Title: Interference Alignment
Speaker: Syed Ali Jafar, Associate Professor, University of California Irvine
Abstract: The presentation surveys the advances in our understanding of the capacity of interference networks, following the connecting thread of interference alignment and highlighting the insights and intuition that emerge out of the recent results. Topics covered will include – the non-trivial nature of bandwidth and degrees of freedom metrics in a multiuser setting. The tradeoffs between accessible signaling dimensions – time, frequency, space and signal levels in a wireless network with multiple antenna nodes; interference alignment as a means to recover desired information when the number of equations is much smaller than the number of unknown variables. Conceptual examples to illustrate the principles behind interference alignment; asymptotic interference alignment; ergodic interference alignment; distributed interference alignment; blind interference alignment; and the combination of interference alignment and network coding for applications like multiple unicasts and distributed data storage repair.
Speaker Bio: Syed Ali Jafar received his B. Tech. from IIT Delhi, India, in 1997, M.S. from Caltech, USA, in 1999, and Ph.D. from Stanford, USA, in 2003, all in Electrical Engineering. His industry experience includes positions at Lucent Bell Labs, Qualcomm Inc. and Hughes Software Systems. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA USA. His research interests include multiuser information theory and wireless communications.
Dr. Jafar received the NSF CAREER award in 2006, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2008, the Information Theory Society paper award in 2009, the Maseeh Outstanding Research Award in 2010, and an IEEE GLOBECOM Best Paper Award in 2012. Dr. Jafar received the UC Irvine EECS Professor of the Year award four times, in 2006, 2009, 2011 and 2012, from the Engineering Students Council and the Teaching Excellence Award in 2012 from the School of Engineering. He was a University of Canterbury Erskine Fellow in 2010 and is an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2013-2014. Dr. Jafar was the inaugural instructor for the First Canadian School of Information Theory in 2011, a plenary speaker for various conferences and workshops including SPCOM 2010, CTW 2010 and SPAWC 2012. He served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications 2004 – 2009, for IEEE Communications Letters 2008-2009 and for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2009-2012.