Distinguished Seminar Series: Ashutosh Sabharwal: Empowering 3Rs of Research via Open Wireless Platforms & Testbeds

Distinguished Seminar Series: Ashutosh Sabharwal, of Rice University

Time: Nov. 17, 2:30 to 3:30 p.m.

Hosted by: Ohio State ECE Professor Lee Potter

Topic: Rice RENEW: Empowering 3Rs of Research via Open Wireless Platforms & Testbeds

Watch the Event Recap Now: https://osu.zoom.us/rec/share/fTHeJSQB9BYW6PmLj3Cz0dKQkOT3iV8NN-ctcNsWp… 

Prof. Ashutosh Sabharwal is Earnest Dell Butcher Professor of Engineering; Department Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering; Director, Rice RENEW (renew.rice.edu); Director, Expeditions in Computing; Founding Director, Rice Scalable Health Labs.

Abstract:

Wireless networking has been a major success story of engineering, and as a field of research, its future continues to be even brighter than its past. The field will need many breakthroughs, by the whole research eco-system, to achieve the grand vision of next-generation networks. Thus, it is important to accelerate the research eco-system while ensuring three R's of the scientific research: repeatability, replicability, and reproducibility. In the first part of our talk, we reflect on our (personal) journey in developing and disseminating open-source wireless research platforms, and how flexible platforms have shaped what research questions we can pose. Both successes and shortcomings from the past are at the heart of our next major step: the POWDER-RENEW platform, designed to be the world's first open platform for next-generation massive-MIMO wireless research, with an emphasis to empower the 3R's for wireless research. In the second part of our talk, we reflect on our recent experimental research results in massive MIMO, to appreciate how flexible platforms can lead to novel research insights, and potentially shape the future wireless research and standards.

Bio:

Ashutosh Sabharwal works in two areas. His first area of research is wireless. He is the founder of WARP project (warp.rice.edu), an open-source project which is now in use at more than 125 research groups worldwide, and have been used by more than 450 research articles. His second area of research is healthcare technologies. He is currently leading several NSF-funded center-scale projects, notably Rice RENEW (open-source massive MIMO) and “See below the skin” for non-invasive bio-imaging. He founded the Rice Scalable Health Labs (http://sh.rice.edu), which is developing a new engineering area called “bio-behavioral sensing.” His research has led to four commercial spinoffs (one in wireless and three in healthcare). He received 2017 IEEE Jack Neubauer Memorial Award, 2018 IEEE Advances in Communications Award, 2019 ACM Test-of-time Award and 2019 ACM MobiCom Community Contribution Award.

Presidential Fellow Presentation: Xingyu Zhou

Nov. 17 from 1 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

"Asymptotically Optimal Load Balancing in Heavy Traffic"

Zoom link: https://go.osu.edu/presidential_fellowship_winner_seminar 

Abstract: Load balancing, which is responsible for dispatching jobs on parallel servers, is a key component in computer networks and distributed computing systems, with broad applications in Web service, cloud computing, distributed cashing systems, and grid computing. In this talk, I will briefly talk about some key contributions in load balancing during my PhD research. In particular, I will first present the necessary and sufficient conditions for delay optimality under pull-based load balancing schemes, which directly resolve a long-standing open conjecture. Then, I will introduce a new framework called LED (Local-Estimation-Driven), which enables us to design optimal load balancing schemes for heterogeneous systems with multiple dispatchers. This result also sheds light on load balancing under delayed information. Finally, I will present a new heavy-traffic analysis of load balancing based on Stein’s method, which allows us to establish stronger results under various scenarios while with a simple template technique. 

Bio: Xingyu Zhou is currently a Presidential Fellow at Ohio State University, advised by Prof. Ness Shroff. He will join the ECE department at Wayne State University as an Assistant Professor next January.  His primary research focus is on applied probability with a focus on load balancing in large-scale data center systems. His research results have not only drawn interest from academics (e.g., invited talks at Caltech, CMU and INFORMS Annual Meeting), but also attracted the attention of industry companies (e.g., Facebook Core System team). He obtained his B.S from BUPT and M.S. from Tsinghua University, both in the Department of Electrical Engineering and with the highest honor. He is also the recipient of various awards including the Outstanding Graduate Award of Beijing city, Distinguished Dissertation Award from BUPT and Tsinghua, National Scholarship of China, and the Academic Rising Star Award from Tsinghua.

Learn more about Zhou's work and watch a brief video of him discussing his research:

• Grad Student Solves Decades-Old Data Queue Conjecture