Eric Mankin
July 24, 2008 — A team led by Professor P. Vijay Kumar of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering received the Best Paper (Algorithms) Award at the 4th I
EEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS '08).
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P. Vijay Kumar
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The subject of the June conference held on the Greek island of Santorini was sensornets, arrays of unsupervised data-collecting devices monitoring variables like temperature, pressure, or seismic activity connected by large-scale networks.
The Viterbi team's paper, entitled, "
On the Average Case Communication Complexity for Detection in Sensor Networks" considers the problem of detecting certain events via algorithms that seek to minimize the probabilities of mis-detection and of false alarm as well as the energy expended in executing the algorithm.
The paper proposed ways of minimizing the energy consumed by inter-sensor communication, a key sensornet problem.
In addition to Kumar, the team included graduate student Venkatesan Ekambaram and project assistant Tarun Agarwal.
"The Hsieh department faculty join me in congratulating Vijay Kumar and his team for this recognition of their research achievements in communications and networks," said department co-chair for systems Alexander "Sandy" Sawchuk.
Kumar is currently on leave from USC working at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He joined the Viterbi School in 1983, after receiving his USC Ph.D. in electrical engineering in1994, he received the USC School-of-Engineering Senior Research Award for his contributions to coding theory; in 1995 he was co-recipient of the IEEE Information Theory Society Prize Paper Award. He is an IEEE Fellow.
Kumar received the B.Tech and M.Tech. degrees from the Indian Institutes of Technology (Kharagpur and Kanpur) in 1977 and 1979 respectively.
