The Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is pleased to announce that the 2013 Claude E. Shannon Research Assistantships are being awarded to Ms. Mina Karzand and Mr. Kuang Xu, who are both doctoral students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Ms. Karzand’s doctoral research is being supervised by Prof. Lizhong Zheng of the Claude E. Shannon Communication and Network Group. Her research interests focus on wireless systems and on multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) channels in particular. Ms. Karzand came to MIT in 2009 after completing a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, where she explored the analysis of the mapping of the manifolds in correlatively changing fading channels.
Mr. Xu is a second-year doctoral candidate, supervised by Prof. John Tsitsiklis of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). Mr. Xu is examining the effect of flexibility in large-scale stochastic networks, where only very small amount of resources is flexible enough to serve multiple demand types. His research also focuses on quantifying the impact of predictions and forecasts in the efficiency of flexible systems. Mr. Xu entered MIT in 2009 following the completion of a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has since been the recipient of several awards, including the MIT-Xerox Fellowship and the Siebel Foundation Scholarship. His master’s thesis on the topic of the power of centralization in distributed processing was awarded the 2011 Ernst Guillemin prize for best Electrical Engineering master thesis, and placed first in the 2011 George Nicholson Best Student Paper Competition at INFORMS.
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 fund in his memory at MIT to support students doing basic research in communication. A subsequent donation from Dr. Richard Barry has made possible additional support for student research in communication. The selection of Ms. Karzand and Mr. Xu was done by a committee consisting of Professor Vincent Chan, Professor Robert Gallagher, Professor Lizhong Zheng (Committee Chair), and Professor Yoel Fink. The Shannon Research Assistant awardees will be honored at a luncheon.