Why the rage against Engage?

The Engage grant is a new NSERC initiative for kick-starting collaborations between industry and academia. The main features of these grants are: short duration (6 months max), limited value ($25,000 max), industry focus (an industrial partner, who will own all the IP, is mandatory), and quick decisions (6 week turnaround, which is only possible with no peer review). I found out on Friday that my Engage proposal would be funded; I'll write more about it as we publish, but the project is in the broad area of fractional resource sharing for femtocells, similar to the earlier work we've done on fractional cooperation (e.g., 1, 2, 3).

So imagine my surprise to learn that the CAUT has come out strongly opposed to Engage, passing the following resolution:

NSERC must remain a granting council that enables peer-reviewed fundamental research. Whereas linkages between industry and universities consistent with academic freedom are possible, the targeting of granting council funds to private industry’s needs erodes Canada’s capa­city to contribute to the general advancement of knowledge in the public interest.

Of course I'm biased because I'm a recipient of NSERC's largesse under this program. But CAUT's position is bizarre on a number of counts. First, it treats all scientific research as equally separate from industrial applications. In wireless communications, there is no tension between the "general advancement of knowledge" and "industry's needs" -- they are one and the same, because essentially all of the applications are industrial. Second, it assumes that only non-industrial research is in the public interest. Again, in wireless, it's the opposite -- the type of research that has a real impact, say by improving your mobile's performance (like this), is coming out of industrial labs, not out of academia. Third, CAUT has completely missed the point of this program: its limited scope, duration, and funding makes it only useful as a door-opener, to give a researcher an easy way to approach a company, and to give that company a low-risk way to say yes to a collaborative project. What's more, Engage grants can only be approved for companies and researchers that have never collaborated before, so this granting program can't be part of some great outsourcing of corporate R&D to universities.

My view on these projects is broadly held across engineering faculties. So CAUT is misunderstanding its membership by opposing the Engage grant, and promoting a "pure" vision of academia that is potentially harmful in some disciplines.

Molecular communication using Brownian motion with drift

I'm third author on this paper, and Sachin and Ravi rightly deserve most of the credit. However, we got a writeup in Technology Review, so I thought I would blog a bit about the paper.

In molecular communication, a transmitter sends a message to a receiver by releasing a pattern of molecules into a shared medium. One way to communicate using molecules is to use timing -- i.e., releasing a molecule at different times to express different messages. Using Brownian motion, the timing message is distorted by the random propagation time from transmitter to receiver.

My original work on molecular communication (1, 2) considered the case of drift-free Brownian motion. In this paper, we extend these results into Brownian motion with drift -- it's a much easier case to deal with, since the first arrival distribution without drift has a very heavy tail, as well as infinite mean. We also have some nice results about modulation: even when multiple molecules are available, pulse position modulation turns out to work quite well if the drift velocity is low.

The paper was submitted to IEEE Trans. Nanobioscience, and we're expecting the first reviews back any day now.

Just like being there

I didn't catch ISIT this year -- my first miss since 2003. Sarwate (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and Mitzenmacher (1, 2) have some nice summaries. Congrats to Shlomo Shamai for his Shannon Award win.

You should be tweeting

Surprisingly few academics in my field are on Twitter. I'm one of them, and did my share of tweeting through ICC. Other than me, only four other people used the #icc2010 hashtag: @jabriffa, @csgrad, @gvrooyen, and @mayanm. This is at a conference with around a thousand attendees! Why the low uptake? It's not as though Twitter is brand new.

At ICC, it struck me that Twitter would be a great tool for participants to get the most out of large conferences. With 20 parallel sessions and over 1000 accepted papers, ICC is enormous -- it would be physically impossible to see more than a small fraction of the available presentations. To deal with this overload of information, Twitter would be an ideal tool to quickly find out about interesting sessions. For example, say you're at a huge conference: tweeting audience members could be giving real-time information on which sessions are worth attending, which presentations are the most engaging, and which papers might interest you. You might change your plans to swing by and check out a session that seems interesting -- or if you didn't have time, you could make a note and check out the papers in the proceedings. Otherwise, seeing these tweets would be a nice way to find out about researchers with interests similar to yours -- and for them to find out about you.

This networking effect of Twitter is a key feature that goes beyond conferences, especially for junior faculty and graduate students. Research -- even excellent research -- doesn't usually attract attention to itself; especially in a huge field like communications, it's incredibly hard for individual researchers to boost their signal above the background. As a result, researchers need to be advertising their work all the time, using every tool they can find. Twitter is ideal for this -- for instance, whenever I publish a paper or give a talk, I mention it on my Twitter feed, and it is broadcast to all my followers. (Of course, the trick is then to get lots of followers.) This principle applies to all social media, not just Twitter: I maintain a personal website, this blog and a YouTube page as well as Twitter, to make it as easy as possible for people to find out about my work.

As one commenter on Mitzenmacher's blog put it, any graduate student wanting an academic career should have a blog. I'd go further: graduate students and junior faculty should be blogging, tweeting, and doing whatever else they can to get their name and work out there.

Paper at ICC: PDF and video

I'm back from beautiful Cape Town, where I presented the paper I mentioned earlier.

Citation:

N. Farsad and A. W. Eckford, “Resource allocation via linear programming for multi-source, multi-relay wireless networks,” in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Cape Town, South Africa, 2010.

PDF of the paper is here.

Presentation video (this is a playlist):

Seven continents

It's long been a life goal of mine to visit all seven continents, which I managed to cross off the list when I stepped off the plane in Africa.

Pictures from: Australia (Sydney, Australia, 2005); Europe (Fontainebleau, France, 2008); Asia (Great Wall near Beijing, China, 2008); Africa (Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, 2010); South America (Colonia, Uruguay, 2006); North America (Banff, Canada, 2008); Antarctica (Weddell Sea, 2006).

Paper at ICC

UPDATE: Paper PDF and presentation video are here.

I'll be heading to Cape Town later this week to present a paper at ICC:

Resource Allocation via Linear Programming for Multi-Source, Multi-Relay Wireless Networks
N. Farsad and A. W. Eckford
CT05: Tuesday, May 25, 1400-1545, Roof Terrace A

This paper continues my work on fractional cooperation, in which relay nodes only retransmit a fraction of the source's packet. Since the transmission is corrupted both by the channel effects and the possibility that not every source bit is retransmitted, we use LDPC codes to recover the original transmission. There are two key insights here: first, in LDPC decoding, the log-likeihood ratios of the relays are additive, weighted by coefficients equal to the source fractions (i.e., a linear combination); and second, for sufficiently many relaying partners, the sum of the LLRs has approximately a Gaussian distribution. Similarly to the design problem solved by EXIT charts, the problem of assigning source fractions can be posed as a linear program.

I'll be presenting the paper. Video of the talk and the PDF of the paper will be posted after the conference.