Student Speakers

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 3: Networks, CSL B02
January 27, 2012 - 10:30am

Biography:

Rachit Agarwal is a PhD student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works with Brighten Godfrey and Matthew Caesar on networked systems and theory. His current research is focused on design and implementation of systems that are memory constrained. He received his BTech degree from IIT Kanpur in electrical engineering. He received 2010 UIUC Wang-Chung research award for excellence in research and was listed in Incomplete list of teachers ranked as excellent in Spring 2010.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 4: Systems and Hardware Design, B02 CSL
January 27, 2012 - 3:40pm

Biography:

Aaron Becker (S’06) received his B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Iowa State University in 2005, and his M.S. in 2008 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 2006, he has been with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is a lab developer for the College of Engineering Control Systems Laboratory and a Research Assistant in the Coordinated Science Laboratory.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Computer Science
Session 4: Systems and Hardware Design, B02 CSL
January 27, 2012 - 2:30pm

Biography:

Leonardo Bobadilla received the B.S. degree in Computer Engineering in 2005 and the M.S. degree in Statistics in 2008 both from the National University of Colombia. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research interests include minimal sensing for robotics, motion planning, planning algorithms, and cyber-physical systems.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 1: Communications and Information Theory, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 11:20am

Biography:

Daniel Cullina received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 2009. He is now a MS/PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His advisor is Professor Negar Kiyavash. His research interests include the combinatorial aspects of coding theory and networks.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 3: Networks, CSL B02
January 27, 2012 - 10:10am

Biography:

Javad Ghaderi is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Coordinated Science Lab., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada in 2008, and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran in 2006. His research interests include wireless networks, network control and optimization, and network information theory.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Aerospace Engineering
Session 2: Control and Power Systems, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 3:00pm

Biography:

 Abhishek Gupta is currently pursuing his PhD in Aerospace Engineering at UIUC. He has completed his Bachelor of Technology from IIT, Bombay, India in 2009 and his MS from UIUC in 2011. His research interests are Stochastic controls, Game theory and security in networked control systems.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 4: Systems and Hardware Design, B02 CSL
January 27, 2012 - 2:50pm

Biography:

Taylor Johnson is a fourth year graduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works in the Coordinated Science Lab with Prof. Sayan Mitra. He completed his MS at Illinois in May 2010 and earned a BSEE from Rice University in May 2008. His current research focus is developing automated methods for developmental verification of distributed cyber-physical systems using techniques and tools from control theory, hybrid systems, optimization, and software verification.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 1: Communications and Information Theory, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 10:30am

Biography:

Peter Kairouz was born on September 24, 1988 in Beirut, Lebanon. He studied electrical and computer engineering from 2006 to 2010 at the American University of Beirut. He is the recipient of the Benjamin Franklin scholarship from the United States Agency for International Development and the Distinguished Graduating Student Award from the electrical and computer engineering department at the American University of Beirut. Currently, he is an Ms./PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is working on multi-mode optical fiber communications and iterative detection and decoding for MIMO systems. He is also interested in reduced complexity graphical model algorithms for machine learning applications and communication systems.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 3: Networks, CSL B02
January 27, 2012 - 10:50am

Biography:

Sreeram Kannan is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois. He obtained his Master of Engineering in telecommunication at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and his Bachelors of Engineering at the College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University. Sreeram is a recipient of the S.V.C. Aiya medal from the Indian Institute of Science (2008), a recipient of a Qualcomm Roberto Padovani Scholarship (2010), recipient of Intel India Student Research Contest first prize (2006),and a recipient of the Qualcomm Cognitive Radio Contest first prize (2010).

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering
Session 1: Communications and Information Theory, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 11:40am

Biography:

Farzaneh Khajouei received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering in 2010 from Sharif University of Technology. She is currently an MS/PhD student in Enterprise Systems Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her advisor is Professor Negar Kiyavash. Her research lies in the area of coding theory. She is interested in developing algorithms for optimization problems in graphs that arise in coding theory.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 4: Systems and Hardware Design, B02 CSL
January 27, 2012 - 3:20pm

Biography:

Lingyi Liu received the B.S. degree in computer science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 2004, and the M.S. degree in computer architecture from Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in 2007. He worked as design and verification engineer in Analogix Semiconductor between 2007 and 2009. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current research interests include hardware and software verification, system level design methodology.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 1: Communications and Information Theory, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 10:10am

Biography:

Rohit Naini is pursuing his Ph.D under the guidance of Prof. Pierre Moulin. His research interests include Information Theory, Audio and Video Signal Processing, Machine Learning and Computer Vision.  He received his Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology- Madras in 2008 and his Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois in 2010.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Coordinated Science Laboratory
Session 2: Control and Power Systems, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 4:30pm

Biography:

Sirin Nitinawarat obtained the B.S.E.E. degree from Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, with first class honors, and the M.S.E.E. degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, College Park, in December 2010.  He is now a posdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Coordinated Science Laboratory.  He was a finalist for the best student paper award for the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory which was held at Austin, Texas in 2010.  His research interests are in information theory, estimation and detection theory, Markov decision processes and coding theory.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 1: Communications and Information Theory, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 10:50am

Biography:

Thomas Riedl received the B.Sc. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany, in 2008 and the M.Sc. degree in electrical and computer engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Urbana, IL., in 2009. He is currently a PhD student in the department of electrical and computer engineering at UIUC and a guest PhD student in the school of communication and computer sciences at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). His advisors are Prof. Andrew Singer and Prof. Rüdiger Urbanke. His research interests are in signal detection and estimation and information theory.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 2: Control and Power Systems, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 2:40pm

Biography:

Ehsan Shafiee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory and working on energy markets and applications of stochastic control in them. Ehsan obtained his M.S. in Economics in 2009, and B.Sc. in 2006, major in Electrical Engineering and minor in Petroleum Engineering(Reservoir) all from Sharif University of technology, Iran.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 4: Systems and Hardware Design, B02 CSL
January 27, 2012 - 2:10pm

Biography:

Nathan Shemonski is a Ph.D. student in the Biophotonics Imaging Laboratory (BIL) at UIUC under Prof. Stephen Boppart. Nathan’s research is focused on improving computational imaging techniques and streamlining them through implementation in real-time systems. Prior to joining BIL, Nathan earned his M.S. degree in control systems under the guidance of Prof. Tamer Başar, and his B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Washington University in St. Louis and Elon University, respectively.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Session 3: Networks, CSL B02
January 27, 2012 - 11:40am

Biography:

David Stein is pursuing his MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UIUC.  He is working with Professor Yi Lu at the CSL to research performance issues in cloud computing and particularly in social networks.  He obtained his BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Ohio State University.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Aerospace Engineering
Session 2: Control and Power Systems, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 3:50pm

Biography:

 Takashi Tanaka received his Bachelors degree in Aerospace Engineering (AE) from University of Tokyo in 2006, where he worked for small satellite projects under Prof. Shinichi Nakasuka. He obtained his M.S. degree in AE from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2009 under Prof. Cedric Langbort. He is currently a Ph.D candidate in AE at UIUC. His research interest is broad in system/control theory and optimization, including decentralized control, robust control, positive system theory, polynomial optimization and compressed sensing.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Coordinated Science Laboratory
Session 2: Control and Power Systems, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 3:20pm

Biography:

Behrouz Touri received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran in 2006, his M.S. degree in Communications, Systems & Electronics from Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany in 2008, and his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011. He is currently a post-doctoral research associate with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include study of random dynamics in complex networks, decentralized optimization, control, and estimation, coding theory, and optimization theory. He is a finalist for the best student paper award of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 2010. His PhD thesis is recently chosen to be published by Springer in its distinguished theses series.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Computer Science
Session 3: Networks, CSL B02
January 27, 2012 - 11:20am

Biography:

Lewis Tseng is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His advisor is Prof. Nitin Vaidya and is part of the wireless Networking Group in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. His research interests lies the area of fault-tolerant computing in distributed systems and wireless networks. He received BS in Computer Science and BA LAS in Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with highest honors.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Organization: Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering
Session 2: Control and Power Systems, B02 CSL
January 26, 2012 - 4:10pm

Biography:

 Yunwen Xu received her B.E. degree in Automation from Tsinghua University in China. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Department of Industrial Engineering at UIUC. She works with Prof. Carolyn Beck and Prof. Srinivasa Salapaka. Her research interests include combinatorial optimization problems, model reduction and machine learning.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________