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." He is also a member of the Army
Science Board (2013--).
) to crash the party by climbing the
Adinkras scaffolding! Time will tell .... In the meantime,
here's a fun
talk I gave at ITA'13. Q.E.D.) to his eyes when
informed:)
E&CE and SoE Undergrads for your unflagging support!
It means a lot to an (increasingly) old man! . 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:  Here's a fun talk I gave at ITA'13. Post-talk comments make me think it's time to write a summary/tutorial paper to incite the roiling masses of young communication theorists and reinvigorate (overthrow!) the technical status quo!  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
|
| 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 |
]
My Son, Evan Rose,
tried to become "The Future
of Night Life" with his startup Nite-Fly. He found that nightlife providers are a scary bunch -- most such businesses fail within a year or so, so they're not exactly forward looking. He (and we -- looking to retire early ) are much more hopeful about Evan's current business. He's essentially seeking to become a hitech headhunter who provides various companies with what they need -- smart employees. In the process he's become a rather good web developer! Check out e-cruit!
Former student, Randal Pinkett,
founder of BCT Partners
and the Donald Trump Season
4 Apprentice (Google
Search) was absolutely spectacular as an undergraduate in our
department -- I remember him most for never letting us see him sweat
-- even when I made up an exam just for him (though I gave the exam
to the whole class ). 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). In December
2012 he was named
as a National Medal of Science winner. 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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