Postdoc Javad Ghaderi to join Columbia Faculty

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Published:
June 30, 2014

WNCG Postdoctoral Associate Javad Ghaderi will join Columbia University this fall as a new tenure-track assistant professor in electrical engineering with a focus on communications and networking. Prof. Ghaderi, who received the offer last year as a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) deferred the offer until 2014 for the opportunity to study as a Postdoctoral Associate with WNCG.

“I deferred because I wanted to spend time as a Postdoc at WNCG,” Prof. Ghaderi states, “because I wanted to gain more experience before I start my own research group and start teaching.”

During his time at WNCG, Prof. Ghaderi participated in two main research areas with Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai, Sujay Sanghavi and François Bacelli. The first research area involves large scale content delivery networks such as YouTube.

One of the main questions in these content delivery networks, according to Prof. Ghaderi, is how to determine the number of video reproductions to store for each video, when demand and popularity of the video constantly changes. With WNCG faculty, Ghaderi helped develop adaptive strategies that use video popularity to establish necessary video storage as it changes.

The second field of WNCG research Ghaderi participates in is Big Data, and how to efficiently divide large scale computation loads between different machines.

“Our group studied these graphs with many nodes and sought to develop efficient algorithms that could minimize inter-machine traffic and increase the efficiency of large scale computations,” Prof. Ghaderi states.

While sad to see his time with WNCG come to an end, Prof. Ghaderi looks forward to the excitement and challenges of living in New York City and of establishing his own research group at Columbia. For Prof. Ghaderi, the choice of academia over industry seemed simple.

 “Everyone in this field has to deal with the question of industry or academia at some point. I just tried to gain exposure to both fields so I could gain a good perspective. Both fields have pros and cons. I ultimately chose academia because I felt it provides more freedom to work on the specific kinds of problems I am interested in.”

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