UT Austin, 6G@UT, and WNCG are excited to welcome Prof. Kaushik Chowdhury as our newest faculty member as of Fall 2024.
Prof. Chowdhury received his BEng from the VJTI Mumbai, MS from the University of Cincinnati, and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. For the past 15 years, he was a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Prof. Chowdhury serves as co-PI of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Colosseum, the world’s largest radiofrequency networked emulator. Supported by a $6 million National Science Foundation grant, Colosseum was initially created for DARPA’s Collaborative Spectrum Challenge. He is also the PI of the NSF RFDataFactory community infrastructure project, a collaborative resource that allows users to access RF-centric datasets, software application programming interfaces, and tutorials for collecting and processing data from experimental testbeds and simulations.
I sat with Prof. Chowdhury to discuss what prompted him to move to UT Austin and what he hopes to achieve with WNCG:
“UT and especially WNCG affords a unique opportunity because it has both the world's best wireless visionaries and is a renowned epicenter for machine learning research in the US. At WNCG, there's a confluence of these two very different disciplines and this unique interdisciplinary spot is where I want to be.”
Prof. Chowdhury and his research group focus on applied machine learning in wireless systems, combining theoretical research with practical work on software-defined radios. At WNCG, they plan to work on projects that analyze and interpret wireless signals using machine learning and enhancing programmable cellular architectures.
Many of Prof. Chowdhury’s students aspire to become researchers or enter academia: “One of my missions here is to utilize all the resources that the university has and the opportunities WNCG provides to launch my students in that trajectory where they can grow to be independent researchers and faculty in top tier places.”
Prof. Chowdhury has been the recipient of multiple awards, including the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2017, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award in 2017, the Office of Naval Research Director of Research Early Career Award in 2016, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2015, as well as multiple best paper awards. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2024 and was a finalist for the 2023 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists.
He has also served in several leadership roles, including Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Simulation, and as Technical Program Chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2021, IEEE CCNC 2021 , IEEE DySPAN 2021, ACM MobiHoc 2022, and IEEE MILCOM 2023.