Paul W. Cuff – Career Sketch

Short Bio

After finishing a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Brigham Young University, I spent 2004 to 2009 getting a master's degree and Ph.D. from Stanford University. My first challenge as a graduate student was to narrow my broad interests. Curiosity ultimately led me to focus on information theory with Thomas Cover, my dissertation advisor. The elegance of the mathematics and brilliance of the advisor were too much to resist.

I received several departmental honors as a graduate student for my performance on the qualifying exam and my efforts as a teaching assistant. A very motivating honor was awarded in 2008 at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, where I received a student paper award for my solo-authored unorthodox work on communication requirements for generating correlated random variables. That work has led to various fruitful and unexpected avenues of research (for myself and others), and elements of those ideas can be found in many of our current results.

Over the years I've interacted with industry in both the technology and the financial sectors, spending summers at Google, Microsoft Research, and elsewhere, and giving talks at a number of hedge funds. In 2005 I co-founded a tech startup called Adaptive Hearing Solutions with Bernard Widrow centered around signal processing technology. This venture began by our winning of the Stanford business plan competition. The company wasn't profitability in its short lifetime (2 years), but the experience certainly was. At that same time in the spring of 2005, one of my friends joined Facebook (#13 employee), and another friend started SoundHound. So I did not win the entrepreneuring clairvoyance prize.

I joined the faculty at Princeton University in September of 2009. In 2014, I received the NSF Career Award and graduated my first batch of Ph.D. students. In 2015, I received the AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award.

In September of 2017, I left Princeton to join the general research group at Renaissance Technologies.