Syed Ali Jafar ( hi, सैयद जफ़र) is an Indian-American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He works at the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and p ...

, and has previously worked at

Lucent Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the dives ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

, Qualcomm and

Hughes Software Systems Aricent was a global design and engineering services company. It was acquired by French-based company Altran in 2018 and renamed Altran North America in April 2019 and Altran Americas in early 2020. With Altran's acquisition by Capgemini, the ...

. His research interests include multi-user

information theory Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. ...

wireless Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The mos ...

communications and network coding. He was named

Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...

(IEEE) in 2014 "for contributions to analyzing the capacity of

communication networks" and won the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2015 "for his discoveries in

interference Interference is the act of interfering, invading, or poaching. Interference may also refer to: Communications * Interference (communication), anything which alters, modifies, or disrupts a message * Adjacent-channel interference, caused by extra ...

alignment in

wireless networks A wireless network is a computer network that uses wireless data connections between network nodes. Wireless networking is a method by which homes, telecommunications networks and business installations avoid the costly process of introducing ...

, changing the field’s thinking about how these networks should be designed."

Career

He studied electrical engineering at the

Indian Institute of Technology The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are central government owned Institute of technology, public technical institutes located across India. They are under the ownership of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Educat ...

(IIT) in

Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, primarily its western or right bank, Delhi shares borders wi ...

, where he earned a B.Tech in 1997. He then studied electrical engineering in the United States, receiving an MSc at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

in 1999 and then a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper ''Piled Higher and Deeper'' (also known as ''PhD Comics''), is a newsp ...

at Stanford University in 2003. He then worked at

, while occasionally also holding positions at

, Qualcomm and

. He studied communications networks and solved problems in network

, and made numerous discoveries in the area of wireless communication and networks, including important discoveries in interference alignment in wireless networks.

Interference alignment

An important discovery in

wireless network A wireless network is a computer network that uses wireless data connections between network nodes. Wireless networking is a method by which homes, telecommunications networks and business installations avoid the costly process of introducing c ...

design is

alignment. A specialized application was previously studied by Yitzhak Birk and Tomer Kol for an index coding problem in 1998. In the context of interference management for wireless communication, interference alignment was first introduced by Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali, Abolfazl S. Motahari, and Amir Keyvan Khandani, from the University of Waterloo, for wireless X channel. Interference alignment was eventually established as a general principle by Jafar and Viveck R. Cadambe in 2008, when they introduced "a mechanism to align an arbitrarily large number of interferers, leading to the surprising conclusion that wireless networks are not essentially interference limited." This led to the adoption of interference alignment in the design of wireless networks. Jafar explained: According to

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, ...

senior researcher Paul Horn:

References

American electrical engineers American information theorists Fellow Members of the IEEE Indian computer scientists Indian electrical engineers Indian emigrants to the United States Living people Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-electrical-engineer-stub