About me!!!
Hi! My name is Thuan Nguyen. I obtained a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Oregon State University with the best dissertation award from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 02/2021 (supervised by Professor Thinh Nguyen). I joined the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University as a postdoctoral researcher from 03/2021 to 08/2023 (supervised by Professor Matthias Scheutz and Professor Shuchin Aeron). Afterward, I was a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at WPI, advised by Professor Donald Brown from 08/2023 to 08/2024. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor with the Department of Engineering, Engineering Technology, and Surveying at East Tennessee State University. My research interests are communications theory, statistical signal processing, and machine learning, including but not limited to quantization for maximizing mutual information, minimizing impurity partition, channel capacity, domain generalization/ domain adaptation, and contrastive learning.
In the News!!!
07/12/2025: Our paper "An Alternating Algorithm for Neural Collapse in Deep Classifier Neural Network with Arbitrary Number of Classes" has been accepted at IEEE Machine Learning for Signal Processing 2025 (MLSP 2025).
06/25/2025: Our paper "Universal Rate-Distortion-Classification Representations for Lossy Compression" has been accepted at Information Theory Workshop 2025 (ITW 2025).
05/30/2025: Our paper "Bounded guaranteed algorithms for concave impurity minimization via maximum likelihood" has been accepted at Elsevier Signal Processing.
04/15/2025: Our paper "Hard-Negative Sampling for Contrastive Learning: Optimal Representation Geometry and Neural- vs Dimensional-Collapse" has been accepted at Transactions on Machine Learning Research.
03/15/2025: I received the summer award funding to support for my research in Summer 2025!
09/24/2024: I am grateful to receive the best paper award at MLSP 2024! This is my first best paper award ever! I want to thank my mentors and collaborators for this achievement!
09/07/2024: The paper "On contrastive learning for domain generalization" has been accepted at ICMLA 2024
08/12/2024: I officially started my position at ETSU. Go Bucs Go!
07/12/2024: Our paper "On neural collapse in contrastive learning with imbalanced datasets" has been accepted at MLSP 2024
07/10/2024: Our paper "On minimizing symbol error probability for antipodal beamforming in MIMO Gaussian wiretap channels" has been accepted at VTC-fall 2024
04/05/2024: Our paper "Assessment of Multiple Systemic Human Cognitive States using Eye Gaze" has been accepted at CogSci 2024
03/18/2024: Our paper "Supervised Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples" has been accepted at IJCNN 2024
02/08/2024: One paper has been submitted to the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making.
02/07/2024: One paper has been submitted to CogSci 2024.
01/10/2024: One paper has been submitted to IJCNN.
11/06/2023: I started the postdoc position at WPI.
10/24/2023: My last day of the Fall term at WPI. I am so proud that most of my students are happy and learn something in my class.
08/24/2023: My first lecture at WPI! Hope that everything will go smoothly!!!
07/25/2023: I got the offer to teach ECE 3308 (Introduction to Wireless Networks) at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) this Fall term.
07/20/2023: One paper has been published in the Journal of Topics in Cognitive Science
07/03/2023: My paper "On the failure of Invariant Risk Minimization and an effective fix via classification error control" is accepted at MLSP 2023!
05/01/2023: My paper "On the failure of Invariant Risk Minimization and an effective fix via classification error control" is submitted to MLSP 2023.
04/17/2023: One paper is accepted at IEEE Access!
03/11/2023: One paper is accepted at VTC Spring 2023!
02/15/2023: My paper "A principled approach to model validation in domain generalization" is accepted at ICASSP 2023.
11/10/2022: One paper is submitted to IEEE Access.
10/15/2022: Two papers are submitted to ICASSP 2022.
09/05/2022: Our paper "Investigating Methods for Cognitive Workload Estimation for Assistive Robots" is accepted in the MDPI Sensor journal.
09/02/2022: Our paper "Trade-off between reconstruction loss and feature alignment for domain generalization" is accepted at 21st International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA-2022).
08/15/2022: Our paper "Supervised Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples" is submitted at 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2023).
07/29/2022: Our paper "Investigating Methods for Cognitive Workload Estimation for Assistive Robots" is submitted to the Sensors MDPI journal.
07/27/2022: Our paper "Assessment of Individual Cognitive Workload via Multiple Physiological Signal Modalities in Simulated Driving" is accepted at 24th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI-2022).
07/08/2022: Our paper "Trade-off between reconstruction loss and feature alignment for domain generalization" is submitted to 21st International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA-2022).
06/16/2022: Our paper "Joint covariate-alignment and concept-alignment: a framework for out-of-distribution generalization" is accepted at International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP-2022).
05/20/2022: Our paper "Assessment of Individual Cognitive Workload via Multiple Physiological Signal Modalities in Simulated Driving" is submitted to the 24th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI-2022).
05/17/2022: Our paper "Conditional entropy minimization principle for learning domain invariant representation features" is accepted at International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR-2022).
04/01/2022: Our paper "Joint covariate-alignment and concept-alignment: a framework for out-of-distribution generalization" is submitted to International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP-2022)
01/30/2022: Our paper "Barycentric-alignment and invertibility for domain generalization" is submitted to Pattern recognition.
01/20/2022: Our paper "Conditional entropy minimization principle for learning domain invariant representation features" is submitted to International Conference on Pattern Recognition ICPR 2022.
09/02/2021: Our paper "Optimal quantizer structure for maximizing mutual information under constraints" is accepted at IEEE Transaction on Communications.
06/11/2021: My thesis won the Ph.D. Outstanding Dissertation Award recognized by School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University.
06/01/2021: Our paper "Achievable Zero-Error Rate Regions Using Novel Location Assisted Coding (LAC) for Short Range FSO Communications" is accepted at IEEE/KICS Journal of Communications and Networks.
05/28/2021: One paper (second author) is submitted to Neural NIPS 2021.
04/30/2021: Our paper "Optimal Threshold Maximizing Mutual Information of Multiple Input One-Bit Output Quantization" is accepted at International Symposium on Information Theory, ISIT 2021.
03/01/2021: I start my first job at Tufts University. Jumbo the elephant!!!
02/25/2021: My CV is updated!
02/22/2021: I successfully defended my final exam. Let's enjoy the last week of student life!
01/29/2021: Our 02 papers: "Constant approximation algorithm for minimizing concave impurity" and "Minimizing Weighted Concave Impurity Partition Under Constraints" are accepted at International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2021.
12/07/2020: I got the IEEE ComSoc Travel Grant to attend IEEE GLOBECOM 2020, Taipei, Taiwan.
11/06/2020: I got the postdoctoral fellowship from Tufts University, Boston, MA.
10/24/2020: Our paper "Capacity Achieving Quantizer Design for Binary Channels" is accepted at IEEE Communications Letters.
09/30/2020: Our 02 papers: "Constant approximation algorithm for minimizing concave impurity" and "Minimizing Weighted Concave Impurity Partition Under Constraints" are submitted at International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2021.
8/21/2020: My CV is updated.
08/18/2020: Our paper "Communication-Channel Optimized Impurity Partition" is accepted at Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2020.
08/08/2020: Our paper "Capacity Achieving Quantizer Design for Binary Channels" is submitted to IEEE Communications Letters.
06/15/2020: Our paper "Minimizing Weighted Concave Impurity Partition Under Constraints" is submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications.
06/11/2020: Our paper "On Binary Quantizer For Maximizing Mutual Information" is published at IEEE Transactions on Communications.
06/05/2020: Our paper "Bounded Guaranteed Linear Time Algorithm for Concave Impurity Minimization Via Maximum Likelihood" is submitted to NeurIPS 2020.
05/21/2020: Our paper "On Bounds and Closed-Form Expressions for Capacities of Discrete Memoryless Channels with Invertible Positive Matrices" is published at IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.
05/12/2020: Finally, I met you. Welcome to this world, Ellie, my second princess. Love you so much!
03/31/2020: Our paper "Structure of Optimal Quantizer for Binary-Input Continuous-Output Channels with Output Constraints" is accepted at 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT).