Waheed Bajwa receives ARO Grant to Design Computationally Efficient Algorithms for Machine Learning

ECE Associate Professor Waheed Bajwa has been awarded a grant from the Army Research Office (ARO) for the project titled "Statistical learning for the modern datasets: Generalization bounds and near-optimal learning algorithms." The 3-year, $360,000 award will advance the state-of-the-art in statistical learning theory and lead to computationally efficient algorithms for machine learning. While the statistical learning framework has long played a central role in advancing our understanding of machine learning systems, there is an interest in looking afresh at the questions of generalization error bounds, fundamental limits, and near-optimal algorithms in the face of modern datasets that increasingly represent a ‘zoo’. Indeed, the classical statistical learning works typically focused on centralized datasets that often had Euclidean geometry. In contrast, many of today’s and tomorrow’s applications of machine learning involve non-Euclidean datasets that are non-centralized, with data often streaming at very high rates, some of which might be compromised due to either gross errors or actions of adversarial entities. Such modern datasets necessitate development of fundamentally new analytical tools and algorithmic techniques for statistical learning-based study of machine learning systems. It is in this regard that this project leverages tools from stochastic approximation, (centralized and distributed) optimization theory, concentration-of-measure literature, information theory, robust statistics, and tensor algebra to derive generalization error bounds, fundamental limits on sample complexity, and near-optimal learning algorithms for machine learning from modern datasets. The outcomes of this project are expected to not only advance the state-of-the-art in statistical learning theory, but they are also expected to lead to computationally efficient algorithms for machine learning that can be deployed in practical settings with the smallest number of training samples.

Congratulations, Waheed!

Wade Trappe appointed Associate Dean for Academic Programs

Dean Thomas N. Farris announced that Prof. Wade Trappe will assume the role of Associate Dean for Academic Programs. Prof. Trappe will fill the position previously held by Henrik Pederson who has become the Interim Dean of the School of Graduate Studies.

In undertaking his role as associate dean for academic programs, Dr. Trappe will partner with Dean Farris and senior leadership to advance overarching strategic direction, especially in graduate and international education and high-level programmatic direction that prioritizes SoE initiatives among academic departments. Dr. Trappe will, additionally, provide leadership, support, and mentoring for the school's assessment and accreditation activities (ABET) and provide oversight of master's student recruitment, education, retention, and outcomes activities.

In working to strengthen organizational effectiveness, Dr. Trappe will forge strong working relationships with programmatic and administrative leaders, including SGS, Rutgers Global, Career Exploration and Success, and the New Brunswick Chancellor-Provost's Office to ensure our academic programs are clearly represented.

Congratulations Wade!

 

ECE Researchers win M. Barry Carlton Best Paper Award

ECE PhD graduate Bo Li (2017) and Distinguished Professor Athina Petropulu have won the 2017 M. Barry Carlton Best Paper Award for their paper “Joint Transmit Designs for Coexistence of MIMO Wireless Communications and Sparse Sensing Radars in Clutter” (Open Access), IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, 53(6),7953658, pp. 2846-2864. The M. Barry Carlton Award is an annual award recognizing the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. To help assess impact, nominations are limited to the papers published in the calendar year four years before the award year. The award was presented at the 2021 IEEE Radar Conference Award Ceremony, on May 12, 2021.

In their paper, the authors address the ever-growing need for bandwidth that wireless devices face. By making use of spectrum that was previously reserved for radar, it is possible to share spectrum between radar and communication systems. To reap the advantages of the available spectrum, the interference between the two systems must be managed. While managing interference is a classic problem in the radar and communication community, prior to that work there had been very little work that jointly examined interference between these two different types of technologies. This paper (along with some earlier related papers by the authors) introduces a new line of research for cooperative design of the two systems that aims to control interference between radar and communication systems. The paper proposes a cooperative scheme for the coexistence of a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication system and a matrix completion (MC) based, collocated MIMO (MIMOMC) radar. To facilitate the coexistence, and also deal with clutter, both the radar and the communication systems use transmit precoding. It is shown that when a random unitary waveform matrix is used the error performance of MC is guaranteed independent of the precoding matrix. The radar transmit precoder, the radar subsampling scheme, and the communication transmit covariance matrix are jointly designed in order to maximize the radar SINR, while meeting certain communication rate and power constraints. The joint design is implemented at a control center, which is a node with whom both systems share physical layer information, and which also performs data fusion for the radar. The paper provides efficient algorithms for the proposed optimization problem, along with insight on the feasibility and properties of the proposed design. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the spectrum sharing performance in various scenarios.

Congratulations to Bo and Athina!

2021 ECE Undergraduate and Graduate Award Ceremony

The ECE Department would like to congratulate each of our undergraduate and graduate students who received awards and recognition during the May 13, 2021 Virtual Celebration! We had a great time celebrating your accomplishments virtually and look forward to the day that we can congratulate you in person.

For anyone who missed the Celebration, you are welcome to view a recording of the event on our ECE YouTube channel.

UG and Graduate Award Presentation 2021 (PDF)

 

 

 

Opening remarks were made by ECE Chair Narayan Mandayam, Dean Thomas N. Farris, and ECE Undergraduate Director Wade Trappe.

ECE Faculty presented Undergraduate Leadership / Service Awards to:

  • Samantha Cheng – Ambassador – department liaison
  • Ariela Chomski – RU IEEE President
  • Puru Saxena – Fishbowl tutor
  • Tran Trong Tan Ngo - Fishbowl tutor
  • Natalie Kim - Fishbowl tutor
  • Yang Bai – Fishbowl tutor
  • Thorson Dai- Fishbowl tutor
  • Amber Haynes – Federal Work Study
  • Sukhjit Singh – Federal Work Study
  • Piotr Zakrevski – Federal Work Study

The George and Ilsa Goubau Memoria Awards for Academic Excellence and Strength in Electromagnetics were presented to:

  • Andrew Simon
  • Peter Wu
  • Crystal D’Souza
  • Naomie Popo

The Ashok and Yohavall Sethu Electrical and Computer Engineering Annual Scholarships were presented to:

  • Jakub Vogel
  • Yati Patel

Graduate awards introductory remarks were given by Graduate Director Yingying Chen. The ECE Graduate Program had 24 doctoral graduates in the 2020/2021 school year.

The following doctoral graduates are the recipients of the ECE Graduate Program Academic Achievement Awards:

  • Intessar Al-Iedani, January 2021, advisor: Dr. Zoran Gajic
  • Ali Haddad, January 2021, advisor: Dr. Laleh Najafizadeh
  • Guangyuan Li, May 2021, advisor: Dr. Yicheng Lu
  • Siyu Liao, October 2020, advisor: Dr. Bo Yuan
  • Vidyasagar Sadhu, October 2020, advisor: Dr. Dario Pompili
  • Mohammad Yousefvand, May 2021, advisor: Dr. Narayan Mandayam

The Teaching Assistant Awards for the Spring 2020 semester were presented to:

  • Corey Norton
  • Faith Johnson
  • Shiva Salsabilian

The Teaching Assistant Awards for the Fall 2020 semester were presented to:

  • Anastasios Dimas
  • Carolina Naim
  • Pei Peng

The Graduate Leadership / Service Award was given to:

  • Demetrios Lambropoulos, Capstone Assistant

The Professor Narindra Puri Memorial Endowed Scholarship awards were presented to:

  • Jeffrey Isaacs
  • Zhaoyi Xu
  • Shounak Rangwala

The Paul Panayotatos Endowed Scholarships were awarded to:

  • Tahiya Chowdhury
  • Murtadha Aldeer

IEEE Communications Society Phoenix ISS Award was presented to:

  • Tejashri Kuber

Prof. Narayan Mandayam, the ECE Department Chair gave closing remarks.

Congratulations and good luck to all ECE students!

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