News

[Dec'17] Our paper validating gains in spatial resolution using high-density EEG appears in Nature Scientific Reports. Here's some press on it. It is led by Amanda Robinson and Praveen Venkatesh, and is a collaborative effort with Behrmann and Tarr labs at CMU. The paper, in part, validates our information-theoretic contention that higher-electrode-count and higher-density EEG has the potential to dramatically improve spatial resolution of EEG systems.

[Dec'17] Rachel (Rui) Sun presents our work with clinicians Drs. Arun Antony and Dr. Mark Richardson at the Annual Meeting of the American Epilepsy Society (AES). The work obtains data-science techniques to reduce clinical errors introduced by possible mislabeling of intracranial electrodes in epilepsy monitoring through simultaneous EEG monitoring.

[Dec'17] Yaoqing Yang presents his work on coded computing for distributed graph mining, PageRank, and inverse problems at NIPS'17. The work is one of the first to utilize intermediate computations in straggling processors in the context of coding. It also connects ideas of diversity in wireless communications with straggling processor, showing coding outperforms replication in scaling sense.

[Oct'17] Our collaborator Prof. Viveck Cadambe (Penn State) presented a joint work with Haewon Jeong and Sanghamitra Dutta, as well as Mohammad Fahim and Farzin Haddadpour from Penn State, at Allerton 2017. The work provides coded computing techniques for matrix multiplication that outperform existing techniques in recovery threshold and straggler tolerance in scaling sense. This is exciting: the problem of coded matrix-multiplication has been studied since the seminal work of Huang and Abraham in 1984, and it surprised us that there was still so much room for improvement!

[Sep'17] Praveen Venkatesh receives the inaugural CMLH fellowship!

Enjoy this wonderful blog of Dr. Chris Blake, who just finished his thesis at U of T!

[June'17] Pulkit presented a tutorial at ISIT'17 with Viveck Cadambe (Penn St) on “Coded Distributed Computing”. The tutorial was very well attended. Slides can be found here and here. Thanks to Yaoqing, Sanghamitra, and Haewon for their help in preparing this tutorial!

[May'17] Ivy (Wanqiao) Ding from our group won the Frank J. Marshall award for best undergraduate research!!

[May'17] Pulkit will present Yaoqing Yang's work on coded graph analyses (jointly with Soummya Kar and Pulkit) in Graph Signal Processing Workshop, 2017.

[Apr'17] Two papers of Yaoqing Yang are accepted into IEEE Transactions on Information Theory! Congratulations, Yaoqing!!

[Apr'17] 4 papers accepted in ISIT 2017. Praveen's work obtains the first fundamental limits on source-localization accuracy that apply to all algorithms as a function of number of sensors. Haewon's work (jointly with Chris Blake, a recent Ph.D. from UToronto) explores new coding techniques, based on Polar codes. Sanghamitra's work (jointly with Viveck Cadambe, Penn State) obtains coded computation techniques for real number convolutions for computing in presence of stragglers. Also, work with our collaborators Omur Ozel and Sennur Ulukus on communicating under temperature and energy-harvesting constraints is accepted. Congratulations everyone!

[Mar'17] Received an NSF grant for pursuing strategies for fault-resilient communication and computing in the Internet of Things through the NSF WiFiUS program! Our Finnish collaborator on the project is Prof. Teemu Roos.

[Mar'17] With Viveck Cadambe at Penn State, Pulkit will give a tutorial at ISIT 2017 on the hot problem of coded computing.

[Mar'17] Alireza Chamanzar, our newest Ph.D. student, presented his first work at the World Congress on Brain Injury.

[Feb'17] Praveen Venkatesh and Pulkit's work on information theoretic view of EEG appears in this month's Proceedings of the IEEE, special issue on Science of Information. The work argues why fundamental understanding of EEG is not attained through a classical spatial Nyquist rate analysis, and that an information-theoretic lens is needed. It also provides fundamental limits on EEG's accuracy in the limit of infinite sensors.

[Feb '17] Dr. Mark Richardson (Pitt neurosurgery) gave a guest lecture from an operating room to tell our students about epilepsy diagnosis and treatment in Pulkit and Praveen's new course. It was one of the most amazing lectures I have ever been a part of, as a student or an instructor. Students from Marlene Behrmann's lab were in the audience, as were friends-of-our-lab Matt Boring and Jeff Weldon. For a couple minutes, Matt worked as a human pointer, explaining Dr. Richardson's point on MRI scans of this patient using his neuroanatomy knowledge. Thanks Mark and Matt!

[Feb '17] Our work on neural interfaces received fabrication award from SRC SONIC center. Thank you SRC!

[Jan '17] New semester! Pulkit and Praveen are teaching a new course on clinical neural data analysis!

[Jan '17] Dr. Ashwati Krishnan joins our group as our first postdoc. Ashwati's background is in instrumentation for neural interfaces, and she'll work closely with Shawn Kelly and Jeff Weldon on instrumentation and circuit design; as well as with Amanda Robinson, Lily Kramer, and Marlene Behrmann on neuroscientific validation.

[Jan '17] Lily Kramer, an undergraduate neuroscience student from Pitt working with us for the past year, has received the CSoI Channels Scholar fellowship!

[Dec '16] Our first publication in a clinical conference: Ivy (Wanqiao) Ding presents her work with Praveen Venkatesh on symptoms that connect epilepsy and Traumatic Brain Injury. As an engineer, she had a great time conferencing with clinicians.

[Dec '16] Sanghamitra presents her NIPS paper (see below) in Barcelona.

[Oct '16] Praveen Venkatesh receives the prestigious Dowd fellowship for 2016-17 to pursue his agenda on fundamental limits and practical strategies for neural sensing/imaging. Congratulations, Praveen!

[Sep '16] Yaoqing Yang presents his paper on parallel filtering with fault-prone components at International Symposium on Turbo Codes (ISTC) 2016 in Brest, France. The paper was our first advance into error-correction in real-number computation, which has now become an active problem for the group (see Sanghamitra's NIPS paper). Yaoqing also got to try fruit de mer, and seems to have taken a liking to French food.

[Sep '16] Sanghamitra Dutta's joint work with Viveck Cadambe (Penn State) and Pulkit got accepted to NIPS'16. We design a new family of codes -- that we call Short-Dot codes -- for performing reliable linear transforms using fault/delay-prone short dot products. Sanghamitra also did experiments on CMU servers to observe speed-ups using her strategy. She will travel for the second time to Barcelona in six months to present the work!

[Aug '16] Pulkit delivers invited talk at WiFiUS meeting in Helsinki, Finland with a visit to University of Helsinki.

[July '16] Our lab presented 5 talks at ISIT'16 on noisy and lossy computing (Yaoqing), fundamental limits on sparsity of compressive sensing (Sanghamitra), and fundamental limits on EEG's source localization accuracy (Pulkit). Yaoqing's results are the first to establish order-sense advantages of computing in presence of noise (with dynamic energy-allocation).

[June '16] The wonderful Chris Blake (UToronto) visited our lab for the month of June. Haewon, Chris, and Pulkit started a collaboration on energy-efficient communication/computing.

[May '16] Rudina Morina received the E.M. Williams Award at her CMU graduation, awarded to an ECE senior in recognition of superior scholastic achievement and community service. Congratulations Rudina!

[Apr '16] Matt Boring receives the prestigious James E. Bradler Jr. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research for 2016 for his work on high-density EEG that connects information theory, neuroscience, and engineering. It is our highest honor for graduating neuroscientists from Pitt. Congratulations Matt! Matt will continue at Pitt for his Ph.D.

[Mar '16] Sanghamitra Dutta receives the Prabhu and Poonam Goel Graduate Fellowship! Sanghamitra also has a paper on sparse sampling accepted at ISIT'16. Congratulations!

[Feb '16] Yaoqing Yang receives the Bertucci fellowship for his work on noisy computing. Congratulations Yaoqing!

[Feb '16] Presented joint work with neuroscientists Marlene Behrmann, Amanda Robinson and Mike Tarr on energy-efficient neural sensing at ITA workshop. The work was led by Matt Boring, a Pitt undergraduate who's looking for a good neuro-school to enter this year. The work experimentally validates a theoretical strategy -- hierarchical referencing -- for correlated sensing.

[Nov '15] Hard work of Karthik Ganesan (supported by me, Andrea Goldsmith, and Jan Rabaey) got accepted into IEEE JSAC special issue on capacity-approaching codes. The fun part: in an issue on capacity-approaching codes, we argue that Shannon-capacity is not the right metric for total energy minimization! Builds on our earlier theoretical results. Here, Karthik did rigorous circuit simulations that enabled us to develop really detailed models of power.

[Oct '15] Shannon-theory tells us how to communicate in presence of noise. But how do we compute in noisy environments? We are now officially a part of the SRC SONIC center (led by UIUC), to explore this. We are excited to continue collaborating with circuit and device designers (including Pulkit's circuits mentor, Jan Rabaey), and obtain both fundamental limits and radically novel computation strategies for novel computational paradigms.

[Oct '15] At Allerton, Haewon presented her novel coding-theory problem of Energy-Adaptive codes, providing new constructions. We don't have full answers yet, but this is turning out to be a very interesting and novel problem. Praveen presented his work on information-theoretic counterexamples to Granger causality and Directed Information use in neuroscience. Pulkit presented joint work with circuit colleages Shawn Kelly and Jeff Weldon on a novel information-theoretic sensing strategy for biopotential/neural sensing and brain-machine interfaces.

[Oct '15] Our lab presented four papers at Allerton '15. Yaoqing presented his work on information-dissipation in noiseless (lossy) distributed computing, which is a surprising result that questions an assumption of communicating real-numbers noiselessly in distributed computing setups, using formal information-theoretic bounds. It derives a bound that is infinitely better than the cut-set bound in lossy distributed computing (a previous work of El Gamal) for networks as simple as line networks.

[Sept '15] Submitted a paper (led by Matthew Boring, Pitt) on experimental work corroborating circuit area/energy benefits of our hierarchical-referencing technique in collaboration with Amanda Robinson, Marlene Behrmann (neuroscientists) and Shawn Kelly, Jeff Weldon (circuit designers).

[Sept '15] Praveen Venkatesh received an inaugural and prestigious Presidential Fellowship from CMU. Congratulations!

[Sept '15] Hear, hear! (and locate, locate!). Received Google faculty award for a joint project with Laurie Heller (psychology) and Bruno Sinopoli (ECE) for exploring informational limits to perception through echolocation. We're working towards building real-life bat(wo)men! :-) Thanks Google!

[Aug '15] Sanghamitra Dutta joins our group as a PhD candidate! Welcome Sanghamitra!

[July '15] Rudina Morina received the CSoI channels scholar fellowship for undergraduate students. Congratulations!

[Jun '15] Temperatures are going up! Especially when communicating from implanted biosensors (that could be harvesting energy from the environment). Our joint work on how to control temperatures in this problem, with Omur Ozel and Sennur Ulukus, was presented by Sennur at ISIT'15

[Jun '15] Praveen's paper providing counterexamples to use of Granger causality and directed information in inferring flows is set to be presented at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) annual meeting!

[Apr '15] What are the “three roles” (as Varaiya calls them) of control actions, and what are the fundamental tradeoffs between these roles? Work on this topic, jointly with Anant Sahai, Aaron Wagner, appeared in IEEE transactions on Information Theory in the April issue.

[Feb '15] Our work on information-friction model appeared in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory this month. It provides our simplest circuit energy model thus far (and the cleanest proofs) showing that classical Shannon-waterfall intuition on energy-efficient communication doesn't apply to modern short distance applications, when circuit power also matters.

[Dec'14] Pulkit is on the technical program committee for WiOpt 2015 as well as IEEE ICDCS 2015. He's also an editor for IEEE JSAC issue on wireless power and energy harvesting, which will be out soon!

[Dec '14] Our joint work with ECE faculty Xin Li, Shawn Blanton, and Don Thomas received the best paper award at the International Symposium on Integrated Circuits (ISIC) 2014 in Singapore! The paper discusses info-theoretic metrics for energy-efficient circuit design.

[Nov '14] Pulkit will give a keynote talk at SICCE 2014, Beirut, Lebanon, on fundamental limits (for realistic models) on energy of communication and computing.

[Oct '14] Our lab has acquired our own EEG system. Undergraduate students Chidimma Onwuegbule, Aishwarya Prem Renu, Peter Wei, and Matthew Boring are using it for their own research, as well as to develop labs for ECE 18-290 (Signals and Systems).

[Sep '14] Undergradute students Rudina Morina and Chidimma Onwuegbule receive REU support from NSF CSoI. Congratulations!

[Sep '14] We welcome two new PhD students: Haewon Jeong (BS KAIST) and Praveen Venkatesh (BS IIT Madras) into our lab! 2013's summer intern with us, Phillip Fynan, has also joined CMU in Shawn Blanton and Don Thomas's groups.

[Aug '14] Our research on data-center networks' energy efficiency was featured in “FCW: the business of federal technology.” Full story here

[Aug '14] Information Friction limits on energy of communication: paper accepted in IEEE Trans. Info Theory. The group also has three papers accepted at Allerton'14. This includes Majid Mahzoon's work on Big Data communication in neural context, Yaoqing Yang's work on noisy encoding, and Pooja Vyavahare's work on info-friction limits in computing.

[July '14] At ISIT'15 (Hawai'i), we presented our work showing that the Shannon-capacity of noisy computing can be zero for realistic models of noisy computing. Pulkit was also (surprised to be :-) a panelist on a discussion on “How to Survive Tenure Track”.

[June '14] Undergraduate student Ana Beisy Cruz is now a CSoI channel scholar. Support of CSoI is gratefully acknowledged.

[May '14] Pooja Vyavahare (PhD student in IIT Bombay with D. Manjunath) is visiting our group for the month.

[May '14] Our work on “information friction” is featured on CMU homepage! Screenshot of a nerdy picture of Pulkit, and the article itself is here.

[May '14] Pulkit visited his former group at Berkeley, and watched Disney's frozen for a group meeting. Things have a come a long way! :-)

[Apr '14] Ana Beisy has received a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) award, including a cash award prize, for her ongoing work on neurostimulation. Congratulations Ana Beisy!

[Apr '14] What is the “Shannon-capacity of noisy computing”? Our work, accepted at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2014 suggests that for some seemingly realistic models, the answer could be zero! Not all is lost: even for these models, there's possibility of significant reductions in energy by allowing noise in computing. Just not as magical reductions as observed in Shannon's communication theory.

[Mar '14] We are now officially affiliates of the NSF Center for Science of Information. The support of the center is gratefully acknowledged. The center's goals are closely aligned with the goals of our lab, and we are excited to be a part of it.

[Jan '14] Received the NSF CAREER award for developing the science of information of green communications. Support for five years is gratefully acknowledged.

[Nov '13] Received EARS award from the NSF, a four-year grant that will fundcollaborative research in green communications with Jeyanandh Paramesh's group. CMU feature story here. Support gratefully acknowledged.

[Aug '13] We welcome Ph.D. students Yaoqing Yang and Majid Mahzoon to our group, even as Pulkit spends time in India waiting for his visa. He has given talks at IIT Bombay, TIFR, and LNMIIT during this trip, and will be visiting IIT Delhi and the National Brain Research Center (NBRC) in Delhi in early September.

[Jul '13] We've included an FAQ section on our research here.

[Jun '13] Our research on low-power data-center links is featured in CMU News!

[May '13] Our paper is one of the best reads in green communications according to IEEE ComSoc!

[Apr '13] Our undergraduate students, Karthik Ganesan and George Alexandrov, will be joining Stanford and Berkeley respectively. Congratulations!

[Nov '12] Received the 2012 Leonard G. Abraham Prize in the field of comm. systems for the paper “Towards a communication-theoretic understanding of system-level power consumption,” published in IEEE Journal for Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Sept. 2011, with Kristen Woyach and Anant Sahai.

[Aug '12] I will be joining CMU as assistant professor in Jan 2013!

[May '12] I am staying longer in UK because of visa issues. Email and skype are pretty much the only ways to contact me! Apologies in advance for being slow in responding.

[Mar-Apr '12] Visiting UCSB (March 6-7), Maryland (March 12-13), Princeton (for CISS, March 21-24), CMU (April 16-17), Cornell (April 24-25) and Imperial College (London; May 3). And I will soon be advising another undergraduate student, George Alexandrov, who'll work on circuits for inductively-coupled communication. I feel I have a group! :-)

[Feb '12] Stronger fundamental limits on encoding/decoding power (submission to ISIT) show why designing codes and circuits in isolation can be a very bad idea.

[Feb '12] Visiting MIT in February last week and UCSB/CISS in March. Presented fundamental limits (from Allerton '11, ISIT '12) on green communications at ITA '12, San Diego.

[Jan '12] “The Finite-Dimensional Witsenhausen Counterexample,” my paper with S.Y. Park and A. Sahai that derives the first approximately-optimal solution to Witsenhausen's counterexample, got accepted in IEEE Trans. Automatic Control! Was one of my hardest papers to write because it needed to make information-theoretic ideas accessible to controls audience.

[Sept '11] I am starting as a postdoc at Stanford. And my journal paper on a theory for green communications appears in JSAC!

[July '11] How do we know when cognitive radios are in near field, and when they are in far field? How would it change our system design? Discussed in our paper that got accepted in Globecom '11.

[June '11] Talk in the 2011 Georgia Tech summer school on cyber-physical systems (June 28) on the need to rethink models in controls, comm, and computing.

[May '11] Received the Eliahu Jury award for “for outstanding achievement in the area of Systems, Communications, Control, or Signal Processing.”

[May '11] Visiting Muriel Medard and Anantha Chandrakasan at MIT.

[Apr '11] My first student's first paper got accepted at DAC '11!

[Mar '11] Talk at CISS on wiring complexity of decoding, and implications on green communication. Slides can be found here.

[Feb-Mar'11] Visiting Cedric Langbort and Tamer Basar at UIUC.

ITA Workshop talk on Green Codes on Feb. 10.

[Jan '11] Green codes will have decoders with short wires. And this is a new code-design problem! My recent paper at CISS talks about this.

[Jan '11] Talk at U Michigan (Ann Arbor) on Jan. 7, 2010.

[Dec '10] Received the best student paper award at IEEE CDC 2010! Talk slides of my paper: “Is Witsenhausen's counterexample a relevant toy?” are here.

[Dec '10] Finally (!), my dissertation “Actions can speak more clearly than words” is done! It can be found here.

[Nov '10] My article on why Witsenhausen's counterexample is important (a more traditional outlook): “Demystifying the Witsenhausen counterexample” appeared in “Ask the Experts” section of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Dec '10.

[Oct '10] Seminars at MIT, UCLA, USC on speaking through actions.

[Sep '10] “Is Witsenhausen's counterexample a relevant toy?” nominated for student best paper award at CDC'10 (a total of four nominees). The conference is in December!

[July '10] Three talks at ISIT'10: wireless info, power transfer, green codes, and decentralized control.

[June 2010] Talk at Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) retreat: “Low-power wireless systems: A theory-practice ping-pong.”

[June'10] Nominated for ISIT best paper award for “Distributed signal cancelation inspired by Witsenhausen's counterexample ”

[March '10][Slides] and [Handout] for my talk at the ISS Seminar at Princeton University, March 26, 2010. “Distributed control: a new frontier of information theory”

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Invited talks and seminars