Pramod Viswanath
 |
Professor
Phone: 217 244 8999 |
Research
I have worked actively in wireless communications for well over a decade, with research involving building models to designing algorithms to system solutions to entrepreneurial and industrial implementations. I am interested in working on complex engineering systems in a holistic and ground-up way --I am partial to the theoretical and conceptual aspects of the engineering problems I work on. With wireless technology fairly mature, I am exploring a variety of other research arenas. A sampling of my current research projects:
Networking
- Data center switching -- algorithms for fast circuit switching
- Peer to peer networking -- deterministic algorithms with near optimal rate-delay guarantees under adversarial arrival/departures, Sigmetrics 2015.
- Interactive computation -- fundamental impossibility results for distributed communication complexity ITCS 2016.
Privacy
- Differential privacy: staircase mechanism cut+replaces Laplace mechanism and universally improves utility, optimal composition theorems.
- Metadata privacy: Rumor source hiding in social networks: Spy vs Spy formulation, Sigmetrics 2015 (best paper award).
- Ventrilocation: making LTE phone calls without revealing your location (too precisely).
Machine Learning and NLP
- Consistent estimation of mutual information for high dimensional real valued data
- Causality strength measurement
Past: Wireless Communication
I have worked on algorithms for scheduling users in cellular networks, MIMO algorithms, interference management solutions and a variety of topics in wireless communication over a decade and a half of research. I was one of the early designers of Flash-OFDM, the first OFDM based cellular system (at Flarion Technologies) and coauthored a popular book on wireless communication.