ECE Associate Professor Anand D. Sarwate has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society for 2024 to 2025.

The Information Theory Society established the Distinguished Lecturers Program in 2009 to promote interest in information theory by supporting chapters who wish to invite prominent information theory researchers to give talks at their events. The Society aims to maintain ten Distinguished Lecturers each serving for two year terms. Typically, the ITSoc Distinguished Lecturers program provides funding for airfare and travel, and the local chapter funds accommodation and local expenses. If traveling to a different continent, visits to two locations are required. The distinguished lectures should be freely accessible to the public.

The selection criteria are: (a) the quality of the candidates’ contributions to research in information theory and related areas, and (b) the ability of the candidates to deliver an excellent lecture to a broad audience. The candidates may be from any geographic region and any organization, e.g., academia, industry, or government. Nominations that promote diversity are encouraged. The Distinguished Lecturers are typically members of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Current Rutgers faculty and former PhD students have also been ITSOC Distinguished Lecturers: current faculty Emina Soljanin (2015-2016) and Roy Yates (2019-2021), and former PhD students Sennur Ulukus (2018-2019), Aylin Yener (2019-2021), and Lalitha Sankar (2021-2022).

Congratulations to Anand!

ECE Assistant Professor Zhao Zhang has received an award from NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC). The project is “Diamond: Democratizing Large Neural Network Model Training for Science”. The total value is $2,999,520, of which $949,528 is the Rutgers portion for a three-year period starting Fall 2023. Rutgers University is the lead institute. 

The Diamond project is led by Zhao Zhang at Rutgers University with collaboration of University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Diamond is a service designed to democratize access to cutting-edge DL methods by abstracting the use of HPC resources. Diamond combines novel computer science research with translational computer science to reduce the significant barriers that impede adoption of DL methods in science. With Diamond, domain scientists can focus on the neural network architecture design to solve their domain-specific challenges without worrying about Cyberinfrastructure management. It provides a web service-enabled programming interface supporting the DL lifecycle from development to deployment and dissemination. It offers container configuration, automatic scaling for distributed training, hyper-parameter tuning, and model sharing. It also applies crucial performance optimizations, including planning for long training jobs, performance-aware model placement, cross-cluster training, and data management. 

Congratulations to Zhao!
 

The ECE Department is proud to announce that our upcoming new faculty, Aggelos Bletsas, has been elevated to IEEE Fellow 2024 with the following citation: 
for contributions to cooperative relaying and backscatter communication networks.

Congratulations to Aggelos for this mile-stone achievement!   We look forward to having him join us in January 2024.