Biography

• Research group leader at the Chair of Communications Engineering led by Prof. Dr.sc.tech Gerhard Kramer.
• Doing a habilitation with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh, Prof. Deniz Gündüz and Prof. Sidharth Jaggi as mentors.
• Worked with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh as a postdoctoral researcher from February 2020 until October 2023.
• Obtained a PhD from the ECE department of Rutgers University in January 2020.
• Held short term visiting positions at Aalto, Technical University of Berlin and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
• Spent three years as PhD candidate at the ECE department of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).
• Worked at the CSI lab supervised by Prof. Salim El Rouayheb.From August 2014 till January 2020,
• Received a masters degree in Information and Communication from the Lebanese University after doing the thesis at IIT in 2014.
• Did the engineering senior project at Center of Nuclear Science and Science of Matter (CSNSM) in Paris, France and graduated as a Computer and Communication Engineer from the Lebanese University in 2013.
• Did an internship at procsim-consulting company in EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2012.

Research Interests

My research interest is centered around privacy, scalability, security and reliability of distributed systems. The applications may differ but the goal remains the same: study theoretical and fundamental limits of innovative storage and computing systems and design codes achieving those limits. My current work is motivated by the following research directions.

• Federated learning
• Private and secure distributed computing
• Distributed storage
• DNA-based storage systems
• Private and secure network coding.

Awards

• DFG (German Research Foundation) grant for a temporary position for a Principal Investigator "Private Secure and Efficient Codes for Distributed Machine Learning". (2023 -- 2026)
• EuroTech Visiting Research Programme grant. (March 2023)
• Best Poster Award on Optimization and Machine Learning in Princeton Day of Optimization, Princeton, New Jersey. (September 2018)

Service

Workshop co-Organizer

• Munich Workshop on Coding and Cryptography 2022

Guest Editor

• Frontier in Communications and Networks

Technical Program Committee (TPC) member

• Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC) 2023
• IEEE International Workshop on Information Theory (ITW) 2023
• 13th Annual Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (NVMW) 2022

Session Chair

• IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) 2022
• IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2022
• IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2021

Reviewer

• IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
• IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory (JSAIT)
• IEEE Transactions on Forensics and Information Security
• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
• IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC)
• IEEE Transactions on Communications
• IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
• IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing
• IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
• ScienceDirect Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
• IET Information Security
• IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)
• IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW)
• IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
• IEEE Global Communication Conference: Communication Theory (Globecom)
• IEEE Global Communication Conference: Workshops: Network Coding and Applications (NetCod)
• IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)

Teaching

• Winter semester 2021/2022: Security in Communications and Networks, jointly with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh
• Summer semester 2021: Coding Theory for Storage and Networks, jointly with Dr.-Ing Sven Puchinger
• Winter semester 2020/2021: Security in Communications and Networks, jointly with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh
• Summer semester 2020: Coding Theory for Storage and Networks, jointly with Dr. Alessandro Neri