Author: baranwa2@illinois.edu

We are very pleased to have Professor Bruce Hajek as our guest speaker for this week’s special social hour on Friday, February 10 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. Prof. Hajek will briefly talk about his research and his experiences at CSL.

Bio: Professor Bruce Hajek received a BS in mathematics and an MS in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.  He has served as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a researcher in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at Illinois since 1979.  He is a member of the Center for Advanced Study and holds the prestigious Hoeft Chair in Engineering. Prof. Hajek’s research interests include communication networks, auctions and mechanism design, stochastic analysis, optimization, control, and machine learning. He was a winner of the USA Mathematical Olympiad in 1973 and has received the Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, and the ACM Sigmetrics Achievement Award.  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the IEEE.

We are glad to have Xun Jian, as our speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, February 3 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Distributed power management for memory networks”.

Bio: Xun Jian is a sixth year graduate student working with Professor Rakesh Kumar in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Xun Jian works in the area of Computer Architecture. His research interest is on server architectures for improving the future scaling of data centers and HPC systems. His graduate work has been exploring energy-efficient architectures for high capacity memory systems, high bandwidth memory systems, and low voltage memories targeting server systems.

Welcome back!! Hope you had a refreshing break. The CSL Social Hour Organizing Committee is very excited to announce this week’s special social hour talk by James Guelfi, Assistant Director for Research Services at CSL. This special session is titled as, “Research Support at CSL – what’s available?”. The event will be held on Friday, January 27 at 3:00PM in CSL 369.

Bio: Jay obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from the University of Illinois in 1996, and an MBA from Eastern Illinois University in 2004. He has been involved in IT with the University since 1997, first as an IT Pro with what was then CCSO (which became CITES, then Tech Services). In 2004, he became the Director of IT for Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (now called MechSE). In 2010, when the College of Engineering’s various IT units merged into Engineering IT, Jay became the Assistant Director for Research Services. In this position, Jay is responsible for planning and providing IT services to faculty and research groups, as well as supporting cleanrooms, machine shops, and other unusual computing within the College. His team manages computers running many versions of Windows, MacOS, and Linux – some of which are long retired.

The CSL Social Hour Organizing Committee is very excited to announce this week’s special social hour talk by CSL professors – Prof. Naresh R. Shanbhag and Prof. Andrew C. Singer. They will provide an overview of SONIC ( Systems On Nanoscale Information fabriCs) center activities. The event will be held on Friday, December 2 at 3:00PM in CSL 369.

Bio: Naresh R. Shanbhag is the Jack Kilby Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since January 2013, he is the founding Director of the Systems On Nanoscale Information fabriCs (SONIC) Center funded by DARPA and SRC under the STARnet program. He was the co-founder and CTO of Intersymbol Communications, an optical communications IC start-up company (2000-07), and was the lead architect of VDSL chip-sets at AT&T Bell Labs (1993-95). He is an IEEE Fellow.

 

Bio: Andrew C. Singer is the Fox Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Director of the Technology Entrepreneur Center and Special Advisor to the Dean for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the College of Engineering. He is Associate Director of the Systems On Nanoscale Information fabriCs (SONIC) Center. He was the co-founder and CEO of Intersymbol Communications, an optical communications IC start-up company (2000-07), and co-founder and CEO of OceanComm, an undersea wireless communications company. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Important: The Video-of-the-Month is due by noon, Thursday, December 1.  The link to upload your videos is:  go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.

We are glad to have Professor Zhizhen Zhao as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, November 18 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This special session is titled as “Data Science Meets Structural Biology”.

Bio: Assistant Professor Zhizhen Zhao (PhD ’13) joined ECE ILLINOIS in Fall 2016. Prior to that, she was a Courant Instructor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. Her research interests include applied and computational harmonic analysis, signal processing, dimensionality reduction, information theory, scientific computing, and their application to imaging sciences and inverse problems in structural biology and atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

See you all on Friday!!

 

The CSL Social Hour Organizing Committee is very excited to announce this week’s special social hour by CSL professors – Prof. Tim Bretl, Prof. Srinivasa Salapaka and Prof. Dan Work. They will provide an overview of DCL (Decision and Control) group activities. The event will be held on Friday, November 11 at 3:00PM in CSL 369.

Bio: Tim received his B.S. in Engineering and B.A. in Mathematics from Swarthmore College in 1999, and his M.S. in 2000 and Ph.D. in 2005 both in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University. Subsequently, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, also at Stanford University. Since 2006, he has been with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is an Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and a Research Associate Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award in 2010.

 

Bio: Srinivasa M. Salapaka received the B.Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology in 1995, the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, U.S.A in 1997 and 2002, respectively. During 2002-2004, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. Since January 2004, he has been a Faculty Member in Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He got the NSF CAREER award in the year 2005. He is an ASME fellow since 2015. His areas of current research interest include controls for nanotechnology, combinatorial optimization, Brownian ratchets, numerical/dynamic-systems analysis of root solving algorithms, and control of power systems.

Bio: Daniel Work is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (courtesy), and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prof. Work earned his Bachelor of Science degree (2006) from the Ohio State University, and a Master of Science (2007) and Ph.D. (2010) from the University of California, Berkeley, each in civil engineering. Prior to joining the faculty at Illinois, Work was a research intern at Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto from 2008-2009, and a guest researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond in 2010. Prof. Work has research interests in control, estimation, and optimization of cyber physical systems, mobile sensing, and inverse modeling and data assimilation, applied to problems in civil and environmental engineering. He currently serves as associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and Transportation Research Part C – Emerging Technologies, and is a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Cybernetics for Cyber-Physical Systems. Prof. Work has received a number of honors and awards including selection to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2016 EU US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, being named a UIUC CEE Excellence Faculty Fellow in 2016, the 2015 UIUC ASCE Outstanding Professor Award, the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2014, and the IEEE ITSS Best Dissertation Award in 2011.

We are glad to have Ji Liu, as our speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, November 4 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Opinion Dynamics with Heterogeneous Social Relationships”.

Bio: Ji Liu received the B.S. degree in information engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2006, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, in 2013. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA.

His current research interests include distributed control and computation, multi-agent systems, social networks, epidemic networks, and power networks.

We are glad to have Amirhossein Taghvaei, as our speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, October 28 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Poisson equation in Nonlinear Filtering, Learning, and Optimization“.

Bio: Amirhossein Taghvaei graduated from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2013, receiving two B.S degrees; in Mechanical Engineering and in Physics. He is currently a PhD student in the Mechanical Science and Engineering department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is working under the direction of Prof. Prashant Mehta in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, Decision and Control group. His research interest lies in the intersection of probability and pde. He is currently working on the Feedback Particle Filter algorithm, and its application to high dimensional problems.

Welcome back! We are glad to have Dr. Vijay Gurbani as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, October 21 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This special session is titled as “Challenges in Big Data and Analytics in 5G”.

Bio: Vijay K. Gurbani is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories‘ End-to-End Mobile Network Research department in Nokia Networks. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics, a M.Sc. in Computer Science, both from Bradley University; and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology. His current work is focused on scalable analytic architectures and algorithms for autonomic 5G networks. His research interests are multimedia protocols, security and privacy in multimedia protocols, and open/inner source. Vijay’s research has resulted in products that are used in national and international service provider networks. He has over 60 publications in peer-reviewed conferences and journals, 5 books, 7 granted U.S. patents and 19 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) RFCs. Vijay holds additional appointments as a Research Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg and as an adjunct professor at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Abstract: The 5G network is expected to be adaptive to the needs of users and applications. Driving the notion of adaptability is the implicit assumption that the billions of devices on the 5G network transmit data to be analyzed for adaptability. How big will this big data be? Will the data trickle in streams or will it burst through a hose? How will the models making sense of this data behave? Will they need to be changed? This informal talk will explore some of these issues by learning from the use of Big Data in today’s global networks and extrapolating how we may use Big Data frameworks in 5G.

We will not be having our regular Social Hour this week. Instead, we encourage everyone to join us at the CSL PhD Thesis Award Ceremony in the CSL Auditorium on Friday, October 14 at 3PM.

Congratulations to CSL’s inaugural PhD Thesis Award recipient Seyed Rasoul Etesami! He will discuss his work on “Game-Theoretic Analysis of the Hegselmann-Krause Model for Opinion Dynamics in Finite Dimensions“.

The CSL PhD Thesis Award is in recognition of outstanding research by a CSL doctoral student. Reception to follow in 301 CSL.