The Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) is pleased to announce that the 2015–2016 Claude E. Shannon Research Assistantships have been awarded to Ms. Gauri Joshi and Mr. Arman Rezaee, doctoral students in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department.
Ms. Gauri Joshi’s doctoral research is supervised by RLE PI Greg Wornell, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Signals, Information and Algorithms Laboratory. Ms. Joshi is recognized this year for her significant accomplishments in contemporary communication and coding, particularly in emerging problem areas arising out of cloud-based infrastructure.
In her masters work Ms. Joshi developed erasure codes for streaming communication, to allow smooth and uninterrupted playback of packets. Currently, she is working on techniques to use redundancy to reduce latency in cloud-based storage and computing systems. The proposed techniques can significantly reduce latency, at little or no additional computing cost. More broadly, her research aims to apply fundamental concepts from probability and information theory to help build reliable and efficient computing systems.
Mr. Arman Rezaee’s doctoral research is supervised by RLE PI Muriel Médard, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Network Coding and Reliable Communications Group. Mr. Rezaee is recognized this year for his significant accomplishments in communication research, particularly for his novel solutions that combine network coding with a predictive model to avoid ACK-explosions over multicast channels.
Mr. Rezaee’s current research interests span wired and wireless communication systems, with an emphasis on network security, privacy, and anonymity. He is examining new ways to utilize information theoretic insights in conjunction with tools from network optimization to characterize the utility-privacy trade-offs of communication networks.
Claude E. Shannon, the father of information theory, served on the MIT faculty as a member of the Electrical Engineering and Mathematics departments, and the Research Laboratory of Electronics from 1956 until 1978. After Prof. Shannon’s death in 2001, his wife, Betty Shannon, launched a MIT fund in his memory to support students doing research in communication. A subsequent donation from Dr. Richard Barry made additional support possible. This year’s recipients were selected by a committee consisting of Professor Vincent Chan, Professor Lizhong Zheng (Committee Chair), and RLE Director Yoel Fink.