April 28, 2004 — USC Viterbi School of Engineering graduate student Sundeep Pattem has won a prestigious best paper award at the recent ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN).

This honor was shared by only 3 papers (out of a total of 50 accepted papers from 145 submissions) at the April 26-27, Berkeley California conference, a prominent one in the area of sensor networks.

Pattem received the award for a paper co-authored with department of electrical engineering/systems faculty Bhaskar Krishnamachari and Ramesh Govindan entitled "The Impact of Spatial Correlation on
Routing with Compression in Wireless Sensor Networks."

A second year Ph.D. student in EE/S, Pattem is also a graduate research assistant in the Autonomous Networks Research Group.

"The work for which Sundeep has received this recognition combines ideas from information theory and networking to analyze the performance of data gathering in sensor networks used for applications such as environmental monitoring," said Krishnamachari, who is Pattem's faculty advisor.

"The paper yields a counterintuitive insight - that it is possible to construct very simple data gathering strategies that are near optimal even in the face of large environmental fluctuations.

"Sundeep performed excellent work on many aspects of this paper, ranging from analyzing a large real-world data set to developing a parameterized model for spatial correlations to performing
experimental simulations."

Pattem was recently a research assistant with Dr. Kristina Lerman at ISI's Intelligent Systems Division, which both Govindan and Krishnamachari are affiliated with, in addition to their EE/S appointments.