is a blend of oral presentations, poster presentations, exhibits, panels and forums. The conference sessions present original first published technical work and innovative circuit techniques that tackle practical problems. CICC is the conference to find out how to solve design problems, improve circuit design techniques, get exposure to new technology areas, and network with peers, authors and industry experts. This year's CICC was held in DoubleTree Hotel, San Jose, CA from Sept. 23 to Sept. 25, 2013
CPCC Member Leads IEEE Special Issues
Prof. Lee Swindlehurst is serving as a Guest Editor for special issues in two IEEE journals: "Signal Processing Techniques for Wireless Physical Layer Security" (IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Sept. 2013) and "Signal Processing in Massive MIMO Systems" (IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, to appear in 2014).
CPCC Member Presents a Plenary Talk
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar was invited by the European COMONSENS project to present a plenary talk and to provide feedback on the final project meeting held at the University of Vigo, Spain in the first week of July 2013. Prof. Jafar's talk on "Topological Interference Management" explored the index coding problem from an interference alignment perspective and established an essential equivalence between the index coding problem and the optimal interference avoidance problem.
CPCC Member Receives Microsoft Faculty Award
CPCC member Prof. Anima Anandkumar has been awarded a 2013 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship. She is one of seven from around the world to receive this support. Microsoft Research awards the annual fellowships to aid talented early-career faculty members in their pursuit of breakthrough, high-impact research that has the potential to help alleviate some of today’s most challenging problems. The fellows, nominated by their universities, represent the brightest young academics in the field of computer science and related areas.
CPCC Member Receives ARO Young Investigator Award
CPCC member Prof. Anima Anandkumar has been awarded the 2013 Young Investigator Award (YIP) by the Army Research Office (ARO). The award grant covers three years. Dr. Anandkumar's proposal is on "Learning, Dynamics and Intervention in Large-Scale Social Networks." The objective of the YIP is to attract to Army research outstanding young university faculty members, to support their research, and to encourage their teaching and research careers.
CPCC Student Selected as a Finalist
CPCC student Sina Poorkasmaei was selected as a finalist in the 2013 Broadcom Student Competition. Sina Poorkasmaei's project was a low complexity differential modulation scheme for MIMO multiple access channels. The problem had been an open problem for years. As a finalist, he received $1000 prize during the Broadcom Technical Conference on June 6. Sina Poorkasmaei's PhD advisor is CPCC faculty Hamid Jafarkhani.
CPCC Member Presents a NetCod'13 Keynote Talk
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar presented a plenary talk at the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Network Coding (NetCod 2013), held in Calgary, Canada, June 7-9, 2013. Prof. Jafar's talk was on the relationship between the index coding problem and the wireless topological interference management problem, how these problems may be viewed from an interference alignment perspective, and the necessity for non-Shannon type information inequalities for these problems.
CPCC Member Presents a Keynote Talk
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar presented a keynote talk at the Newcom# Summer School on Interference Management for Tomorrow's Wireless Networks, hosted by Eurecom in Sophia-Antipolis, France, May 28-31, 2013. Prof. Jafar's talk on "Topological Interference Management for Wireless Networks" presented an information theoretic view of the two robust principles of avoiding interference when it is strong and treating it as noise when it is weak.
CPCC Member Named Distinguished Lecturer
CPCC faculty Prof. Syed Jafar has been named a 2013-14 Distinguished Lecturer by the IEEE Communications Society. The Distinguished Lecturer Program provides a means for IEEE Chapters and other organizations to identify and arrange lectures by renowned authorities on IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) topics. The topics of Dr. Jafar's lectures are interference alignment and index coding.
CPCC Student Wins a Best Paper Award
CPCC student Jie Chen received 2nd place in the Student Paper Competition at the 2012 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers held in November, 2012, at Pacific Grove, CA. The title of the award-winning paper was "The Gaussian CEO Problem for a Scalar Source with Memory: A Necessary Condition," and was co-authored by fellow CPCC student Feng Jiang and Prof. Lee Swindlehurst. The award included a $400 prize.
CPCC Member Receives an NSF CAREER Award
CPCC Member Anima Anandkumar is the recipient of a CAREER Award from the Division of Computer and Communication Foundations of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the ~$550K grant is "Modeling Dependencies via Graphs: Scalable Inference Methods for Massive Datasets." The award is granted for a period of 5 years starting in 2013.
Today, we have access to data on a massive scale in a number of domains such as online social networks, genomic sequencing, etc. This data deluge is however accompanied by a plethora of challenges. The collected data is typically noisy, subsampled and high-dimensional, i.e., possessing a large number of variables or "unknowns" compared to the number of observations or "knowns". Dr. Anandkumar's research addresses the challenges of learning and measurement of such high-dimensional data through a graph-based approach.
Since CPCC's inauguration, all faculty who joined the center as assistant
CPCC Members Win a Best Paper Award
CPCC student Liangbin Li and CPCC faculties Hamid Jafarkhani and Syed Jafar are the recipients of a Best Paper Award for their paper entitled "Towards the Feasibility Conditions for Linear Interference Alignment with Symbol Extensions: A Diversity Constraint" at the IEEE Globecom conference held in Dec. 2012. IEEE Globecom is the flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society.
CPCC Member Presents a Keynote Speech
CPCC faculty Hamid Jafarkhani presented a keynote speech in the ACM Research in Applied Computation Symposium (ACM RACS 2012) held in San Antonio, TX, October 23-26, 2012. The symposium included sessions on network computing, security, cloud computing and image processing. Prof. Jafarkhani's keynote speech on "Managing Interference in Cooperative Wireless Networks" presented an overview of current wireless communication technologies and recent progress in dealing with interference in wireless networks.
New NSF Research Grants Received by CPCC Members
CPCC Members Dr. Syed Jafar, Dr. Hamid Jafarkhani and Dr. Athina Markopoulou received four research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
CPCC faculty Hamid Jafarkhani was awarded a 2012 NSF grant to pursue research outlined in the proposal: "Network Beamforming: A Distributed Source Coding Perspective." The research will study the challenges in a multiple-source, multiple-relay, multiple-destination cooperative network suffering from interference. Especially, the research will consider the effects of limited-feedback in collaborative beamforming.
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar was awarded a 2012 NSF Medium grant to pursue research outlined in the collaborative proposal: "Multihop Multiflow Wireless Networks -- A Treasure Hunt" with colleagues at USC, Cornell University and University of Colorado. The research will explore progressive capacity refinements, using principles of interference alignment and aligned interference neutralization, for multihop wireless networks, starting from simple settings (few hops, few flows, layered networks) to increasingly complex network topologies.
CPCC member Dr. Athina Markopoulou received a research grant as Co-Principal Investigator from NSF in 2012 for a period of 3 years. The project is titled "TWC: Medium: Collaborative Proposal: Safety in Numbers: Crowdsourcing for Global Software Integrity". This project explores a fundamentally new approach to malware detection that promises to be faster, more effective, and cheaper than current tools.
CPCC member Dr. Athina Markopoulou received a NSF research grant in 2012 as a sole PI for a period of 2 years. The project is titled "I-Corps: Microcast: Cooperative Networking of Mobile Devices." In this project, a group of mobile devices are enabled to perform a common task (involving acquiring content from each other and/or from a remote server) to enjoy higher bandwidth and lower delay than each device would be able to achieve by itself. This is achieved by building a cooperative networking framework that enables several devices to use all their resources together.
CPCC Member Presents a Keynote Speech
CPCC member Prof. Heydari has given a keynote speech at the 10th International SoC Conference. This conference was held from October 24 & 25, 2012 in Hilton Irvine, California. In this keynote speech, Prof. Heydari gave comprehensive overview of Terahertz and millimeter-wave (including both active and passive) imaging and their enabling and exciting applications. The speech reviewed current efforts to push the design of integrated circuits to operate at millimeter-wave and Terahertz frequency range. The talk covered daunting challenges in designing Terahertz building blocks and active/passive imaging systems at various levels of design hierarchy including system- and architecture-level down to the circuit- and device-levels.
Broadcom Foundation Gifts Support CPCC Research
Broadcom Foundation has provided gifts to support the research of CPCC faculty Michael Green, Syed Jafar and Hamid Jafarkhani. Broadcom is one of the original sponsors of CPCC and has continued his support through generous gifts to the center and his faculty members.
CPCC Member presents a Plenary Talk
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar presented a plenary talk at the 13th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC 2012), held in Izmir, Turkey, June 17-20, 2012. The workshop included sessions on Interference Alignment, MIMO, Cognitive Radio, Scheduling and Cooperative Communications. Prof. Jafar's plenary talk on "Counting Signal Dimensions in MIMO Interference Networks" presented an overview of insights obtained from degrees of freedom analysis of distributed MIMO networks.
2012 Best CPCC Dissertation Award
The 2012 recipient of the Best CPCC Dissertation Award is Tiangao Gou . The award is an annual award presented to a CPCC-affiliated student for her/his PhD research. A committee of CPCC faculty selects the recipient. The award includes a $500 honorarium.
Tiangao has published 8 journal papers and according to GoogleScholar his publications have been already cited 375 times. Tiangao's dissertation includes many new, significant, and fundamental ideas. Several of his contributions have been either seminal in starting new research avenues or conclusive contributions that have settled previously open problems, often with surprising insights, disproving prior conjectures by prominent researchers. For example, he has disproved a conjecture by Weingarten, Shamai, and Kramer regarding the collapse of degrees of freedom of compound broadcast channels, and also settled the open problem of optimal degrees of freedom characterization for this setting.
CPCC Member wins Multiple Teaching Awards
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar was awarded the Engineering School Teaching Excellence Award at the Annual UCI Celebration of Teaching, May 2012, co-sponsored by the Division of Undergraduate Education and the Senate Council on Student Experience (CSE). The Celebration of Teaching is hosted by the Teaching, Learning & Technology Center.
He also won the EECS Professor of the Year award for 2012 given by the Engineering Students Council at the Engineering Week Award Banquet. Professor Jafar has won this undergraduate teaching award a total of 4 times, in 2006, 2009, 2011 and 2012. During these years, Professor Jafar has taught Network Analysis (EECS 70A), Continuous Time Signals and Systems (EECS 150A) and Engineering Probability (EECS 140).
ONR Grant Received by CPCC Member
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar was awarded a single-investigator research grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for his project on "Robust Interference Alignment Approaches for Tactical Communication Networks". This project explores the use of interference alignment techniques to obtain information theoretically optimal solutions to distributed storage repair problems.
CPCC Member presents a plenary talk
CPCC member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani presented a plenary talk at the 12th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC 2011), held in San Francisco June 26-29, 2011. The workshop included sessions on coding, cognitive radio, sensor networks, MIMO, interference and cooperative networks. Prof. Jafarkhani's plenary talk on "Distributed Beamforming in Wireless Relay-Interference Networks" presented an overview of distributed beamforming and recent progress in dealing with interference in wireless relay networks.
Broadcom Foundation Gifts Support CPCC Research
Broadcom Foundation has provided gifts to support the research of CPCC faculty Michael Green, Syed Jafar and Hamid Jafarkhani. Broadcom is one of the original sponsors of CPCC and has continued his support through generous gifts to the center and his faculty members.
New NSF Research Grant Received by CPCC Member
CPCC member Lee Swindlehurst received a research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2011 for a period of 3 years. The project is titled "Jamming in Wireless Networks: Offensive Strategies and Cooperation." The research focuses on jamming techniques that exploit multiple antennas at the physical layer.
CPCC Member presents Inaugural Lecture
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar presented the inaugural lecture at the First Canadian School of Information Theory, held on the campus of UBC Okanagan, Canada in May 2011. The first Canadian School of Information Theory, sponsored by the Canadian Society of Information Theory (CSIT), NSERC, and Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences, was offered in conjunction with CWIT 2011. The goal of the School of Information Theory is to bring graduate students and senior researchers together to participate in a stimulating program related to information theory and its applications.
Best CPCC Dissertation Award established
CPCC has established the Best CPCC Dissertation Award. The award is an annual award presented to a CPCC-affiliated student for her/his PhD research. A committee of CPCC faculty will select the recipient. The award includes a $500 honorarium.
The 2011 recipient of the Best CPCC Dissertation Award is Viveck Cadambe. Viveck is best known for the idea of interference alignment for wireless interference networks. His journal paper on the topic, co-authored by his advisor, CPCC faculty Prof. Syed Jafar, was awarded the IEEE Information Theory Society Best Paper Award for the year 2009. Viveck's work on interference alignment has become the basis for a highly active area of research. The concept of interference alignment, and in particular the interference alignment scheme proposed by Viveck, has provided highly counter-intuitive solutions to some of the most challenging and critical issues in areas as diverse as the capacity problem for wireless interference networks, the multiple unicast problem for network coding, and distributed storage repair bandwidth minimization problem in the data storage community.
CPCC Member wins a Teaching Award
CPCC faculty Syed A. Jafar won the EECS Professor of the Year award for 2011 given by the Engineering students council at the Engineering Week Award Banquet. Professor Jafar has won this undergraduate teaching award a total of 3 times, in 2006, 2009, and 2011. During these years, Professor Jafar has taught Network Analysis (EECS 70A), Continuous Time Signals and Systems (EECS 150A) and Engineering Probability (EECS 140).
CPCC Member wins a Best Paper Award
CPCC faculty Animashree Anandkumar is the recipient of the Best Paper Award for her paper entitled "Topology Discovery of Sparse Random Graphs Using Few Participants" at the ACM SIGMETRICS conference held in June 2011. ACM SIGMETRICS conference is the flagship conference of the ACM special interest group for the computer systems performance evaluation community. This year, SIGMETRICS was a part of FCRC 2011, the ACM Federated Research Conference.
CPCC Member Elected as a Fellow of AAAS
CPCC Member Hamid Jafarkhani has been elected as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow. The AAAS Council elects members whose "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished" as AAAS Fellows. Dr. Jafarkhani is being honored for "distinguished contributions to the field of communications." His certificate and rosette will be presented to him in Washington, DC on Feb. 19 during the AAAS Fellows Forum, a part of the Association's Annual Meeting.
DOD Research Grant Received by CPCC Members
CPCC members Athina Markopoulou, Lee Swindlehurst and Animashree Anandkumar received a research grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The grant is to pursue research outlined in the proposal: "NetSense: Optimizing Network Configuration for Sensing.
Mindspeed Grant Supports CPCC Research
Mindspeed Solutions, Inc. has provided gifts to support the research of CPCC faculty Ahmed Eltawil, Michael Green and Payam Heydari. Mindspeed Solution Inc. is one of the original sponsors of CPCC and has continued his support through generous gifts to the center and his faculty members.
CPCC Member Joins Honor Roll as Erskine Fellow
CPCC faculty Syed A Jafar joins the honor roll of Erskine Fellows at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch New Zealand for 2010. Erskine Fellows are distinguished academics in their field who are invited to the University of Canterbury for durations of, normally, one to three months for the purpose of giving lectures in the topics of their expertise to students of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
CPCC Member Receives Best Faculty Research Award
CPCC member Prof. Syed A. Jafar received the School of Engineering Fariborz Maseeh Outstanding Research Award. Dr. Jafar was recognized for his research contributions, especially in the area of interference management for communication networks. The award was presented at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering Banquet, held on September 21, at the Engineering Plaza on campus. Previously CPCC members Prof. Michael Green had received the Fariborz Maseeh Best Teaching Award and Professors Hamid Jafarkhani and Payam Heydari had received the Fariborz Maseeh Best Faculty Research Award.
New NSF Research Grants Received by CPCC Members
CPCC Members Dr. Payam Heydari, Dr. Athina Markopoulou, Dr. Hamid Jafarkhani, Dr. Syed Jafar, Dr.Lee Swindlehurst and Dr.Ahmed Eltawil received five research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The title of Dr. Heydari's award is "Novel Radio-Frequency (RF)-Modulated Near Infrared (NIR) Electro-Optic Phased Array Imaging Systems" and the grant will be active for three years. The objective of Dr. Heydari's research is to develop and investigate a new low-cost, broadband, RF-modulated near-infrared imaging integrated system for detecting breast cancer. The approach is to design a novel electro-optic two-element phased-array system with high spatial resolution to obtain accurate information about the breast tissue's optical scattering and absorption properties.
The title of Dr. Markopoulou's award is "Topology and Function in Computer, Social and Biological Networks." This is a Type II CDI grant for four years and Dr. Markopoulou's co-PI's are Dr. Carter Butts and Dr. Natasa Przulj. They will investigate the modeling of interactions between network topology and element attributes or function; the characterization of unknown network structure from imperfect and incomplete data; and the development of associated algorithms which will scale efficiently to large systems.
The title of Dr. Jafarkhani and Dr. Jafar's award is "Interference Alignment and the Rate-Reliability Tradeoff of Wireless Networks" and as a medium CIF grant will be active for four years. Dr. Jafarkhani and Dr. Jafar plan to examine the rate-reliability tradeoff of interference alignment schemes. They investigate the tradeoff from the traditional coding perspective which places emphasis on low decoding complexity, usually at the cost of a restricted notion of optimality and also in the Shannon framework which allows strong definitions of optimality, usually at the cost of unbounded delay and complexity. The ultimate goal of the project is to use the collective insights to develop new physical layer schemes that can operate at the frontier of the rate-reliability tradeoff.
The title of Dr. Swindlehurst's award is "Physical Layer Optimization for Cognitive Sensor Networks" and the grant will be active from 2009 to 2013. This research effort introduces Cognitive Sensing as a concept dual to that of cognitive communications, and investigates the competing objectives of sensing and communications networks. A cognitive sensor would adaptively adjust its operating parameters in response to the environment it finds itself in so as to optimize sensing performance, or perhaps a dual performance metric that includes both sensing and communications functions.
CPCC Member Dr. Ahmed Eltawil received a NSF research grant whose title is "EAGER: Collaborative Research: Towards A Unified Wireless Network Involving Reconfigurable Devices" and the grant will be active for one year. The project aims to: (i) improve understanding of the roles and impacts of next-generation software-defined radios on future wireless systems; (ii) produce a device model that accurately represents the capabilities and limits of next-generation software-defined radios; and (iii) develop new techniques for managing bandwidth in such a unified wireless network.
CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member
Dr. Animashree Anandkumar has joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor as of July 2010. Her research interests are in the area of networking, statistical-signal processing, and information theory. Currently, she is working on inference of graphical models and on distributed learning and inference algorithms.
Dr. Anandkumar received B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2004 and a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 2009. She was a post-doctoral researcher at the Stochastic Systems Group at MIT, Cambridge, MA between 2009 and 2010. She is the recipient of the 2008 IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Young Author award, 2009 Best thesis award by the ACM Sigmetrics society, 2008 Fran Allen IBM Ph.D fellowship and the Student Paper Award at the 2006 International Conference on Acoustic, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).
CPCC Member presents a plenary talk
CPCC member Dr. Syed Jafar presented a plenary talk at the International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM) 2010, held at the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) Bangalore India July 18-21, 2010. SPCOM is a biennial conference that has been organized at IISC since 1990 and includes a mix of invited and contributed talks from academia, research laboratories and industry on recent developments in signal processing and communications. Dr. Jafar's plenary talk on "Asymptotic Interference Alignment" presented an overviews of interference alignment schemes extending from wireless networks to network coding and distributed storage applications.
CPCC member will present a keynote speech
CPCC member Prof. Michael Green has been invited to give the keynote address at the European Conference on Circuits and Systems for Communications, to be held Nov. 23-35 in Belgrade, Serbia. This conference, sponsored by the IEEE Circuits & Systems Society, is the premier venue in Eastern Europe for presenting new concepts in the modeling, simulation, and design of communication circuits. Prof. Green's talk will give an overview on the design of wireline communication systems, including both a historical perspective and a presentation of new developments.
CPCC student wins a Best Paper Award
CPCC member and Ph.D student Amitav Mukherjee was presented with the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC) held in Marrakech, Morocco, June, 2010. His paper, entitled "Securing Multi-Antenna Two-Way Relay Channels with Analog Network Coding Against Eavesdroppers," considers the design of linear precoders to decrease the likelihood of an unintended listener from eavesdropping on the communications of two-way relay networks. Prof. Lee Swindlehurst is supervising Mukerhjee's work on this project.
CPCC Member presents a plenary talk
CPCC member, Dr. Syed Jafar presented a plenary talk at the 2010 IEEE Communication Theory Workshop held in Cancun, Mexico, May 10-12, 2010. The workshop included focused sessions on future cellular networks (Cellular 10X), cognitive radio and wireless networking as well as panels on emerging topics and the impact of communication theory on future technology development. Dr. Jafar's plenary talk on "Robust Interference Alignment" explained the challenges and novel insights associated with interference alignment techniques in the presence of channel uncertainty.
CPCC Professors and Former Student Win Best Paper Award
A paper written by CPCC professors Homayoun Yousefi'zadeh and Hamid Jafarkhani and CPCC alumni Javad Kazemitabar who received his doctorate in 2008, has received the 2010 Best Paper Award from the IEEE/KICS Journal of Communications and Networks (JCN). "A Study of Connectivity in MIMO (Multiple-Input/Multiple-Output) Systems Fading Ad-Hoc Networks" was first published in the February 2009 issue of JCN. The award was presented May 24, 2010 at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) in Cape Town, South Africa.
CPCC Professor Wins a Best Paper Award
CPCC member Prof. Lee Swindlehurst received the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award for "Zero-Forcing Methods for Downlink Spatial Multiplexing in Multi-User MIMO Channels" (IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, February, 2004, co-authored by Quentin Spencer and Martin Haardt). The award was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, held in March, 2010.
Multi-University Team Wins Major DoD Grant
CPCC member faculty Athina Markopoulouis is part of a team of six universities that won a MURI (Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative) grant worth $7M total over a period of 5 years. The project is titled "Information Dynamics as Foundation for Network Management" and is funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The research helps solving a difficult communications problem: how to make wireless networks more reliable and thus avoid the communications failures that can result from packet loss
One More NSF CAREER Award for CPCC
CPCC Member Ahmed Eltawil is the recipient of an CAREER Award from the Directorate of Engineering of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The title of the $400K grant is "Cognitive Power Management for Memory Dominated Mobile Devices." The award is granted for the period April 2010 to March 2015.
There are expectations that the processing power will increase by about three orders of magnitude within the next decade. When that is the case, power management for mobile devices that rely on battery power becomes very important. Dr. Eltawil's proposal has an approach of redefining the error tolerance of memory blocks according to the tolerance of the application and the wireless channel conditions. This allows the margin of acceptable performance to be dynamically managed by the needs of the application employing the hardware unit. The project is of multidisciplinary nature, spanning theory, circuit and system design, and experiments.
The projected increase in the number of processing engines employed in system-on-a-chip architectures of the future according to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, sponsored by five leading semiconductor industry associations of the world.
New CPCC Fellows Announced
New CPCC Fellows for the academic year 2009-2010 have been announced. The names of the new Fellows and the advising faculty members in alphabetical order are Jie Chen (Lee Swindlehurt), Amin Khajeh Djahromi (Ahmed El Tawil and Fadi Kurdahi), Weng-Hsiang Hu (Nader Bagherzadeh), Erdem Koyuncu (Hamid Jafarkhani), Sheng-Hui Liao (Lichun Bao), Hamid Maleki (Syed Jafar and Athina Markopoulou), and Chun-Chang Wang (Payam Heydari). The program is based on continuing funding from Conexant Systems, Inc. and Mindspeed Solutions, Inc.
Industry Sponsor Extends MANET Grant
A year ago, armed with a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the Boeing Company, CPCC professors Homayoun Yousefi'zadeh and Hamid Jafarkhani began refining a MANET testbed they had assembled in their research lab. Now, the Boeing Company has extended the contract for an extra year with an additional $250,000 grant designated for the design and implementation of advanced cooperative communication techniques in the testbed.
New Research Grants Received by CPCC Members
CPCC Members Dr. Ender Ayanoglu and Dr. A. Lee Swindlehurst received research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) titled "Network Failure Recovery Employing Network Coding," and "Physical Layer Optimization for Cognitive Sensor Networks," respectively. Dr. Ayanoglu plans to use techniques from the field of network coding to investigate topology and code design algorithms for actual networks, to analyze their performance, to compare restoration time and extra capacity requirements of the new approach with conventional techniques, and to discover new protocols to implement the new technique. Dr. Swindlehurst's research aims to optimize resources to be used for competing communications and sensing operations in cognitive sensing networks. Both grants are awarded by the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate of the NSF and will be active for three years.
CPCC Fellowship Leads to Prestigious Best Paper Award
The paper "Interference Alignment and the Degrees of Freedom for the K-User Interference Channel," by former CPCC Fellow Viveck R. Cadambe and his advisor CPCC Member Syed A. Jafar received the prestigious IEEE Information Theory Paper Award for the year 2009. The award is given annually by the IEEE Information Society "to recognize exceptional publications in the field and to stimulate interest in and encourage contributions to fields of interest of the Society." Past recipients of this award are well-known information theorists and include such names as T. M. Cover, G. D. Forney, G. Ungerboeck, and A. J. Viterbi. The paper was published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in August 2008. The announcement was made in advance at the Information Theory Society's flagship conference, ISIT 2009, in Seoul, South Korea. Viveck Cadambe was a CPCC Fellow during the academic year 2007-2008 and worked on this topic. The authors list their affiliation as the CPCC in this award-winning paper.
CPCC Member Jafarkhani Named Chancellor's Professor
CPCC Member Hamid Jafarkhani has been awarded the title of Chancellor's Professor. The designation recognizes scholars who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement makes them of exceptional value to the university. Jafarkhani's research involves communication theory, with emphasis on coding and wireless communications and networks. He is addressing the theoretical and practical challenges of designing communication systems and networks that use multiple antennas. In particular, Dr. Jafarkhani is one of the inventors of Space-Time Coding, which provides performance gain in wireless systems that employ multiple antennas. The invention took place in the late 1990s, and has been a very active research area throughout the world since then. In a very short time, space-time codes have become part of a number of wireless technology standards. Dr. Jafarkhani's research interests include data compression, joint source and channel coding, and multimedia applications in networks. Most recently, he is the co-recipient (together with Dr. Homayoun Yousefi'zadeh, a former CPCC Postdoctoral Fellow) of a $1.5M grant from Boeing Co., to develop a MANET (Mobile Ad-hoc Network) testbed powered by software defined radios.
Multi-University Team Wins Major DoD Grant
CPCC member faculty Lee Swindlehurst is part of a team of seven universities that won a MURI (Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative) grant worth $6.25M total over a period of 5 years. The project is titled "ARSENAL: A cross layer ARchitecture for SEcureresilieNttacticAL mobile ad hoc networks," and is funded by the Army Research Office. The goal of this project is to develop a cross layer architecture that provides comprehensive security and resilience for mobile ad hoc networks.
CPCC Fellow Joins Academia, Publishes Book
Sudeep Pasricha was a CPCC Fellow during the academic years 2004-2005, 2005-2006, and 2006-2007, working on his Ph.D. with his advisor Prof. Nikil Dutt. During this time, he worked on a project sponsored by Conexant Systems, Inc. on a System-on-Chip power optimization framework. His work resulted in a Best Paper award from the Asia South Pacific Design Automation Conference in 2006 (please see below). He completed his Ph.D. degree at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences during Summer 2008 and consecutively joined Colorado State University at Fort Collins, Colorado as an Assistant Professor. Together with Professor Dutt, he has recently completed a book entitled On-Chip Communication Architectures: System on Chip Interconnect, published by Morgan-Kaufman in 2008. The book provides a survey of research and standards as well as the future trends in on-chip communication architectures. A reader commented on amazon.com that "As a Professor in CS/EE, I consider using the book in advanced design courses. I will certainly recommend it for those of my master students who need in-depth knowledge in this area for the thesis work. I am also convinced that the book will be very useful for design engineers in industry."
CPCC Member Receives Best Research Award
CPCC member Prof. Payam Heydari was given the Fariborz Maseeh Best Faculty Research Award. The award was presented at The Henry Samueli School of Engineering's annual dinner and awards banquet along with the Fariborz Maseeh Best Teaching Awards. The awards banquet was in recognition and appreciation of the recipients' numerous contributions to advancing research and enhancing the quality of teaching at UC Irvine. Previously CPCC members Prof. Michael Green and Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani had received the Fariborz Maseeh Best Teaching Award and the Fariborz Maseeh Best Faculty Research Award, respectively.
CPCC member presents a keynote speech
CPCC member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani has been invited to give a keynote speech at the 2009 World Congress on Computer Science and Information Engineering (CSIE 2009), March 31 - April 2, 2009. Prof. Jafarkhani's talk will give an overview of recent advances in wireless relay networks and cooperative communications.
CPCC Member Receives ONR Young Investigator Award
CPCC Member Dr. Syed A. Jafar is one of 27 recipients of the 2008 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. Dr. Jafar's proposal was on multi-user information theory and was titled "Interference Alignment and the Promise of Unlimited Secure Spectrum for Tactical Communication Networks." The award grant covers three years.
In wireless networks, interference, which is caused by simultaneous transmissions from multiple transmitters, has an adverse impact on the efficiency and capacity. The traditional approach to avoiding interference over wireless networks is to divide the available spectrum/channel/bandwidth among the users proportionally. For example, if there are 10 wireless users who wish to access the same channel, then each user is allotted 10 percent of the available spectrum. However, Dr. Jafar's group has found a new approach called interference alignment . This approach is based on designing signals so that they cast overlapping shadows at the unintended receivers while they remain distinguishable at the intended receiver that can, in theory, allow every user to access half the spectrum. Potentially, this means the data rates of wireless networks can be significantly improved and wireless networks may not be fundamentally interference-limited as was previously believed.
Industry Grant Supports MANET Research
A three-year, $1.5 million grant from the Boeing Company, is funding research to develop a MANET testbed and protocol stack. Principal investigator Homayoun Yousefi'zadeh and co-principal investigator Hamid Jafarkhani are creating custom MANET software that controls software-defined radios (SDRs). The CPCC professors are designing and implementing new protocols in an attempt to improve MANET performance and efficiency, while reducing costs.
Yet Another CPCC Member Receives NSF CAREER Award
CPCC Member Athina Markopoulou received a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation for her work on network coding applications in the Internet. In network coding, intermediate nodes in a network combine incoming packets from multiple sources into their destinations instead of simply forwarding them. This can increase the throughput and can improve scheduling performance. Dr. Markopoulou is working with her five students to explore ways to apply network coding to the areas of network security and multimedia delivery. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award is intended to support the development of research programs of faculty in their early careers. The grant process is highly competitive and the reception of the award is very prestigious for the individual and her or his institution. Previously CPCC Members Hamid Jafarkhani, Payam Heydari, and Syed Jafar received NSF CAREER awards.
CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member in EECS
Dr. A. Lee Swindlehurst has joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as of September 2007. Dr. Swindlehurst's research interests are in the application of detection and estimation theory to problems in signal processing and wireless communications. Currently, he is working on problems with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications, including space-time characterization of indoor and outdoor radio frequency propagation, channel estimation and performance analysis for time-varying MIMO links, downlink beamforming in multiuser MIMO systems, and space-time processing for ad-hoc networks.
Dr. Swindlehurst received B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from Brigham Young University in 1985 and 1986, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1991. Prior to joining UC Irvine, he was a faculty member in Brigham Young University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he began his academic career in 1990, and most recently held the position of full professor and department chair. He also served as vice president of research for ArrayComm LLC, a San Jose-based company working on smart antennas for wireless communications applications.
CPCC Members Receive Best Faculty Awards
CPCC member Prof. Michael Green received the Fariborz Maseeh Best Teaching Award.
Another CPCC member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani received the Fariborz Maseeh Best Faculty Research Award.
CPCC members were recognized for their numerous contributions in teaching and research at The Henry Samueli School of Engineering's annual awards banquet, held on May 15, at the Engineering Plaza on campus. The banquet took place following the first day of the 6th annual "California: Prosperity Through Technology" industry research symposium, themed "energy and the environment".
CPCC Member Receives Best Journal Paper Award
CPCC member Prof. Payam Heydari won the 2007 prestigiousGuillemin-Cauer Award from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.
Dr. Heydari is also the recipient of the 2005 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Darlington Award, which puts him in an elite group of only seven researchers who, in the 40-year history of the awards, have received both.
Dr. Heydari was recognized for his paper "Model-Order Reduction Using Variational Balanced Truncation with Spectral Shaping", which was published in the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Vol. 53, April 2006.
The Guillemin-Cauer Award recognizes the best journal paper published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems during the two calendar years preceding the award. The award is based on general quality, originality, contributions, subject matter and timeliness.
CPCC Member presents a plenary talk
CPCC member, Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani presented a plenary talk at the 23rd Biennial Symposium on Communications held in Kingston, Canada, May 29 - June 1, 2006. Prof. Jafarkhani's plenary talk on "Advances in Space-Time Coding and Beamforming" explained recent progress and challenges in MIMO systems.
Another CPCC Member Receives NSF CAREER Award
CPCC Member Dr. Syed A. Jafar received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2006 for his proposal titled "Capacity of Wireless Networks with Side Information - Theory and Applications." Capacity refers to the highest information rate that can be transported through a medium, typically restricted by bandwidth and noise, and in some cases, interference. Capacities of individual links for various transmission media are known, while the capacity of a network of links is currently an active research area. Dr. Jafar's research will investigate network capacity in the presence of side information and will be a further step towards understanding the capacity of networks. Knowledge of the capacity of a network is essential in allocation of resources and network design.
CPCC Authors Receive Best Journal Paper Award
CPCC Member Dr. Hamid Jafarkhani and his graduate student Yun Zhu are the recipients of the 2006 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications from the IEEE Communications Society. They received this award for their paper "Differential Modulation Based On Quasi-Orthogonal Codes," published in the November 2005 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Quasi-orthogonal codes belong to the class of space-time codes which provide improved performance for wireless communications systems employing multiple transmit or receive antennas. Prior to this work, all of the known space-time codes required the knowledge of the transmission channel. Differential modulation, as described in the paper, removes the need for this information. The Marconi Prize Paper Award is given to the paper deemed best in terms of originality, utility, timeliness, and clarity of presentation among the papers published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications during the previous year.
CPCC Member Receives the Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research
CPCC member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani received the2006-2007 Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research. The Distinguished Faculty Awards are the UCI Academic Senate's highest honors. The awards are given to UC Irvine faculty who have achieved excellence through their activities in research, teaching and service. The Academic Senate's Distinguished Faculty awards are selected by the Committee on Scholarly Honors and Awards.
CPCC Authors Win Best Paper Award at ASPDAC
CPCC Fellow and UC Irvine graduate student Sudeep Pasricha, his advisor UC Irvine Computer Science Professor Nikil Dutt, and Conexant coauthor Dr. Mohamed Ben-Romdhane are the recipients of the Best Paper Award at the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASPDAC) that took place in Yokohama, Japan, January 24-27, 2006. The paper, titled Constraint-driven Bus Matrix Synthesis for MPSoC, proposes novel techniques to reduce the cost and development time of communication architectures for high performance electronic systems used in the next generation electronic devices such as mobile phones, video game consoles and high-speed networking equipment.
The paper is based on the authors work in a CPCC project that has been supported by Conexant, Inc. during 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 with Dr. Ben-Romdhane serving as the leader of the Conexant team.
CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member in EECS
Dr. Athina Markopoulou, an expert in networking, has joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Irvine effective January 1, 2006. Dr. Markopoulou received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in November 2002. Prior to joining UC Irvine, she worked at Stanford University, Sprint Advanced Technologies Laboratories, and Arastra, a startup, as Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Member of Technical Staff, and Research Scientist, respectively. During her Ph.D. education, she has had internships at Aloha Networks, Nokia Research Center, and Cisco Systems. Dr. Markopoulou's research interests are in voice and video over wired and wireless packet networks, network measurement and control, and Internet reliability and security.
CPCC Member Jafarkhani Elected IEEE Fellow
CPCC Member Hamid Jafarkhani is one of the 271 professionals the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named an IEEE Fellow effective January 1, 2006. Election to the IEEE Fellow Grade is the highest member grade the IEEE, world's largest engineering society, can bestow on a member. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon an IEEE member with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth percent of the total voting Institute membership. Dr. Jafarkhani's citation is for contributions to space-time coding.
Space-Time Codes employ multiple antennas at the transmitter and the receiver of a wireless communications system for significantly improved performance. Discovered in the early 1990s, these codes have very quickly found their way into a number of new wireless communications standards such as 3G, 802.11n, and 802.16. Dr. Jafarkhani is one of the first researchers to work on this field and is widely considered to be one of the inventors of Space-Time Coding. Many experts in the field consider Dr. Jafarkhani to have been one of the authors of three of the most important publications in this field. Dr. Jafarkhani is the author of the recently published book Space-Time Coding, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
CPCC Member Receives Best Journal Paper Award
CPCC Member Payam Heydari is the sole recipient of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society's 2005 Darlington Award. The award is given for Prof. Heydari's paper Analysis of the PLL Jitter Due to Power/Ground and Substrate Noise, published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I in December 2004. This award is given by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society to recognize the best paper bridging the gap between theory and practice published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems. The award is based on general quality, originality, contributions, subject matter and timeliness. Prof. Heydari is the youngest recipient of this award during the award's 37-year history.
CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member in EECS
Dr. Ahmed Eltawil, an expert in system integration especially for wireless systems, has joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Irvine effective January 1, 2005. Dr. Eltawil received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2003 and worked as the Director of VLSI Design at Innovics, a startup, between January 2001 and August 2003 where he developed a 3G mobile wireless broadband system employing Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) technology. Prior to joining UC Irvine, Dr. Eltawil was affiliated with UCLA as a Research Engineer. His research interests are in the design of system and VLSI architectures for broadband wireless communication, and in implementations and architectures for digital signal processing.
CPCC Member Receives NSF CAREER Award
Payam Heydari, CPCC Member and Assistant Professor in the UC Irvine Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The announcement was made January 2005. He was awarded this prestigious award for his research on Analysis and Design of Silicon-Based Performance Optimized Integrated Circuits for High-Frequency Wideband Wireless Communication Systems.
Payam Heydari is working to design novel silicon-based integrated circuits for use in high-performance wideband wireless communication systems. These next generation high data rate wireless systems will be able to transmit at transmission speeds much higher than today's wireless personal area and wireless local area networks.
The CAREER award is NSF's most prestigious commendation for faculty members and recognizes the early career development activities of scholars most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are chosen on the basis of creative career development plans that integrate research and education.
Multiuniversity Team with CPCC Member Jafarkhani Wins Major DoD Grant
CPCC member faculty Hamid Jafarkhani, who is one of the inventors of space-time coding, is part of a team of six universities that won a grant worth $3M total over a period of 3 years. The project is granted to develop "space-time processing for tactical mobile ad-hoc networks" by the Department of Defense (DoD) on behalf of the U.S. Army. The grant is part of a major program, called the Multidisciplinary Research Initiative (MURI), worth $146M, a five-year effort targeting topics of exceptional opportunity for the DoD.
Image from left to right: . Cruz, Y. Hua, T. Javidi, B. Rao, L. Milstein, J. Zeidler, M. Zorzi, J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves (kneeling), S. Krisnamurthy, L. Swindlehurst, M. Jensen, J. Proakis, and H. Jafarkhani.
CPCC Welcomes New Faculty Member
Dr. Syed A. Jafar, a graduate of the Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering, has joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UCI, as of January 2004. With his appointment, Dr. Jafar also joined the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing.
Dr. Jafar's research interests are in communications and information theory. His Ph.D. thesis is on the fundamental capacity limits of multiple-antenna wireless systems. During his Ph.D. work, he has characterized the impact of channel uncertainty on the capacity of multiple-antenna wireless systems. He has also contributed to fundamental advances on a multi-user transmission technique known as Dirty Paper Coding, now known to be optimal for the multiple-antenna broadcast channel (downlink).
Dr. Jafar received his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India in 1997, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, California in 2003. He was a summer intern with the Wireless Research group at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Crawford Hill, New Jersey during the summer of 2001. He was a Senior Engineer at Qualcomm Incorporated, San Diego from August 2003 to January 2004.
CPCC Member Receives NSF CAREER Award
CPCC member Hamid Jafarkhani has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The announcement was made in January 2003. He was awarded this prestigious award for his research on "Coding for multiple-input multiple-output channels".
The CAREER award is NSF's most prestigious commendation for faculty members and recognizes the early career development activities of scholars most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.
CPCC Faculty Member Receives Best Paper Award
CPCC member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani and his co-author Dr. Feraydoun Taherkhani were recently awarded the Best Paper award by the 2002 IEEE International Symposium on Advances in Wireless Communications for their paper titled "Pseudo Orthogonal Designs as Space-Time Block Codes". The paper was invited to the symposium. Prof. Jafarkhani is one of the inventors of space-time block coding which is a technique of employing multiple transmit and/or receive antennas in wireless transmission and thereby improving overall system performance. The codes are designed to provide maximum diversity gain while requiring only a simple maximum likelihood decoding technique. The resulting system can achieve dramatic increases in the transmission bit rate of wireless systems using low complexity decoding. This is very attractive for wireless system design and space-time block coding has already been incorporated into 3rd generation cellular networking standards known as WCDMA and cdma2000.
In their award-winning paper, Prof. Jafarkhani and Dr. Taherkhani study the orthogonality properties of space-time codes. Orthogonality is a desired feature in space-time code design, however while most orthogonal space-time codes are designed for the real line or the complex plane, real communication systems employ only a subset of these. The paper develops the conditions necessary for space-time codes to exist under this constraint.
