Aman Jain  

About Me

I am a fifth year Ph.D. student in the department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. Before that, I obtained my undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology - Kanpur in India. I am planning to graduate by May 2010. Click here for my curriculum vitae in pdf.

My Ph.D. research work is in the area of energy efficiency in wireless networks. I work with Prof. Sanjeev Kulkarni and Prof. Sergio Verdú.

Research

My research is in the area of energy efficiency in the next-generation wireless networks, e.g., ad-hoc networks and sensor networks. See the list of publications for details.

I have used information-theoretic tools to study the minimum possible communication energy in various setups of interest (e.g., broadcast-relay channels, random networks, regular networks, directed acyclic graphs, complete graphs, etc.), when there are only reliability constraints and no other (e.g., bandwidth or cooperation). I have also given lower bounds on the minimum energy per bit for broadcasting in arbitrary networks. In many interesting special classes of networks, I have also proposed energy efficient distributed communication schemes which are either optimal or close to it.

More recently, I have defined and studied the fundamental tradeoff between the communication energy and distortion of a reconstructed estimate, in general sensor networks. This is a fundamental tradeoff in the sense that it does not depend upon the available bandwidth or the communication and cooperation strategies, rather depends only on the physical description of the sensing and communication infrastructure. The energy--distortion tradeoff is of great significance to the sensor networks community, since sensor networks deal with the communication of correlated natural phenomena under severe energy-constraints. A surprising consequence of my work is that distributed analog transmission schemes outperform digital coding schemes in many regimes. Better energy-efficiency along with operation on a per symbol basis and simple implementation (low space and time complexity) makes analog transmission schemes an ideal candidate for implementation in the real-world. I am very excited by the future prospects of this work.

Besides wireless communication and information-theory, my research work is also naturally related to distributed algorithms, networks and signal-processing.

Publications

1. Aman Jain, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni and Sergio Verdú, "Minimum Energy per Bit for Wideband Wireless Multicasting: Performance of Decode-and-Forward," accepted to Twenty-Ninth IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), San Diego, USA, Mar. 2010.


2. Aman Jain, Deniz Gündüz, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni, H. Vincent Poor and Sergio Verdú, "Energy Efficient Lossy Transmission over Sensor Networks with Feedback," accepted to Thirty-Fifth IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Dallas, USA, Mar. 2010.


3. Aman Jain, Deniz Gündüz, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni, H. Vincent Poor and Sergio Verdú, "Energy-distortion tradeoff with multiple sources and feedback," Information Theory and Applic. Workshop (ITA), San Diego, USA, Jan. 2010. (Invited)


4. Aman Jain, Deniz Gündüz, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni, H. Vincent Poor and Sergio Verdú, "Energy-Distortion Tradeoffs in Multiple-access Channels with Feedback," Proc. IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Cairo, Egypt, Jan. 2010. (Invited)


5. Aman Jain, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni and Sergio Verdú, "Minimum Energy per Bit for Gaussian Broadcast Channels with Cooperating Receivers and Common Message," Proc. Forty-Seventh Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, USA, Sep. 2009.


6. Aman Jain, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni and Sergio Verdú, "Multicasting in Large Random Wireless Networks: Bounds on the Minimum Energy per Bit," Proc. IEEE Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Seoul, South Korea, June 2009.


7. Aman Jain, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni and Sergio Verdú, "Energy Efficiency of Decode-and-Forward for Wideband Wireless Multicasting," submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Nov. 2009.


8. Aman Jain, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni and Sergio Verdú, "Multicasting in Large Wireless Networks: Bounds on the Minimum Energy per Bit," submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Mar. 2009. [Arxiv Version]


9. Mouaaz Nahas, Michael J. Pont and Aman Jain, "Reducing Task Jitter in Shared-Clock Embedded Systems Using CAN," Proc. UK Embedded Forum, Birmingham, UK, Oct. 2004.

Teaching Experience

I have enjoyed teaching many courses at Princeton University. Here is the list.

1. ELE 201 - Introduction to Electrical Signals and Systems, Fall 2007.
   
   • Taught precepts, created problem sets and exams, graded exams, supervised laboratories.
   • Led four other teaching assistants and lectured in the absence of the instructor.
   • Class comprised of more than 40 students from a variety of backgrounds.
   • Won Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, Sep. 2008.
2. PHI 218/ ELE 218 - Learning Theory and Epistemology, Spring 2007.
   
   • Teaching and planning precepts, creating problem sets and exams, grading problem sets and exams, holding help sessions.
   • Class comprised of more than 50 students from a variety of backgrounds.
3. ELE 301 - Circuits and Signal Processing, Fall 2006.
   
   • Grading problem sets, holding help sessions and supervising laboratories.

Besides teaching courses, I have led other graduate students in a two day workshop to teach effective pedagogical techniques, as a Graduate Fellow with the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University.

Other Interests

Reading non-fiction, buddhism and running.

Useful Links

• Emails: Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, Princeton University Webmail.
• Search: Google, Google Scholar, Google Maps, Google Images, You Tube.
• Social Sites: Facebook, Orkut.
• Music: Pandora, Last.fm, You Tube.
• News/Magazines: BBC News, New York Times, Google News, The Economist, National Geographic.
• Princeton University Facilities: Princeton University Webmail, Princeton University Registrar, Princeton University Library, Dillon Gym Schedule, Tiger Transit, Shuttle Schedule for Tiger Line (pdf), Shuttle Schedule for Campus Circulator (pdf), Shuttle Tracker.
• Libraries/References: Google Scholar, Princeton University Library, Princeton Public Library, Wikipedia.
• Banks: Bank Of America, HSBC Direct, Ally Bank.
• Others: Stumble Upon, Amazon, IMDB, Thesaurus, Puzzles, Bizconc.

Friends