Following graduate school, he
joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J. as a member of
the Network Systems Research Department. Chris is currently a Professor
of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rutgers University in New
Jersey and an
IEEE
Fellow, cited "for contributions to wireless communication systems
theory."
Research: After
submitting a proposal on communication
theory in biological systems to the 2008 NSF CDI
competition, I stumbled across this neat drawing at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York City. The title is Art and Nature, and the
artist is Dudley Huppler. My interpretation? Science is
crisp and neat. Nature is
messy, composed of myriad inter-communicating actors.
Yet and still, organization not only
emerges but is uncannily repeatable despite the plethora of insults
hurled at biological systems by the world. The nature of the implicit reliable code-to-structure/function
transformation is one of the "big questions" in biology. (The
ever-popular "Are we
alone?" is another one -- next column over  .)A muse on whither structure/function by Nobelist Paul Nurse (pdf, local pdf) appears as a recent Nature "Horizons" article, Life, Logic and Information. The gist? We need to better understand information flow in biological systems -- which is exactly the topic of the (now funded) proposal, though we're quite a bit more literal! (pun intended )My partner in crime for this research is Saira Mian, a broadly knowledgeable computational biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Our hope for this work is that there are coding, channel, network and rate distortion theorems in there somewhere -- perhaps even transcending biological systems since at heart everything is a network of inter-communicating actors. My Precious Students Interference Avoidance Opportunistic Communications Spectrum Server (see also R. Yates' page) Contentious Spectrum Management Genetic Algorithms and Spectrum Sharing (DySpan'05) Ultra-Blogging: I've been toying with the idea of doing research on the implications of the fact that soon, everything will be recorded and very little will be private. Think of Microsoft's My Life Bits but with the ability to share and search over the Internet. As a simple example of what's coming, the following candid photo was taken in Brazil at MWCN'01. I had no idea the photo existed until a Google search on my name turned it up (the site has since disappeared -- how fleeting fame! 
). However, imagine
if zillions of these sorts of candid moments (including audio) could
be uploaded wirelessly, correlated, indexed and searched by a
Super-Google over the web. Assuming symmetry of access and
information accountability (with the possibility of information
hiding by loggers -- or e-chroniclers),
I'm not sure that loss of public privacy is such a bad idea.
But it does give one pause to think that every public (and many an
ostensibly
private) moment could be subject to public scrutiny. Nonetheless,
I see this not as "Big Brother" but more as "Everything In The Light Of
Day" a la Rodney King where the watched can watch the watchers. Steve Mann at the
University
of Toronto has coined the rather neat term sousveillance for this
sort of system (as opposed
to SURveillance). Public ServiceI recently submitted an NSF proposal which was declined, but I thought the reviews were especially helpful. As it is with these things, we often feel the reviewer might possibly have missed the point (see comment about characterizing moving foliage on trees being infeasible -- I AGREE, but if so, that still tells you something about the channel estimation problem ). However, objectively speaking,
the reviewer might also be
pointing out that I missed the point
-- the practicality of
the approach might be nil for most real-world systems -- but still
offered helpful suggestions, I thought.
Anyone who wants to run with (or deride) the idea is welcome
to do so. I'm thinking I'll post all proposals and subsequent reviews
here as a public service (maybe particularly helpful to new faculty if
only as an example of what not
to do if you want to get funded Just TOO COOL!Here's one of my FAVORITE Nova segments on an up and coming (now graduated) M.I.T. engineer named James McLurkin. Yes, an engineer can truly have it all! |
Cosmic Communications 
Caroline Angelo's cartoon National Science Foundation
Discoveries
|
Administrativia:Graduate Assistantships and Research ProjectsProtocol for Student Paper Draft SubmissionsPh.D. Orals Signup Sheet |
Spectrum Policy Outreach:FCC Technological Advisory Council Meeting Talk (09/18/2002) (PDF) (PS)FCC TAC Meeting Archival SummaryThe
Economics, Technology And Policy Of Unlicensed Spectrum Workshop
|
]
). So, he's always been
preternaturally graceful under pressure.
Randal went on to an even more spectacular academic career (Rhodes
Scholar, MBA and Ph.D. from M.I.T.) and was clearly the best candidate
The Apprentice had ever seen. In fact, I found it puzzling how much
hand wringing was done over which of the two final candidates to hire
--
there really was no other choice. Perhaps they manufactured
a bit of theater?
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