Hessam Mahdavifar

Short Bio

I am an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. My area of research is coding and information theory with applications to wireless communications, data storage, data privacy, and security, as well as the interplay between information theory and machine learning including learning-assisted channel coding and privacy-preserving machine learning.

Before joining the University of Michigan in 2017, I received the B.Sc. degree from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2007, and the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. degrees from the University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA, in 2009, and 2012, respectively, all in electrical engineering. I was also with the Samsung Mobile Solutions Lab (MSL), in San Diego, US, between 2012 and 2016.

I have received the NSF CAREER award in 2020. I also received the Best Paper Award in 2015 IEEE International Conference on RFID, and the 2013 Samsung Best Paper Award. During my Ph.D. studies, I was awarded UCSD Shannon Memorial Fellowship for demonstrating outstanding achievements in information theory. I received two Silver Medals at International Mathematical Olympiad in 2002 and 2003, and two Gold Medals at Iran National Mathematical Olympiad in 2001 and 2002.

Openings

I am always looking for enthusiastic graduate students with strong analytical and quantitative background. If you are interested in working with me, please do not hesitate to contact me and/or apply to our graduate program and mention my name in your application. 

News

• May 2023: New NSF Award for the project titled Designing Plotkin Transform Codes via Machine Learning. 

• January 2023: The $35m Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC), funded by SRC/DARPA via JUMP 2.0 program, is launched (link). As part of the team, my group will develop resiliency and security modules for the envisioned next generation connectivity networks and systems.

• June 2022: We will present 3 papers on string reconstruction from substring compositions, secure coded regression, and bounds on codes with large minimum distances at ISIT. Check out the full program here.

• June 2022: Mohammad Vahid Jamali sucessfully defended his PhD thesis. Congrats Vahid!

• May 2022: Invited talk at ITA Workshop on low-rate channel coding. Check out the program here.

• May 2022: Promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure (Link). Many thanks to my students, collaborators, and colleagues!

• April 2022: Mahdi Soleymani successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congrats Mahdi!

• February 2022: Nasser Aldaghri successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congrats Nasser!

• February 2022: We will present our work on resilient and robust prediction serving systems at AAAI. Check out the paper here.

• December 2021: Invited keynote talk at IEEE Globecom Workshop on Channel Coding Beyond 5G. Check out the program here.

• October 2021: Ford funds our project on vehicular network traffic management via collaborative data buffering.

• September 2021: Department of Energy funds our project on studying randomized sketching and compression for high-dimensional non-real-valued data (News).

• September 2021: Invited seminar on machine learning-aided channel coding at UC Berkeley BLISS seminar series (based on the work reported here and here)

• August 2021: Cisco funds our research on privacy-preserving collaborative distributed learning. Our relevant publications on the topic can be found here and here.

• July 2021: We will present our work on our newly invented KO codes via deep learning at ICML 2021. Check out the paper here.

• July 2021: We will present 6 papers on non-stationary polarization, low-rate polar coding, ML-assisted RM decoding, privacy-preserving computing, coded computing, and Grassmann codes, at ISIT. Check out the full program here.

• June 2021: Our team has won 2021 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. Congratulations Vahid!

• April 2021: We will present our work on polar coded repetition at ITW.

• February 2021: We will present our work on coded machine unlearning at AAAI Workshop on Robust, Secure and Efficient Machine Learning (one of the only 6 papers accepted for oral presentation). Check out the program here.

• June 2020: We will present three papers, on binary gradient coding, analog subspace coding, and polar-based LDGM codes, at ISIT 2020. Check out the full program here.

• April 2020: Online talk on “New Faces of Channel Coding: 5G and Beyond” as part of Shannon Channel talk series. 

• March 2020: Our work on subspace coding for massively connected wireless networks is in the Michigan Engineering News Center.

• February 2020: NSF CAREER Award for the project titled Coding Subspaces: Error Correction, Compression, and Applications.

• December 2019: We will present our work on mmWave covert communications at Globecom.

• September 2019: Our work on channel coding for next generation communication is in the Michigan Engineering News Center.

• September 2019: We will present our work on threshold secure coding at Allerton. 

• August 2019: We will present our works on coded distributed computing, coding at low capacity, and coding for crowdsourced classification at ITW. 

• July 2019: NSF Award for the project titled Communications in Ultra-Low-Rate Regime: Fundamental Limits, Code Constructions, and Applications. 

• July 2019: We will present our work on secret generation via pulse coupling at ISIT. 

• February 2019: We will present our recent results on physical layer security via coupling dynamics at ITA. 

• December 2018: We will present our works on coded NOMA, key generation in static environments, and physical layer security via coupled oscillators at Globecom. 

• December 2018: We will present our work on NOMA for mixed RF-FSO systems at Globecom Workshop winning the best paper award in interactive sessions (Congratulations Vahid!). 

• June 2018: We will present our work on multi-user secret sharing at ISIT. 

• June 2018: NSF Award for the project titled New Frontiers in Polar Coding: 5G and Beyond.

• February 2018: We will present our work on distributed secret sharing at ITA.  

• July 2017: We will present our works on sparse linear codes, non-stationary polarization, rank-metric codes, and sticky-insertion correcting codes at ISIT. 

Research Funded By: