The Department of Electrical Engineering

My current research activities are focused on advances in several fields of rapid technology development, notably wireless networks, social networks and smart grid.

The dramatic increase in demand for new capacity and higher performance has been a major issue in the design and deployment of contemporary wireless networks. The development of these capabilities is severely limited by the scarcity of two of the principal resources in wireless networks: energy and bandwidth. Emerging generations of wireless standards are addressing these issues through the use of technique such as cooperative communications and spectrum sharing. One focus of our recent work in wireless networks has addressed the fundamental limits of such techniques through the information theoretic analyses of relay and interference channels. A further issue that we are addressing is the fundamental ability of the physics of the radio channel to provide security in data transmission, and the development of codes and other methods to exploit this capability.

In the area of social networks, our focus has been on two areas of interest. The first is the development of new models and analytical techniques for studying the degrees of social separation in small-world networks, and the application of such models to aid in the understanding of social phenomena that have been observed in experimental studies of social networks. The second area of interest has been the development of an on-line content trading platform, and the use of this platform as an experimental test-bed to investigate the behavior of users in various types of content sharing and content trading scenarios.

Smart grid has emerged as a key technology for improving the efficiency, efficacy and security of the distribution and consumption of electric power, and particularly for the integration of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, into the electricity grid. Our work in this area has focused on the use of advanced methods from communications and information technology to address several issues arising in this context, including the detection and amelioration of bad data attacks, the study of privacy issues for both operators and consumers, and development of distributed algorithms for state estimation and control of the grid.

Preprints of my recent and forthcoming publications describing this research can be found on the ArXiv website . Other publications describing recent research progress in related areas can be found there as well.