| Special
Treat A must-read memoir by WINLAB's own Dick Frenkiel, "Father of Cellular and Cordless" National Medal of Technology (1994 Winner) Cellular Dreams and Cordless Nightmares: life at Bell Laboratories in interesting times |
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Following graduate
school,
he
joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J. as a member
of
the Network Systems Research Department where he regaled his peers
with levitated center conductor Hi-Tc superconducting cables,
annoyed them by showing random lightwave network architectures
performed as well as carefully sculpted ones, and puzzled them with
odd applications of cellular automata. In 1990 when Arno
(Penzias) told everyone in "Area 11" to go to academe if they were
not keenly interested in the corporate bottom line (including his
Nobel partner Bob
[Wilson]), Chris was congratulated on his timing as he joined
the E&CE at Rutgers University the very next week. He is
currently a Professor
of Electrical & Computer Engineering and a
Fellow
of the IEEE, cited "for contributions to wireless
communication systems
theory." 
Q.E.D.) to his eyes when
informed:)
E&CE and SoE Undergrads for your unflagging support!.
Chris can be reached at crose
AT
winlab dot rutgers dot edu.
Research:A Different Type of Cellular Communication: After
submitting a proposal on communication
theory
in biological systems to the
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 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. 9/1/2008: The proposal has been funded! Here are the reviews (with which I very much agree in almost all aspects). Thank you panelists whoever you are! Your encouragement (and suggestions/warnings) are duly noted and greatly appreciated. We vacillate between exhilaration and professional terror -- not a bad thing! Nothing ventured, nothing gained. 12/12/2009: Update -- a pivotal, but devilish problem is beating us about the head and face. However, we sense it's tiring out. 1/5/2010: NY Times profile of Mina Bissell and her work on the relationship between tissue architecture and cancer. Mina's work is what captivated me a few years back. Those genotypically malignant cells that stay quiet in normal tissue somehow know when they reside in a normal architecture and when they do not. This is an important (and new) communication problem if ever there was one. 5/3/2010: Mina Bissell elected to NAS!!!! Stockholm next! 7/29/2010: Here's an animation of (one aspect of) the molecular communication problem courtesy of Ruochen Song. 10/16/2010: Living things are so beautiful and precise that there must be a mathematics that describes them. Information theory is that mathematics. Tom Schneider, NIH Publication Trickle
Adinkras  The following "summary slide" that ties together the above threads from biology to fundamental descriptions of the universe lies somewhere between profound and ludicrous, but it's so much fun I decided to post it here anyway:  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 (since at least 2003 starting with an un-responded-to letter to William Safire of the NY Times and following up with an extremely weak talk I gave at Google in 2006 ) 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 ex-M.I.T. engineer named James McLurkin when he was a "kid". He's now a rising star at Rice. 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 SummaryAchieving
Innovative
and
Reliable
Services
in
Unlicensed
Spectrum. A National
Science Foundation collaboration with the Quello Center
at Michigan State
|
]
My Son
is
trying to become "The Future of
Night Life" with his startup Nite-Fly.
I helped around
the technical edges, but am amazed at the number of hats Evan has
had
to wear already. If he's as successful as he could be, I'm
hoping
for an early retirement. First NYC then the world!
). 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?
Here's Randal's
wikipedia
page.
My "Big
Brother" S. James
Gates, Jr., the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at UMD,
has been
appointed to President Obama's Council
of
Advisors
on
Science
and
Technology (PCAST for short). Jim was
actually a "big brother" (and a legend) for close to a generation
of
students who came through MIT in the '70s and early '80s. (Shirley Jackson
-- current president of RPI -- is another MIT legend who's been
appointed to the PCAST as well). Jim is an amateur Einstein
historian who focuses on Einstein's stance on human rights.
Jim
also has ideas on diversity in the STEM fields, espoused in a talk
given
at Rutgers in February 2011. Want more
information?
Both Jim
and Shirley
have Wikipedia pages.
My
"Brother" Emery
Brown is a big deal professor in the Harvard/MIT
program in
Cambridge. We were antipodal undergrads (Emery was a Harvard brat
while I was an MIT gnerd) and graduate students together. We
also vied for lifer status (Emery won
that one ). His area is anesthesiology as this
delightful
New
York
Times Profile shows. However, what many do not realize
is
that Emery's main research passion is something that knocks
directly
on the door of one of the biggest Big Questions there is: what
is
consciousness? Emery's experimental work considers how
mental
state
relates to measurable electrical phenomena in the brain -- of
rats, so
there's no need to go out and buy helmets and tin foil hats ...
yet.
And as you might have already guessed, Em has a
wikipedia page.
My "Little Brother" Todd Coleman is a newly minted Associate Professor with Tenure at UCSD in Bioengineering after successfully luring him from the corn (UIUC). He is a true academic star and not only scary smart, but scary driven and scary savvy. Here's a nice recent profile of Todd. His area is information theory applied to biological (mostly electrical) signals. Whether he wins a Nobel or creates a business empire only time will tell. Here's a recent Science paper of his that's causing somewhat of a rage in non-invasive bioelectrical signal sensing. I suspect a few more of these types of bombshells will be forthcoming soon. I'm delightedly proud (and somewhat in awe) of Todd.
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