USC - Communication Sciences Institue

CSI News Log

April 3, 2007
	Ph.D. Student Matthew Brennan receives NSF Fellowship Matthew Brennan, a CSI Ph.D. student, has received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship. Matt received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is currently completing his first year of graduate studies at USC.
January 3, 2007
	Urbashi Mitra elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Professor Urbashi Mitra has been elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The IEEE Fellow title honors people with outstanding professional and technical achievements in the broad fields of electrical engineering. IEEE is the leading technical organization in these fields, with 39 professional societies and publication of 128 transactions, journals and magazines representing a wide spectrum of technical interests. The IEEE traces its history to 1884 and has approximately 365,000 members in over 150 countries.
October 20, 2006
	Work by Todd Brun, Igor Devetak and Min-Hsiu Hsieh Appears in Science Work by two faculty members and a student of the Communication Sciences Institute has appeared in the October 20, 2006 issue of the prestigious journal Science. The paper ``Correcting quantum errors with entanglement'' presents a new class of entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes which generalize the standard stabilizer codes which are widely used in quantum computation and quantum information theory. These codes have an algebraic structure similar to stabilizer codes, which are included as a special case.
	There are well-known constructions which can be used to construct quantum error-correcting codes from classical linear codes; but these constructions can only be used for classical codes which satisfy a particular constraint (dual-containing codes). Entanglement-assisted codes, by constrast, have no such restriction. This may make it possible to construct straightforwardly quantum versions of high-performance modern codes (such as Turbo or LDPC codes), which has proven difficult within the standard stabilizer formalism.
September 13, 2006
	Giuseppe Caire Receives a 2006 Okawa Foundation Research Grant Giuseppe Caire, Professor of Electrical Engineering, is a recipient of a 2006 Research Grant from the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications. The Okawa Foundation was established in Japan in 1986 to provide funding for and give recognition to new studies in the information and telecommunications fields. The Okawa Foundation Grant recognizes and supports Prof. Caire's research on the topic "Understanding and Implementation of Shannon-Theoretic Multiuser Wireless Systems."
April 4, 2006
	Ph.D. Student Nick Richard receives NSF Fellowship Nick Richard, a CSI Ph.D. student, has received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship. Nick received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is currently completing his first year of graduate studies at USC.
March 23, 2006
	Prof. Todd Brun Promoted to Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Todd Brun has been promoted to Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, with tenure. Prof. Brun's research is in quantum information processing, computation and communication. He has done outstanding work exploring the interplay between the theoretical, computational and application aspects of these fields.
March 2, 2006
	Igor Devetak receives NSF CAREER AWARD Igor Devetak, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Award for the project "A High-Level Framework for a Unified Treatment of Quantum and Classical Information Theory and Thermodynamics." The goal of this work is to develop a modular mathematical formalism for quantum and classical information theory, in which coding theorems are phrased as inequalities between information processing resources such as entanglement and quantum communication. The NSF CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution.
January 24, 2006
	Alan Willner Elected President of of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) On January 1, 2006, Alan Willner became the President of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) for a 2 year term (www.ieee.org and www.i-leos.org). The IEEE LEOS has approximately 8,000 members world-wide, approximately 75% of LEOS members have a Ph.D. degree, and nearly half the members are from outside the United States. The IEEE LEOS sponsors or co-sponsors over 30 international technical conferences and 6 technical journal publications.
January 23, 2006
	Viterbi Ultrawideband Specialist Wins IEEE Sumner Medal Professor Robert A. Scholtz has been named a co-recipient of the 2006 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award "for pioneering contributions to ultra-wide band communications science and technology." Scholtz has been a faculty member in the Viterbi School department of electrical engineering since 1963 and now holds the school's Fred H. Cole chair. For nearly a decade he has been studying how to use ultrawideband--brief signal pulses spread over a very wide band of the radio spectrum--for imaging, data transmission, and other tasks, and he now directs a research unit specializing in the field, the USC UltRA Laboratory. Scholtz shares the honor with his frequent ultra-wideband research collaborator and co-author, Moe Win of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
September, 2005
	Giuseppe Caire and Daniel Lidar join the CSI Faculty Giuseppe Caire has joined USC-CSI as a Professor of Electrical Engineering. Prof. Caire's research is in the area of wireless communications and information theory. Prof. Caire received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1994 from Politencnico di Torino, Italy. His previous position was with the Eurecom Institute, Sophia-Antipolis, France.
	Daniel Lidar has joined CSI and has a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Chemestry departments at USC. Prof. Lidar received his Ph.D. in 1997 from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests are in the areas of quantum control and quantum computing. His previous position was with the University of Toronto.
January 24, 2004
	2005 CSI Review to Coincide with Viterbi Conference This year's CSI Research Review will coincide with a series of events to be held March 8-9, 2005. This includes the Viterbi Conference: Advancing Technology through Communication Sciences, a 1.5 day technical symposium. The annual Viterbi Lecture will take place on the evening of March 8 and will be given by Prof. Jacob Ziv of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. The Viterbi library at the newly dedicated Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering will also be dedicated. For more information on this event, see the Viterbi School of Engineering page.
January 19, 2005
	Brun receives NSF CAREER AWARD Prof. Todd Brun has received the Faculty Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation for work on "Realistic models and simulations of systems for quantum information processing". The (NSF) CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution.
September 7, 2004
	Andrew Viterbi and Igor Devetak join the CSI Faculty Andrew Viterbi has been named USC Presidential Chair Professor. As a co-founder of Linkabit and Qualcomm, Inc., Dr. Viterbi has been instrumental in transitioning advances in coding, information theory, and digital communications to government and commercial communication systems. Dr. Viterbi received his Ph.D. from USC.
	Igor Devetak will officially join the CSI faculty in January 2005. Prof. Devetak received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 2002. His research interests are in the area of quantum information theory. He comes to USC after completing a post-doctoral research appointment at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center under the supervision of Dr. Charles Bennett.
March 2, 2004
	USC Engineering is now the Viterbi School USC has announced that the School of Engineering received a $52 million naming gift from Andrew and Erna Viterbi. In remarks during the ceromony held March 2, Dr. Viterbi mentioned his interaction his CSI faculty over the years as a rewarding connection to the university. Dr. Viterbi received his Ph.D. from USC in Electrical Engineering.
February 26, 2004
	Successful CSI Review Representatives of fourteen corporations and research organizations attended the 2004 CSI Research Review on Feb. 26, 2004. The program included a Keynote talk by Dr. Roberto Padovani, CTO of Qualcomm, Inc., research presentations by six CSI faculty, and 24 poster presentations by CSI graduate students. More information on the review can be found here with presentation videos and slides available in the affiliates-only section.
January 28, 2004
	Zhen Zhang named IEEE Fellow Professor Zhen Zhang has been named IEEE Fellow for "contributions to source coding theory and information inequalities".
January 15, 2004
	Alan Willner named IEEE Fellow Professor Alan Willner has been named IEEE Fellow for "contributions to the fundamental understanding and mitigation of key limitations of lightwave transmission systems and networks". Prof. Willner is also a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.
October 30, 2003
	Keith Chugg and Mingrui Zhu win MILCOM best paper award Professor Keith Chugg and his Ph.D. student Mingrui Zhu were awarded the Fred W. Ellersick Award for best paper in the unclassified program at the IEEE Conference on Military Communications (MILCOM). The paper, entitled "Iterative Message Passing Techniques for Rapid Code Acquisition," was presented at MILCOM in Boston, on October 16, 2003 by Prof. Chugg. The work was supported by the Army Research Office via a Multi-University Research Inititive (MURI) grant lead by Professor Robert Scholtz.
October 15, 2003
	Urbashi Mitra Part of Team Awarded $5.5 Million for Wireless Network Research USC, in partnership with five University of California campuses and the University of Delaware, has won a National Science Foundation Networking Research Testbed grant of over $5.5 million. WHYNET, a wireless hybrid networked testbed, will provide a testbed for researchers to evaluate the impact of new technologies on application level performance, using scalable and realistic scenarios. USC will be providing infrastructure and research on the Ultrawideband portion of the testbed.
August 28, 2003
	Robert Scholtz Appointed to The Fred H. Cole Professorship in Engineering The Fred H. Cole Professorship in Engineering will be held by Robert Scholtz, professor of electrical engineering systems. A faculty member for 40 years, the much-honored Scholtz began the first university research program in ultra-wideband radio, a promising technology with applications in wireless networks, security systems and consumer electronics. C. Nikias, dean of the School of Engineering said: “Bob Scholtz has created and mentored a credible and successful research effort in both spread spectrum communications and ultra-wideband radio that reaches far beyond the wrought iron fences of our campus.”
July 3, 2003
	Lloyd Welch Presents the Shannon Lecture at ISIT 2003 in Yokohama, Japan Emeritus Professor Lloyd R. Welch, recipient of the 2003 Claude E. Shannon Award, presented the Shannon Lecture at the International Symposium on Information Theory, held in Yokohama, Japan, June 29-July 4, 2004. The Shannon Award is the highest honor granted by the IEEE's Information Theory Society. It is given for "consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory".
May 9, 2003
	Robert Scholtz Wins 2003 Shelkunoff Transactions Prize Paper Professor Robert A. Scholtz and his coauthors Jean-Marc Cramer and Moe Win have been chosen as the recipients of the 2003 A. Shelkunoff Transactions Prize Paper Award of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society.
April 30, 2003
	Sol Golomb Elected to National Academy of Sciences Sol Golomb, a 40-year faculty member, becomes only the third person affiliated with the School to hold dual membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. USC School of Engineering - Article
March 3, 2003
	Alan Willner's Optical Communications Lab Awarded $3.6 Millon Grant A team of faculty from five major research groups in the School of Enineering recently received a $3.6 million award from the Defense Advanced Research projects Agency (DARPA).