Rice Wireless researchers, Profs. Ashutosh Sabharwal and Santiago Segarra, are collaborating with Dr. Chris Dick at Nvidia to develop machine learning tools for massive MIMO systems.
In a new NSF project which is a collaboration with three universities, Prof. Ashutosh Sabharwal and his team will design and analyze new machine-to-machine (M2M) network protocols based on the key concept that the quality of service of the machine-based traffic is largely determined by how fresh the information can be delivered to the destination, instead of the sheer quantity of the delivered messages. The team consists Profs. Chih-Chun Wang (Purdue University), Bo Ji (Virginia Tech) and Ness B. Shroff (The Ohio State University).
In collaboration with Northeastern University, Prof. Ashutosh Sabharwal and his team will develop a software infrastructure for dataset generation and create a centralized searchable database that democratizes access to wireless datasets for the entire research community. The Northeastern team includes Profs. Kaushik Chowdhury, Tommaso Melodia and Francesco Restuccia.
Rice University wireless researchers have received a $1.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop an open-source platform to meet the urgent need of developing and validating machine-learning (ML) based innovations for future wireless networks and mobile applications.
The goal of the project led by Yingyan Lin, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering, is to develop a first-of-its-kind community platform to turbocharge the research process of inventing novel ML-based techniques for intelligent wireless network management and optimization.
The project team includes Rahman Doost-Mohammady, Joe Cavallaro, Ang Chen and Ashutosh Sabharwal at Rice, and Atlas Wang at TAMU.
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Yasaman Ghasempour will be joining the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University as an Assistant Professor in 2021. She recently got her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University advised by Prof. Edward Knightly. She has received her Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University in 2016 and her Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Iran in 2014.
Her research interests include wireless communication and sensing, with a focus on emerging millimeter-wave and terahertz spectrum. Yasaman’s Ph.D. dissertation proposes ways to enhance directional networking by leveraging unique sensing capabilities of mmWave/THz wireless signals, namely, the ability to access a large swath of spectrum flexibly, sparse scattering, and the possibility of directionality in small form factors by using large antenna arrays or unexplored high-frequency antenna structures. She has published in Nature Communications as well as top-tier IEEE and ACM conferences and journals. Yasaman has been named an EECS rising star in 2019. She is also the recipient of Texas Instruments Distinguished Fellowship among multiple IEEE/ACM societies awards.
Ashutosh Sabharwal is co-chairing and Rahman Doost-Mohammady is part of the TPC for the first workshop on Open Software-Defined Wireless Networks. The workshop is co-located with ACM Mobisys 2020 and will be held virtually on June 19, 2020. More info on this workshop is found here.
Qualcomm demonstrated full-duplex MIMO as part of their next-generation cellular offerings; see news release. Novel scalable full-duplex 
MIMO techniques, especially for antenna arrays with large number of antennas like those in Massive MIMO antenna arrays for 5G networks, were proposed by Sabharwal and his team in a sequence of papers; see SoftNull and JointNull. The papers showed that massive MIMO has sufficient degrees of freedom to enable MIMO full-duplex without adding new analog hardware to existing systems that are not designed for in-band full-duplex systems. The papers used channels measurements using Rice Argos massive MIMO testbed that was built using Rice WARP.
Starting January 2020, Rahman Doost-Mohammady is appointed as a research faculty at the ECE department of Rice University. Since 2016, Rahman has been at Rice as a Postdoctoral Research Engineer busy with building ArgosNet, the world’s first real-world massive MIMO network testbed at Rice and since 2018 has been the technical lead for the RENEW project, an NSF PAWR platform. He will have dual roles: research novel directions for next-generation wireless systems and continue his role in the RENEW project.
Rahman received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University in 2015. He has obtained his Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Delft University of Technology in 2009 and his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Iran in 2006. His research interests include wireless networking and architecture for next-generation wireless systems.
Full-duplex communications, pioneered by Rice Wireless group, has been adopted by Cable Labs as part of their next generation cable data modem standards. The new standard, DOCSIS 4.0, will allow the cable industry to support symmetric gigabits/sec data rates. See the full announcement here.