Research interests

My research interests are in the areas of communication theory and information theory and include classical error-control coding, codes on graphs, codes for distributed storage, caching, and computing systems, and coding for privacy and security. In particular, I have worked extensively on private information retrieval (PIR) for coded distributed storage systems and low-latency coding for distributed computing. The goal of PIR is to allow a user to privately access an arbitrary message stored in a set of databases, i.e., without revealing any information of the identity of the requested message to each database. Distributed computing systems have emerged as one of the most effective ways of solving increasingly complex computational problems, such as those in large-scale machine learning and data analytics. In coding for distributed computing redundancy is added to the computation to mitigate the effect of straggling servers and also to reduce the amount of intra-server communication. Moreover, I am currently looking into coding for DNA storage, code-based post-quantum cryptography, applications of coding theory to machine learning, and coding for distributed computing over the edge (so-called edge computing). In edge computing, computations are offloaded to the edge of the network instead of being carried out in a data center in order to reduce the overall computational latency. Low-latency applications like autonomous driving will likely require efficient solutions for edge computing.