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About Me

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I work as a part of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) under supervision of Prof. Muriel Medard and Prof. Manya Ghobadi. I received my Ph.D. degree from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2019 where I worked with Prof. Lara Dolecek as part of the Laboratory for Robust Information Systems (LORIS). I received my M.Sc and B.Sc degrees from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Tehran in 2015 and 2012, respectively.

I am currently on the academic job market for tenure-track positions starting in Fall 2023!

Research Interests

My research interests broadly include coding and information theory, signal processing, and statistical learning. My research addresses various practical risk factors in data communication and processing over large-scale distributed information systems. These issues include but are not limited to the failures in communication and computation, bottlenecks and system heterogeneity, resource costs, and privacy concerns, and arise in many modern applications such as the next generations of communication networks (5G and beyond), cloud infrastructure, smart cities, etc. I tackle these challenges from an information-theoretical perspective to propose practical solutions that have theoretical motivations and guarantees in terms of complexity, latency, and throughput.

Announcements

  • Our paper, "InfoShape: Task-based neural data shaping via mutual information" is accepted to appear in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2023. This is a wonderful joint work with William Wu and Dr. Muriel Medard.
  • Together with Dr. Alejandro Cohen, Dr. Muriel Medard, and Dr. Shlomo Shamai,  our paper has been elected as one of the two best short papers at CloudNet 2022!
  • Our paper, "Distributed computations with layered resolution" is accepted to appear in IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet) 2022. This is a wonderful joint work with Dr. Alejandro Cohen, Dr. Muriel Medard, and Dr. Shlomo Shamai.
  • Our paper "A Unified, SNR-Aware SC-LDPC Code Design with Applications to Magnetic Recording" is published in IEEE Transactions on Magnetics (TMAG). This is joint work with Dr. Eshed Ram, Dr. Yuval Cassuto, and Dr. Lara Dolecek. I will give an invited talk on this work at IEEE TMRC 2022.
  • William (Bill) Wu, MIT M.Eng student whom I co-advised with Prof. Muriel Medard, graduated. Bill's thesis was on "Neural Data Shaping and Evaluation via Mutual Information Estimation". Good luck Bill!
  • Our paper, "A bivariate invariance principle" is accepted to appear in IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) 2022. This is a wonderful joint work with Alexander Mariona, Dr. Rafael D’Oliveira, and Dr. Muriel Medard.
  • Together with Prof. Muriel Medard, Dr. Vipindev Adat, Dr. Peihong Yuan, and Dr. Hadi Sarieddeen, we are hosting and mentoring several high-school students to work with us in the area of reliable and low-latency communications, Summer 2022.
  • Andrea Jessica David Jaba, MIT M.Eng student whom I co-advised with Prof. Muriel Medard, graduted. Andrea's thesis was on "Random Sequential Encoders for Private Data Release in NLP". Good luck Andrea!
  • Our paper, "Stream iterative distributed coded computing for learning applications in heterogeneous systems" is accepted! I will present this exciting work at IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) 2022, link, Stay tuned!
  • I started my new job as a postdoctoral associate at RLE MIT where I work with Prof. Muriel Medard's research group.
  • I defended my Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Lara Dolecek in December 2019.
  • Our paper, "A three-stage approach for designing non-binary spatially-coupled codes for Flash memories" won the Memorable Paper Award at the 2018 Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (NVMW), in the area
    of devices, coding, and information theory (news on UCLA ECE website).
  • I won the prestigious 2018-2019 Dissertation Year Fellowship (DYF) at UCLA.