People

Current Members

Lav VarshneyLav R. Varshney is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, with further affiliations in Computer Science, Neuroscience, Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, Digital Agriculture, Personalized Nutrition, and the Beckman Institute, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is also affiliated with the Discovery Partners Institute in Chicago. His research interests include information and coding theory, statistical signal processing, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and creativity. [BIO|CV]

Razan Baltaji is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from the American University of Beirut. Her research interests lie at the intersection of science and machine learning as well as multimodal machine learning. She is also passionate about globalization of engineering research and education.

Sourya Basu is a graduate student and Sarwate Fellow / ECE Distinguished Research Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  He completed his M.S. thesis, “Universal and Succinct Source Coding of Deep Neural Networks,” in the group in 2020 and received a B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur in 2017. His research interests include information theory and its applications.

Akhil Bhimaraju is a graduate student and Promise of Excellence Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  He received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in 2020. His research is generally based on mathematical modeling of engineering problems.

Moulik Choraria is a graduate student and Sarwate Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He completed his M.S. thesis, entitled “The Inductive Bias of Polynomial Neural Networks,” at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2021 and received a B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 2019. His research interests include deep learning and information theory.

Austin Ellis-Mohr is a graduate student and DIGI-MAT fellow in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.  He received his B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University. His research interests include artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and emergence.

Ibtihal Ferwana is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science.  She received her B.S. degree in computer science from Prince Sultan University in 2019. Her research interests include natural language processing, network science, and data science.

Babak Hemmatian is a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive science and an M.S. in computer science from Brown University in 2021. He received his B.A. in clinical psychology from the University of Tehran. He is primarily interested in how narratives about sociopolitical topics are collectively developed and negotiated. He uses linguistic theories and behavioral experimentation to uncover the structure of narratives and their cognitive underpinnings, while testing their broad impact and automatic generation using machine learning.

Alayt Issak is a post-baccalaureate research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. She completed her B.A. degree in mathematics and studio art from the College of Wooster in 2021. Her research interests lie at the intersection of visual art, creativity, and AI.

Anant Naik is a medical student at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. He received his B. Eng. in biomedical engineering at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities in 2018. His research interests are neurodegenerative disorders, spinal cord regeneration, and modeling neural circuits.

Anuj K. Nayak is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2018 and B. E. degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from PES Institute of Technology in 2014. He was with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Signalchip Innovations, Pvt. Ltd. as a Modem Systems Engineer. His research interests include information theory, machine learning and network science.

Anay Pattanaik is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science. He received his B.Tech. degree in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of technology (IIT) Kanpur in 2016. His research interests include decision making under uncertainty and machine learning.

Xinbo Wu is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the B.S. degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. His research interests include large language models, AI alignment, multimodal models, and AI for science.

Haizi Yu is a research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation, “Automatic Concept Learning via Information Lattices,” in the group in 2019. He received his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, and his B.S. degree from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University. His research interests include machine learning, interpretable feature learning, automatic knowledge discovery, and music intelligence.  He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Knowledge Lab, University of Chicago.

Huozhi Zhou is a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He completed his M.S. thesis, “Algorithms on Graph-Structured Data with Imperfect Information,” in the group in 2019.  He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. His research interests include statistical inference, network algorithms and machine learning.

Xilin Jiang (2021-present), Anushka Pachaury (2021-present), and Pieter Svenson (2021-present) are currently undergraduate researchers in the group.

Former Members

Pritam Bose was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow in the group and also affiliated with the Oslo University Hospital in Norway. He received his Ph.D. degree in medicine from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo in 2019, his M.S. degree in telecommunications engineering from the University of Trento in 2016, and his B.Tech. degree in electronics and communications engineering from the West Bengal University of Technology in 2013. His research interests include communication system design for wireless medical technologies, medical signal processing, wireless body area networks, and machine learning.  He is now with Kongsberg Maritime.

Suyoung Park completed his M.S. in Statistics-Analytics in 2021, while a graduate student in the group.  He had received his B.S. degree in Economics and Statistics with honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018. His research interests are in the area of generalized linear models, causal inference, and quantitative genetic analysis. He is currently a data scientist at Bayer.

Pankaj Sharma completed his M.S. in Statistics in 2021, while a graduate student in the group.  He received his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee in 2017. His research interests include machine learning and data science.

samsterSam Spencer completed his Ph.D. dissertation, “Rumor Source Identification, Contagion Processes, and Dynamics of Social Network Formation and Evolution,” in the group in 2020, where he as a CSE Fellow and focused on social and societal networks. He had received B.A. degrees in mathematics and in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University and the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He had worked for several years at Rockwell-Collins before returning to Illinois to complete doctoral studies.  He is now with The MITRE Corporation.

Ruby Zhuang completed her M.S. thesis, “Science of Science: Biological Research Network, in the group in 2019, where her research interests included data science and computer engineering.  She had received the B.S. degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. She is now with Google.

Alan Yang was a Carver Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a graduate student in the group, where his research interests included information theory and cognition.  He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018.

dseoDaewon Seo completed his Ph.D. dissertation, “Information-Theoretic Analysis of Human-Machine Mixed Systems,” in the group in 2019, where he worked largely on problems in information theory and its applications.  He had received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2008 and 2010, respectively.  He is now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Professional PicRavi Kiran Raman completed his Ph.D. dissertation, “On the Information Theory of Clustering, Registration, and Blockchains,” in the group in 2019, where he was a Bahl Fellow and had primary research interests in understanding the fundamental limits of noisy computation systems and statistical inference problems using information theory. He had received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, in 2014. He is now a research scientist at Analog Devices.

Xiou Ge completed his M.S. thesis, “Computational Creativity Applications in Engineering,” in the group in 2018, where his main interests were artificial intelligence and creativity.  He had received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016 and 2018, respectively. He is now a graduate student at the University of Southern California.

Rebecca Chen completed her M.S. thesis, “Missing Values Imputation and Image Registration for Genetics Applications” in the group in 2019, where her research interests included image processing and machine learning.  She had received a B.S. in biomedical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015.

Sakshi Agarwal completed her M.S. thesis, “A Study on Creativity: Detection and Network Structures,” in the group in 2019, where her research interests included information theory and machine learning.  She had received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay in 2017. She is now with Google.

Yongjune Kim was a postdoctoral research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Seoul National University and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include coding and information theory for nanoscale devices, resource-constrained machine learning, and energy efficient computing.  He is now an assistant professor at DGIST in Korea.

TingyiTing-Yi Wang was a postdoctoral research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory from Fall 2016 until Spring 2017. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Chi-Nan University, Nantou, Taiwan, in 2005 and 2007, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Communication Engineering from National Chiao-Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2013. His research interests include information-attention theory, distributed programming, joint source-channel codes, and powerline communication.  He is now on the faculty at Sun Yat-sen University.

Avhishek Chatterjee was a postdoctoral research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory from Fall 2015 until Summer 2017. He had received the B.E. degree from Jadavpur University in 2006, the M.E. degree from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 2008, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. His research interests include understanding dynamics, fundamental limits, and optimal designs of stochastic networks like social networks, crowdsourcing systems, communication networks, and nanoscale circuits. He is now an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Linjia_Chang 2Linjia Chang completed her M.S. thesis, “Changing Edges in Graphical Model Algorithms,” in the group in 2016, where her interests were primarily in stochastic information processing systems, coding theory, data analytics, and network analysis.  She had received the B.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014. She is now with Intel Corporation.

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Aditya Vempaty completed his Ph.D. thesis, “Reliable Inference from Unreliable Agents,” in the group in 2015 for which he received the All University Doctoral Prize.  He had received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, in 2011.  He is now with the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Tyler Chen (2019-2020), Aditya Bhansali (2019-2020), Jiarui Sun (2018-2019), Abhinav Das (2018-2019), Cheshta Bhatia (2018), Wenxian Zhang (2017-2019), Kengyan Lim (2017-2019), Jianlin Du (2017-2018), Dennis Ryu (2016–2017), Sarah Schieferstein (2017), Fanbo Xiang (2017), Seungjun Cho (2017), Yirou Li (2017), Carolyn Nye (2017), Dingchen Yue (2017), Huozhi Zhou (2015–2017), Malhar Jere (2016–2017), Taehun Ahn (2016–2017), Seo Taek Kong (2016–2017), AJ Benjamin (2016), Dickens Li (2016), Sourya Basu (2016), Mayank Amencherla (2014–2016), You Guan (2015–2016), Song Jianhan (2015), Vei Wang Isaac Phua (2015), Chien-Sheng Yang (2015), Evan Phibbs (2015), Hongyang Bai (2014–2015), Rex Chen (2014–2015), Zhizhou He (2014–2015), Kaiqing Zhang (2014–2015), Matt Tsao (2014–2015), Johnny Duan (2014–2015), Dominic Gentile (2014–2015), Konrad Wrobel (2014–2015), Matthew Yang (2014–2015), and Mohammad Saad (2014) have all done some undergraduate research in the group.