Syed Jafar

Syed Ali Jafar is an Indian-American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He works at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously worked at Lucent Bell Labs, Qualcomm and Hughes Software Systems. His research interests include multi-user information theory, wireless communications and network coding.[1] He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2014 "for contributions to analyzing the capacity of wireless communication networks"[2] and won the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2015 "for his discoveries in interference alignment in wireless networks, changing the field’s thinking about how these networks should be designed."[3]

Career

He studied electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi, where he earned a B.Tech in 1997.[4][1] He then studied electrical engineering in the United States, receiving an MSc at the California Institute of Technology in 1999 and then a PhD at Stanford University in 2003.[3][1] He then worked at University of California, Irvine, while occasionally also holding positions at Lucent Bell Labs, Qualcomm and Hughes Software Systems.[1] He studied communications networks and solved problems in network information theory, and made numerous discoveries in the area of wireless communication and networks, including important discoveries in interference alignment in wireless networks.[3]

Interference alignment

An important discovery in wireless network design is interference alignment.[3] Specialized applications were previously studied by Yitzhak Birk and Tomer Kol for an index coding problem in 1998, and then by Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali and Abolfazl S. Motahari in the specialized context of the X channel. Interference alignment was eventually established as a general principle by Jafar and Viveck R. Cadambe in 2008, when they introduced "a mechanism to align an arbitrarily large number of interferers, leading to the surprising conclusion that wireless networks are not essentially interference limited." This led to the adoption of interference alignment in the design of wireless networks.[5]

Jafar explained:

My research group crystallized the concept of interference alignment and showed that through interference alignment, it is possible for everyone to access half of the total bandwidth free from interference. Initially this result was shown under a number of idealized assumptions that are typical in theoretical studies. We have since continued to work on peeling off these idealizations one at a time, to bring the theory closer to practice. Along the way we have made numerous discoveries through the lens of interference alignment, which reveal new and powerful signaling schemes.[1]

According to New York University senior researcher Paul Horn:

Syed Jafar revolutionized our understanding of the capacity limits of wireless networks. He demonstrated the astounding result that each user in a wireless network can access half of the spectrum without interference from other users, regardless of how many users are sharing the spectrum. This is a truly remarkable result that has a tremendous impact on both information theory and the design of wireless networks.[3]

References

1. "Meet the Scientists: Syed A. Jafar". Armed With Science. United States Department of Defense. August 24, 2015. Retrieved 23 September 2019.
2. "IEEE Fellows 2014". IEEE Communications Society. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Retrieved 22 September 2019.
3. "2015 National Laureates". Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. June 30, 2015. Retrieved 22 September 2019.
4. "UCI's Syed Ali Jafar wins $250,000 Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists". UCI News. University of California, Irvine. 30 June 2015. Retrieved 22 September 2019.
5. Jafar, Syed A. (2010). "Interference Alignment — A New Look at Signal Dimensions in a Communication Network". Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory. 7 (1): 1–134. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.707.6314. doi:10.1561/0100000047.