Short Bio
Research group leader at the TUM Chair of Communications Engineering led by Prof. Dr.sc.tech. Gerhard Kramer.
Doing a habilitation (accreditation for thesis supervision) at the Technical University of Munich with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh, Prof. Deniz Gündüz and Prof. Sidharth Jaggi as mentors.
Worked with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh as a postdoctoral researcher from February 2020 until October 2023.
Obtained my PhD from the ECE department of Rutgers University in January 2020.
Held short term visiting positions at Aalto (May - July 2016), Technical University of Berlin (May - July 2018) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (September - December 2019).
Spent three years (August 2014 - August 2017) as PhD candidate at the ECE department of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).
Worked at the CSI lab with Prof. Salim El Rouayheb from August 2014 till January 2020.
Received a masters degree in Information and Communication from the Lebanese University after doing the thesis at IIT in 2014.
Did the engineering senior project at Center of Nuclear Science and Science of Matter (CSNSM) in Paris, France and graduated as a Computer and Communication Engineer from the Lebanese University in 2013.
Did an internship at procsim-consulting company in EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2012.
Research Interests
My research interest is centered around privacy, scalability, security and reliability of distributed systems. The applications may differ but the goal remains the same: study theoretical and fundamental limits of innovative storage and computing systems and design codes achieving those limits. My current work is motivated by the following research directions.
Federated learning
Private and secure distributed computing
Distributed storage
DNA-based storage systems
Private and secure network coding.
For more details please check the following pages.
Grants and Awards
DFG (German Research Foundation) grant for a temporary position for a Principal Investigator "Private Secure and Efficient Codes for Distributed Machine Learning". (2023 -- 2026)
EuroTech Visiting Research Programme grant. (March 2023)
iDASH 2022 Secure Genome Analysis Competition, second place of Track 4: Secure Record Linkage (November 2022)
Best Poster Award on Optimization and Machine Learning in Princeton Day of Optimization, Princeton, New Jersey. (September 2018)
Service
Workshop Co-organizer
Munich Workshop on Coding and Cryptography 2024
Munich Workshop on Coding and Cryptography 2022
2022 Munich Workshop on Coding and Cryptography
Group photo of the 2022 Munich Workshop on Coding and Cryptography focused on coded computing and DNA-based storage that we organized in June 2022. The workshop was well attended and resulted in fruitful collaborations. More information about the workshop can be found here.
Guest Editor
Frontier in Communications and Networks
Technical Program Committee (TPC) member
IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and its Applications (ISITA) 2024
Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC) 2023
IEEE International Workshop on Information Theory (ITW) 2024, 2023
13th Annual Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (NVMW) 2022
Session Chair
IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2023, 2022, 2021
IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) 2022
Reviewer
More than 20 journals and international conferences