Sensing, Processing and Communication (SPC) Research Lab

Prof. Fekri is the founder of the SPC Research Lab that has a multidisciplinary flavor in three intertwined areas of Sensing, Processing, and Communications. In particular, he applies signal processing, statistics and information theory to fundamental research problems in biology, social computing, robotics, and wireless communications.

Currently, the Research Lab has five main thrusts. (1) Compression: the research taps into information theory, statistics, and signal processing to explore redundancy and correlation within/across the data or signal to represent them using the minimum number of bits. It also explore the structure and redundancy within an abstract object (such as a neural network) to reduce its representation complexity. (2) Social Computing: the research develops analytical and computational models/tools to extract desired information from the data, and perform both forensic and prediction. The objects of interest will generally be social phenomena (social groups) and socio-cognitive phenomena (human intentions in a social context). (3) Molecular Communication: the research investigates the usage of molecules to encode and transmit information among nanomachines such as synthetic biological agents. The establishment of the foundations of molecular information theory, the development of the transceiver architecture and signaling techniques are been studied. (4) Biomarker Sensing: the research investigates several problems including identification of the biomarkers for subject target diseases, understand and study sensing mechanisms for the biomarkers, and develop theoretical foundations and optimum algorithms for biomarker sensing for disease detection or therapy. (5) Neural Computing: the research investigates the cause and effect relation between the stimulus and the neural response, technologies for linking large-scale temporal activity maps of neural circuits to quantifiable behavioral paradigms, and obtain neural biomarkers to detect and predict pathogenic processes.

In the past. Prof. Fekri and his research group were investigating the theory and practice of error correction codes, the application of mathematical tools to modern networking, spanning from performance characterization of wired/wireless networks to the design, analysis, and optimization of communication protocols. The team also developed the first cryptographic system using finite field wavelet transforms. Follow the links in below for details of the current and past projects. You may also click on the "Project" tab at the top of this page