Abhishek Sinha

Abhishek Sinha
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Electrical Engg., IIT Madras
Email: abhishek.sinha@ee.iitm.ac.in
Office: ESB-212-A

Research Summary

My primary research interest broadly lies at the intersection of Probability theory, Stochastic control, Information theory, and Learning Theory, where I seek to develop new analytical tools for understanding and enhancing the performance of networked communication and control systems of wide varieties. During my PhD, I worked with Prof. Eytan Modiano at LIDS, MIT, where we studied the multicasting and the broadcasting problems from a network control standpoint, and proposed provably optimal and decentralized algorithms targeted for wireless networks. This is the first known throughput-optimal policy for solving a flow problem of such generality. My thesis committee included Prof. Leandros Tassiulas, Prof. David Gamarnik and Prof. Eytan Modiano.

I interned with Bell Labs at Murray Hill, NJ in the summer of 2016, where I worked with Matthew Andrews and Prasanth Ananth on optimal resource allocation problems. I spent the summer of 2014 as a research intern at Microsoft, Redmond, working with Jie Liu at Microsoft Research and David Maltz's group at Windows Azure. There I worked on control and optimization of anycast based load management systems.

I obtained my Master's degree from the Electrical Communication Engineering department at the Indian Institute of Science, located at the beautiful city of Bangalore, where I worked with Prof. Anurag Kumar. Some of the highlights of my present and past research works are given below:

In my doctoral work, I have designed an exciting new Max-Weight type dynamic policy, called Universal Max-Weight, which provides a unified framework for the general network-flow problems and simultaneously addresses several open and fundamental problems in the field.

During my PhD, along with my colleagues, I designed a downlink scheduler for minimizing the Age of Information with throughput constraints. This work recently won the Best Paper Award in IEEE INFOCOM 2018, Honolulu, HI.

In my Master's thesis, I worked on optimal impromptu deployment problems for wireless sensor networks along a random lattice trail, with Prof. Anurag Kumar at the Network Engineering Lab, IISc. We leveraged various tools from stochastic optimal control theory to develop a provably efficient algorithm which is way faster than the traditional Value iteration.

At IISc, I also worked on the problem of optimal deployment of relays on a line for the multi-relay channel from an Information theoretic perspective.

In my Bachelor's thesis, I worked with Prof. Swagatam Das, at the Electronics and Telecommunication Engg. dept., Jadavpur University, located at the bustling city of Kolkata, where we leveraged mathematical tools from non-negative matrix theory and linear systems theory to prove convergence and study the nature of equilibrium points of an increasingly popular evolutionary optimization algorithm known as BBO.

News/ Press Coverage

[July 2019] Received an unrestricted gift of 35K USD from Qualcomm.

[July 2019] Delivered an invited talk at ISI Kolkata.

[June 2019] Delivered an invited talk at the Joint Telematics Group (JTG) 2019 Summer School to be held at IIT Madras.

[June 2019] Chaired a session on Age of Information at WiOpt 2019, held at Avignon, France.

[May 2019] Gave an invited talk at the Huawei Mathematical and Algorithmic Sciences Lab, Paris.

Our paper wins the Best Paper Award in IEEE INFOCOM 2018, Honolulu, HI.

MIT News Article on our Age of Information research.

Campus Technology article on the proposed scheduling algorithm.

Science Daily article on our recent work.

Our paper wins the Best Paper Award in ACM Mobihoc 2016, Paderborn, Germany. MIT link, Yale link .

Some of my interviews: Interview 1, Interview 2.