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BROOKLYN, New York, Thursday, December 8, 2022 – Shivendra Panwar — Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering  at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Director of the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT) — has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

The fellowship recognizes Panwar’s wide-ranging innovation in the field of wireless communications. That innovation encompasses a broad range of work including cooperative wireless networks, switch performance and multimedia transport over networks.

Panwar holds over 25 patents in areas like packet switches, online media streaming, cybersecurity of wireless communications, and more. His recent work includes a new system called “streamloading,” a technology that improves wireless streaming over wireless cellular networks through preloading fine grain detail to devices, allowing for high quality video and audio even while service deteriorates.

He is also one of nine NYU Tandon researchers who received a combined $2.5 million from the  National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the Resilient and Intelligent Next Generation Systems (RINGS) partnership to ensure resiliency is part of next-G wireless telecommunications. The projects will focus on making current and future wireless infrastructure, software and hardware systems more resilient to flaws, accidents, subterfuge and hacks.

As the Director of CATT for over 20 years, Panwar has built an economic engine that helps drive New York City’s continued success in the tech sector. CATT promotes industry-university collaborative research and development to create economic impact through research, technology transfer, and faculty entrepreneurship. CATT is sponsored by the New York State’s Empire State Development’s Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR). In his capacity as Director, Panwar has worked with AT&T, Sony, InterDigital, Cisco, several startups and other companies to improve their technology and develop further economic prosperity.

“Shivendra Panwar’s pioneering work is changing the ways that we interact with our world without wires,” said Jelena Kovačević, Dean of NYU Tandon. “His history of innovation in the fields of communications, cybersecurity and more — and the ways those innovations translate into economic and business success — make him more than worthy of this tremendous honor.”

Panwar received his B.Tech degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, in 1981, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1983 and 1986, respectively.

He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York, Brooklyn (now NYU Tandon) in 1985. He is a co-founder of the NYC Media Lab, as well as a member of NYU Wireless. He spent the summer of 1987 as a Visiting Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, and has been a consultant to AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ. He has won the Sony Research Award twice.

Article originally posted on FUZEHUB

In 1983, NYSTAR designated The Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT) at New York University as one of the first Centers for Advanced Technology (CAT) in the state.  The CAT program was created to encourage greater collaboration between universities and private industry to support basic and applied research, technology transfer and, ultimately, economic development.

Over the past 38 years, CATT and its affiliates have been at the forefront of some key advances in wireless networks, cybersecurity, media/network applications and other areas of information technology and electronics.  This has included working with household names such as AT&T and Verizon to map out the future of communications, helping small-to-midsized companies with specific technological challenges and providing the type of environment in which entrepreneurial professors and their students can create businesses like BotFactory Inc., a Long Island City-based company that adapted 3D printing technology to the rapid fabrication of printed circuit boards.

Through its research, consulting, education, and technology transfer efforts, CATT helped create 222 new jobs in New York State between 2016 and 2019 and had a non-job economic impact to the state of over $219 million.

Shivendra Panwar, Director of CATT and a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, said the best way to understand CATT’s role is to imagine a pyramid.  At the bottom is the vast infrastructure provided by NYU.  Above that is basic research, typically funded by federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation or the Department of Defense.

“As you get closer to the top is where CATT operates,” he said.  “We translate some of this basic research from our professors and other sources and start applying it to the needs of individual companies, making that bridge.  So, there is a continuum of work that we do from the classroom to basic research to more applied research and, finally, individual projects for companies.”

Panwar said CATT typically works with 20 to 30 companies, most based in New York State, at any given time.  Most often the company approaches the Center, but in some cases, CATT is proactive in approaching the company.  CATT then plays matchmaker, connecting the company with faculty and graduate students at NYU, with partner Columbia University, or even with another school in the state that can take on the company’s project.

“The project itself could be a consulting agreement, the development of software, or a study,” he offered as examples.

CATT also provides companies with NYSTAR-supported matching grants to help offset the cost of a project, which can range from tens of thousands of dollars to over $100,000.

Client companies can be of any size, from small to mid-sized businesses “right up to the AT&Ts and Verizons,” Panwar said.

He said the smaller companies typically require help with a particular technology or capability.  He gave the example of an upstate company that made cameras used in dental imaging and needed help making the transition from chemical to digital processing. An NYU professor stepped in, and while it was a relatively small project for CATT, it was huge for the company, increasing its revenue by millions of dollars.

The larger companies are more likely to take advantage of basic research, “because they are interested in what is going to happen five years from now, 10 years from now and they are already investing in that,” Panwar said. “They have very large labs of their own, but sometimes they are missing something or looking for fresh ideas, so they come to us.  They are also interested in hiring our students.”

Examples of breakthroughs tied to CATT include advances in 5G—such as Massive MIMO and millimeter wave—digital image forensic technologies and network “infection detection” systems.

And then there are the startups.

It is the entrepreneurial spirit of CATT that drew Michael Knox into its fold.  Knox, a graduate of NYU, worked in private industry for 30 years before returning to NYU to teach classes and work with students.

“Before I came full time to NYU, I was doing startups, so I already had the bug and knew I wanted to continue doing that,” he said. “In an environment like CATT offers, students and faculty come up with great ideas, start companies and then spin them out. Just working in that environment, you are always thinking of creative things and trying to find the right team of students to do things.”

One of the first group of students with which he worked, about eight years ago, was the team behind BotFactory.  The question the team set out to answer was whether 3D printing, which at the time was centered on plastic, could be used in building electronics.  The answer was yes.

George Kyriakou, Chief Operating Officer of BotFactory, explained that the traditional process of creating electronic circuit boards can be long and expensive.  An electrical engineer designs a prototype, which is sent out for manufacturing, typically to China.  This can take weeks, as most manufacturing facilities are geared to high volume and prototyping is a small part of their business. Once the bare boards arrive, they must be assembled.  If the designer does not have a specialized technician in-house, it must outsource the work, which can be rather costly.  The completed board is then tested, and most of the time there are bugs.  The engineer starts again. This process may be repeated several times before a final, bugless circuit board is produced.

“The machines BotFactory creates allow the electrical engineers to create their circuit boards from design to actual working board in two-to-three hours,” Kyriakou said. “The idea is that they can design the board, test it, see their mistakes, correct them, assemble again, test again and so on.  They can reach the final product much faster.  And of course, they do that in-house and it is a lot less expensive.”

The company, which employs 12 people, now is on the third iteration of its product, which is called Squink.  The company’s goal is to eventually make Squink available to businesses of all sizes and “make hardware as accessible as software,” but at the moment its clients are mostly big names, including Amazon, Apple, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Nike.  The U.S. Air Force is interested in the possibilities the technology presents, including 3D printing from materials never thought possible, and recently awarded BotFactory a $750,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR grant).

Knox was both an advisor to, and a co-founder of, BotFactory.

“It was mostly because of my experience in the electronics business and printed circuit boards that I was able to add a lot of value giving them advice early on,” he said. “I’ve also done a lot of patents and there was a lot of patent work that had to be done early.”

Kyriakou agreed that what is special about CATT “is the environment you are in—an environment where entrepreneurship is not a strange word; where you have people who have been there, done that.  They embrace this kind of thinking and to be able to bounce some ideas around, to get some advice—having people to tell you what you need to do from a legal, strategic, structural, technical or team building perspective—is very helpful. For example, how do you divide the responsibilities?  It sounds simple and you may think this information is widely available but having a person that you feel close to, and you are in the same space at the same time, to be able to discuss those things, is extremely important.  It is what pushes you forward.  It is motivating, if nothing else.”

Panwar said that the value of having faculty perform research and work with student entrepreneurs goes beyond the benefits to the individual businesses.

“The lessons [a professor] learns from working with companies, doing research, all of that flows into the classroom,” he said.  “You can’t replicate the experience the professor has working with real life issues and companies, pursuing research, knowing what is going to happen next and bringing that to the classroom.  So, the students are much better prepared.  They are taught what they need to know to work in companies.  They are taught what might happen in five years.”

NYU Tandon and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur have long enjoyed a warm relationship. Since 2007, 100 IIT Kanpur undergraduate students have interned in NYU Tandon’s summer research program, and the two schools forged an international partnership for research and education in cybersecurity in 2016. This fall, they launched dual doctoral degree programs in electrical engineering.

Congratulations to Ashutosh Srivastava, Fraida Fund, and Shivendra S. Panwar on winning the Researchers Win CNERT Workshop Reproducibility Award for their paper, “An Experimental Evaluation of Low Latency Congestion Control for mmWave Links.”

The award was presented at the 2020 IEEE Infocom Conference.

Shivendra Panwar, the director of CATT, gave a keynote presentation at the 40th IEEE Sarnoff Symposium 2019 on September 24, 2019. His presentation, “5G: Millimeter waves, millisecond delays?” provided an overview of 5G’s unique promise of ultra-reliable low latency communications while outlining some of the challenges 5G brings to the mobile landscape.

These challenges include:

• sub-millisecond control loops will need to stay on mobile devices
• signal dead spots and signal blockages due to mobile blockers
• less dead spots for sub-6GHz signals, but less bandwidth as well (~100Mbps)

Prof. Panwar’s presentation was based off of his 2018 paper of the same name. Millimeter Waves, Millisecond Delays is available on the ACM Digital Library.

Abstract from Millimeter Waves, Millisecond Delays

Two simultaneous revolutionary changes are occurring in networking: the advent of mmWave networks and the advent of applications that require end-to-end delays of the order of a few milliseconds. mmWave is the first physical layer technology that promises huge wireless bandwidth, but with very poor reliability as a result of its vulnerability to blockage (optical fiber offers high reliability and high bandwidth; sub-6Ghz microwave networks offer lower bandwidth but graceful bandwidth degradation that can be mitigated). The emergence of the need for ultra-low delays for haptic communications and control loops in self-driving cars and other sensor-based applications, has radically changed the requirements for layers above the physical layer. These two changes transform standard networking problems and will lead to a new wave of research. Examples will be used to illustrate this paradigm shift.

 

5G is going to make your cellphone much faster, and that’s going to change gaming dramatically. 4G, adopted 10 years ago, is shorthand for “fourth generation” mobile technology. It exponentially increased the amount of data sent to your phone and made it possible to stream high-quality video. 4G tech put a DVD player in your pocket; 5G is going to put a PlayStation there too.

“In five to 10 years, a game-streaming company will be as prevalent as Netflix,” Shivendra Panwar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the New York State Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications at New York University, tells Newsweek. Total game sales around the world were estimated to have been $138 billion in 2018.

Panwar says companies like Netflix took off because of wireless consumption of their videos, first via home Wi-Fi and then on phones following the arrival of 4G. But the change didn’t happen fast. “In the early years, video-streaming quality wasn’t great, and it was not available everywhere,” he says.

Read the full article on Newsweek.

Yong Liu — a professor of electrical engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and a faculty member of the Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT) and NYU WIRELESS — has been named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest technical professional association, for contributions to multimedia networking. He is the 100th recipient of that honor at NYU Tandon.

Liu, who has published more than 100 papers in major journals and conferences, was recognized for seminal work in the measurement, modeling, analysis, and design of multimedia networking systems, which now dominate online traffic and which crucially impact the performance and stability of the global Internet.

Because most commercial multimedia applications use proprietary protocols and encrypt their data and signaling, there had been very limited public information about their design choices and the Quality of Experience (QoE) delivered to users, and Yong’s research filled this knowledge gap, providing valuable insights into system architecture, design, performance, and network impact. He is also active in the field of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, which leverages networking, computation and storage resources available on end systems to deliver a wide range of scalable network services and which is now a core component in many modern Internet applications.

Notably, Liu devised novel real-time bandwidth estimation and video adaptation algorithms that were recently adopted by Tencent WeChat, China’s exceptionally popular online social network platform, significantly improving the experience of WeChat’s 650 million monthly active users around the world.

“It is always a proud moment when an august organization like the IEEE elevates one of our faculty members to Fellow status,” Dean Katepalli Sreenivasan said. “This honor indicates the high quality of his research and his commitment to solving real-world problems. I congratulate him on receiving this well-deserved recognition.”

Liu holds a master’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China and a doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Among his many other honors are a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, given to young researchers who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar, and multiple best-paper awards at such events as the Association for Computing Machinery Internet Measurement Conference and the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM).

His latest research involves augmented reality and virtual reality, which are predicted to become the next generation of “killer apps” when fifth-generation (5G) mobile is widely available to consumers.

The IEEE is dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. The group has more than 400,000 members around the globe, only a small fraction of whom are honored with the designation of fellow.