I received bachelor and master degrees in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1995 and 1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia, in 2006. Please note that I have moved to the School of Engineering and Information Technology, UNSW, Canberra. I currently hold an Honorary Professor appointment at ANU.

Research Interests:

My current research interests are mainly in information-theoretic data privacy, index coding, communication for omniscience and network coding. I am also interested in other foundational problems in information theory, wireless communications and signal processing. More details about my research can be found here.

News:

3 Feb 2021: We have submitted five papers to 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) - two on index coding and three on privacy. Please check out their preprints Update-based index coding, alpha lift privacy, nonlinear index coding, privacy in source coding via graphs, and differential privacy via randomized graph coloring.

27 Jan 2021: Our Paper “Low Influence, Utility, and Independence in Differential Privacy: A Curious Case of 3 choose 2” was accepted for publication in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory, Special Issue on Privacy. Preprint can be found here and here.

22 Dec 2020: Our paper “On Properties and Optimization of Information-theoretic Privacy Watchdog” was accepted for publication in 2020 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW). Preprint can be found here.

06 Oct 2020: I started a new position as Professor of Electrical Engineering at School of Engineering and Information Technology, UNSW, Canberra. I hold an Honorary appointment at ANU, has access to my ANU email account, and will maintain this webpage for some time. My new email address is p dot lastname at unsw dot edu dot au.

30 June 2020: Our paper “Secure Index Coding with Security Constraints on Receivers” was accepted for publication in 2020 International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Applications (ISITA). Preprint can be found here.

1 April 2020: Our paper “Privacy-Utility Tradeoff in a Guessing Framework Inspired by Index Coding” was accepted for publication in 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory. Paper can be found here.

30 March 2020: I was awarded a Data61 (@CSIRO) Collaborative Research Project (CRP), entitled ``Information Theory Models for Practical Privacy/Utility Balance”.

Career Highlights:

From 1997 to 2002, I worked as a Research Engineer and then as a Senior Research Engineer at Iran Communications Industries (ICI) in Tehran, Iran and at Deqx (formerly known as Clarity Eq) in Sydney, Australia.

I have co-authored around 180 refereed journal articles or conference papers and a book on Hilbert Space Methods in Signal Processing, published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. One of my papers has won the best paper award at Globecom 2016 , co-authored with Noman Akbar, Nan Yang, and Rodney A. Kennedy. I have been a Chief Investigator in five ARC Discovery Projects, one Linkage Project. In October 2019, I was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship. I have supervised, hosted, or collaborated with a large number of PhD students and postdoctoral research fellows.

Throughout my career, I have visited various research institutes, including the Institute for Communications Engineering, Technical University of Munich (TUM) in 2008 and MIT in 2009 and 2013. Between 2016 and 2019, I served as an Editor (AE) for coding techniques for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory . I am the General Co-chair of the 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) , to be held in the beautiful city of Melbourne, Australia in July 2021. I have been a Senior Member of the IEEE since 2007. In April 2019, I was elected by the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc) to serve on the Board until December 2020.

Email

Email 1: firstname dot lastname at anu dot edu dot au

Email 2: p dot lastname at unsw dot edu dot au