Mumbai: In 1948, a young engineer at Bell Labs, in the US, Claude Shannon, wrote a paper, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication", that is today recognized as the birth of Information Theory. It lies at the heart of all digital information technology, which sends information in bits of ones and zeroes over wired or wireless links. His theory said any communication consisted of signal and noise -- and how to ensure signals overcame noise has remained the biggest challenge of communication engineers ever since.
Last week the announcement in the US, that one of the two recipients of the Marconi Society's Paul Baran Young Scholar Award for 2014, was an Indian doctoral student at Stanford University, Himanshu Asnani, saw many of his peers and mentors recall the pioneer of Information Theory all over again. Why? Because they saw in the work and approach of Himanshu, shades of Shannon himself:
“Himanshu’s outstanding work and contributions to point-to-point and multi-terminal channel coding and source coding problems were very impressive,” says Bob Tkach, chairman of the Young Scholar Selection Committee, " Even in this elite group (of Marconi Young Scholars), his academic and entrepreneurial achievements stand out.”
Professor Tsachy Weissman, Asnani’s PhD guide at Stanford University, says: “In his graduate studies, Himanshu has made profound contributions to our understanding of the fundamental limits in new communication and data compression scenarios. His work runs the gamut from the theoretical to the applied. It is top-notch Shannon-type research: bringing new ways of thinking of problems and new engineering insights that will inspire future systems."
"His brilliance was clear to me even he when he joined my Information Theory course in 2010", Weissaman adds, "I was struck by his ability to grasp everything that I tried to explain... I practically begged him to join our research group and in fact he joined that same year."
Dr. Haim Permuter, a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Ben Gurion University in Israel, who collaborated with Asnani on several projects, called him “by far the best young researcher in information and communication theory that I have met.”
The core of Himanshu's thesis work work was uncharted territory -- at the confluence of Information Theory and control. He dumbs it down for us: “If you have a whole communications scenario, how do you introduce more intelligence into it? By introducing cooperation between the entities, so they can see each other and learn where to go to collect information.” Fellow researchers believe his work may radically improve the way data is sent and received, making the whole system much more efficient.
Born in Kota, Himanshu was a 4th ranker in the in the IIT JEE Examination, which took him to at IIT, Mumbai where he got his EE BTech in 2009. He was immediately accepted to Stanford’s Electrical Engineering School where he earned his M.S. in 2011 before starting his doctoral work. Even earlier he was snapped up by telecom giant Ericsson and still works in their R&D lab in the US Silicon Valley.
While others debate on the impact of his work on tasks like human genome sequencing, Himanshu saw a more earthy benefit when he spoke to us: "This work is especially relevant in an Indian context where we see a boom in mobile telecom services. Introducing extra capabilities into the network entities can significantly increase performance, reduce data loss rates and ultimately provide , better quality of service", he says.
Himanshu Asnani receives his award in Washington on October 2.
