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Tingjun Chen, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department of Computer Science (secondary appointment)
Duke University

Email: tingjun.chen [at] duke [dot] edu
Phone: (919) 613-1581 (O)
Office: 411 Wilkinson | Lab: 028A Hudson Hall

Twitter: @TingjunChen
GitHub: tingjunchen

[CV] (v. Dec. 2021)
[Google Scholar]
[ResearchGate]
[LinkedIn]

I’m an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science (secondary appointment) at Duke University. I direct the Duke FuNCtions Lab, working with a group of talented students on a variety of exciting research topics in next-generation wireless, optical, and mobile networks as well as edge computing systems. I am also the co-founder and Network Lead of WiLO Networks Inc., a start-up focusing on low-power sensor hardware and end-to-end systems. 

Before joining Duke, I was a postdoc in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Yale University in 2020-2021, working with Professor Leandros Tassiulas and Professor Lin Zhong. Before that, I received my Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 2020 (advisor: Professor Gil Zussman) and my B.Eng. degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2014 (advisors: Professor Zhisheng Niu and Professor Sheng Zhou).

Interests: I am interested in the broad areas of future wireless/mobile/optical networks and IoT systems. My recent research focuses on both theoretical and experimental aspects of massive antenna systems and millimeter-wave networks, optical-wireless networks, and their convergence with edge cloud, computing, and AI/ML systems. I also enjoy building efficient hardware-software systems and experimental testbeds at scale.

Impacts: My research has been recognized by an IBM Academic Award, a Google Research Scholar Award, the Columbia Engineering Morton B. Friedman Memorial Prize for Excellence, the Columbia University Eli Jury Award, a Facebook Fellowship, and a Wei Family Private Foundation (WFPF) Fellowship. My Ph.D. thesis received the ACM SIGMOBILE Dissertation Award Runner-up. I also received the ACM CoNEXT 2016 Best Paper Award and the ACM MobiHoc 2019 Best Paper Award finalist. WiLO Networks Inc. is currently supported by an NSF SBIR Phased I award (IIP-2108012).

News: I am always looking for motivated and creative B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. students, as well as Postdocs to join my group in Duke ECE. If you are interested in topics related to next-generation wireless networks and systems, optical-wireless communications, AI/ML for networking, edge cloud, and IoT, please email me your CV, transcript, and a brief note about your research interests, and I would be happy to chat!

Research Projects

Current:
– [SRC/DARPA JUMP 2.0] Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC) (center info)
– [NSF EAGER] EAGER: An Integrated Fiber Sensing and Communication Living Lab in the Research Triangle
– [NSF SII-NRDZ] SII-NRDZ: Spectrum Sharing via Consumption Models and Telemetry – Prototyping and Field Testing in an Urban FCC Innovation Zone
– [NSF CISE] CNS Core: Medium: Softwarizing Millimeter-wave Radio Access Networks at the Edge 
– [NSF SWIFT] SHIELD: A Software-Hardware Approach for Spectrum Coexistence with Rapid Interferer Learning, Detection, and Mitigation
– [NSF NAI] National AI Institute for Edge Computing Leveraging Next-generation Networks  (Athena website)
– [NSF PAWR] Cloud Enhanced Open Software-defined Mobile Wireless Testbed for City-scale Deployment (COSMOS website)

Past:
– [FlexICoN] Full-duplex Wireless: From Integrated Circuits to Networks (Columbia)
– [EnHANTs] Energy-Harvesting Active Networked Tags (Columbia)

I am very fortunate to work with a group of students:

Ph.D. students:
 – Chung-Hsuan Tung (Spring 2023-present)
 – Jialin Liu (Fall 2022-present, co-advised with Yiran Chen), ECE Diversity Fellowship
 – Zhihui Gao (Spring 2022-present, co-advised with Yiran Chen)
 – Zhenzhou Qi (Fall 2021-present), ACM SIGMOBILE Student Community Grant Award
 – Zehao Wang (Fall 2021-present), ACM SIGMOBILE Student Community Grant Award

M.S. and B.S. students:
 – Yiming Li (Duke ECE)
 – Zeyu (Michael) Li (Duke ECE)
 – Yixin Liang (visiting student from ZJU)
 – Walter Kalowsky (REU student from Penn State University)

High school students:
 – Nayan Patel (Cary Academy)
 – Runxi Wan (Tenafly High School)

Recent News

[07/2023]: Received an award from the NSF EAGER program to work with Duke Office of Information Technology (OIT) on building an integrated fiber sensing and communication testbed leveraging Duke-Durham field fiber. [NSF award information]

[07/2023]: Received an NSF supplement to conduct experimental millimeter-wave research on the NSF-funded PAWR COSMOS testbed.

[07/2023]: Two papers were accepted to ACM MobiHoc’23: (i) Wi-Fi monitoring using low sampling rate radios, (ii) Optimization of sectorized wireless networks.

[07/2023]: Received an award from the Thomas Lord Educational Innovation Grant Program that will support the development of an undergraduate course on full-stack IoT systems.

[07/2023]: Our paper on an open EDFA gain spectrum dataset collected using the PAWR COSMOS testbed and its applications in data-driven EDFA gain modeling was accepted to IEEE/Optica Journal of Optical Communications and Networking. [Dataset]

[07/2023]: Our paper on the design and deployment of programmable millimeter-wave radios in the COSMOS testbed was accepted to Computer Networks.

[07/2023]: Three papers were accepted to ECOC’23: (i) Field trial of automatic WDM optical path provisioning, (ii) One-shot transfer learning for EDFA gain spectrum prediction, (iii) ML-based Raman tilt prediction in ROADM transmission systems.

[03/2023]: Received a research grant from NTT to work on autonomous WDM optical link control frameworks.

[02/2023]: Our OFC’23 paper on the field-trial of coexistence of real-time fiber sensing and coherent 400GbE signals was selected by the subcommittee as a “Top-Scored Paper”.

[01/2023]: Excited to be part of a $35M SRC JUMP 2.0 Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC) with the goal of enabling seamless, robust, and scalable edge-to-cloud connectivity by developing and integrating advanced photonic, wired, and wireless connectivity solutions. CUbiC consists of a team of world-class researchers from Columbia (lead institution, director: Keren Bergman), UC Berkeley (assistant director: Ali Niknejad), UCSB, UIUC, MIT,  UMich, Cornell, Duke, Princeton, Stanford, Oregon State University, UCSD, and USC. [SRC JUMP 2.0 program] [DARPA news] [Columbia Engineering news] [Duke ECE news]

[12/2022]: Received an award from the NSF SII-NRDZ program to work on spectrum sharing field trials in an urban FCC innovation zone. This is a collaborative project between Columbia (lead institute), Syracuse, Princeton, Duke, Rutgers, and CCNY. [NSF award information]

[12/2022]: Two papers were accepted to OFC’23: (i) Field-trial of coexistence and simultaneous switching of real-time fiber sensing and coherent 400GbE, (ii) EDFA wavelength-dependent gain prediction using transfer learning.

[08/2022]: Received an award from the NSF CISE Core Medium program to work on the softwarization of millimeter-wave RANs. This is a collaborative project between Duke (lead institute) and Yale (PI: Lin Zhong). [NSF award information]

[06/2022]: Our paper on ML-based optical power spectrum prediction in multi-span ROADM systems was accepted to ECOC’22 (oral presentation).

[04/2022]: Received a research gift from NEC Labs America.

[02/2022]: Our paper on the design and architecture of COSMOS’ programmable optical x-haul network was accepted to IEEE Network Magazine, Special Issue on Next-Generation Optical Access Networks to Support Super-Broadband Services and 5G/6G Mobile Networks.

[08/2021]: Zhenzhou (Tom) Qi received an ACM SIGMOBILE Student Community Grant award.

[08/2021]: Received an award from the NSF SWIFT program to work on spectrum coexistence with rapid interferer detection and mitigation. This is a collaborative project between Duke (lead institute), Oregon State University (PI: Arun Natarajan), and Yale (PI: Leandros Tassiulas). [NSF award information]

Acknowledgments: Our research projects are supported in part by NSF grants CNS-2330333 (EAGER), AST-2232458 (SII-NRDZ), CNS-2211944 (CISE Core), CNS-2128638 (SWIFT), and CNS-2112562 (NAI), the SRC-DARPA JUMP 2.0 program (CUbiC – Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity), a Google Research Scholar Award, an IBM Academic Award, an NEC Labs America Research Gift, an NTT Research Grant, and an ACM SIGMOBILE Student Community Grant. The findings, positions, or opinions of our research projects do not necessarily represent the official policy of any of these organizations.