Best Paper Award for EECS Student

Sun (left) and Jafar found a surprising connection between two theories.July 28, 2016 – Samueli School electrical engineering and computer science graduate student Hua Sun won a best student paper award this month at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory in Barcelona, Spain.

Sun’s paper, “Blind Interference Alignment for Private Information Retrieval,” written with his adviser, EECS Professor Syed Ali Jafar, won the IEEE Jack Keil Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award from more than 1,000 scientific papers submitted to the conference. The award, given to as many as three outstanding papers on which the student is the principal author and presenter, includes a $500 honorarium and a plaque.

Private information retrieval, a method of protecting the privacy of users from data providers, is a cryptographic problem. Its goal is to allow users to search databases and retrieve desired information without disclosing their interest in the information to the data provider. Blind interference alignment (BIA), a technique for managing interference on wireless networks, was introduced by Jafar in 2012; the paper describes a surprising connection between the two theories and points the way toward translating BIA schemes into stronger privacy information-retrieval practices.

Jafar is proud of his student’s work. “The IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory is the most prestigious international conference in the field,” he says. “Based on this discovery, we were able to characterize the exact information theoretic capacity of PIR.”

--Anna Lynn Spitzer

 

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