Lalitha Sankar

Science and Technology Postdoctoral Fellow
C-436, E-Quad, Olden Street,
Princeton, NJ 08544,
Phone: 609-258-2509,
Email: lalitha at princeton dot edu

Bio: (CV)

Since June 2007, I have been a Science and Technology Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. My teaching and research mentor is Prof. H. Vincent Poor. Prior to this, I was a doctoral candidate and graduate assistant at WINLAB, Rutgers University, where I worked with Prof. Narayan Mandayam. I moved to WINLAB after working for several years as a Senior Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Shannon Labs, Florham Park, NJ, where I worked on design, development, and prototyping of next-generation wired and wireless systems such as multi-band software radios and DSL modems. This was preceded by a year developing signal processing algorithms for the first digital camera prototype developed at Polaroid Corporation Engineering R&D in Cambridge, MA. I moved to Polaroid following my Masters from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. My bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics is from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India.

Research Interests

My research interests include wireless networks, information and communication theory, and game theoretic analysis of communication networks. Specific topics are:

Teaching

One of my responsibiltiies as an STC Fellow is to teach one course every year, preferably to non-science majors. Along with my teaching mentor Prof. H. Vincent Poor, I proposed to introduce and teach a new course under the umbrella of the Princeton Freshman Seminar Series with the aim of introducing the fundamental ideas of entropy, compression, and coding, that were developed by Claude Shannon and are the heart of the information revolution.

In Spring 2008, we introduced the Freshman Seminar Course FRS174 titled 'The Fundamental Ideas of the Information Revolution: Insights into Technology, Language, and Biology'. We offered it again in Spring 2009. Here is an article published in the Information Theory newsletter, September 2008, describing our first attempt at teaching the course. We are constantly looking for reading materials on the contributions of Shannon and the information theorists who followed him with more intuitive descriptions accessible to Freshman and non-science majors. The lack of such materials is stunning given the success of the theory and the pervasiveness of the Information Revolution. Here is a detailed description of the course and a list of books and papers we plan to use this semester.

Publications and Patents/Research Projects 

Here is a list of my publications and patents.  Alternately, my publications sorted by research projects can be found here. 

Collaborators