Pulkit Grover, pulkit@stanford.edu
Curriculum vitæ: Page 1 of 6
Pulkit Grover (pulkit @ stanford.edu)
Address: 378 Ventura Ave, Palo Alto, CA - 94306
Web: http://www.stanford.edu/∼pulkit
Phone: (510)-325-8123 (mobile)
—————————————————————————————————————————————————Research interests
My current research interests lie in developing a science of information with an emphasis on understanding systemlevel energy and power for “green” communications and control of cyber-physical systems. I seek fundamental
results applicable to technological applications of current interest, specifically, gigabit wireless communication, lowpower system design, and interconnected control systems.
Education
• Postdoctoral researcher, Electrical Eng. Stanford University (Sept 2011 – present)
Focus area: “Theoretical underpinnings of green radios and cyber-physical systems”
• Postdoctoral researcher, Electrical Eng. UC Berkeley. (Feb 2011 – Aug 2011)
• Graduate student, Electrical Eng. UC Berkeley (Aug. 2005 – Dec. 2010)
Dissertation topic: “Implicit communication: Actions can speak more clearly than words.” Eliahu Jury Award.
• Master of Technology in Electrical Engineering, IIT Kanpur (2003-2005)
CPI : 10.0/10, Ranked 1st . Dissertation topic: “Fundamental bounds on the rate of LDPC codes”
• Bachelor of Technology, Electrical Engineering, IIT Kanpur (1999-2003).
CPI : 9.1/10, in major 9.5/10.
Honors, awards and Scholarships
• Eliahu Jury award by the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley, for the best
thesis in systems, control, communications or signal processing, 2011.
• Best student paper award at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Atlanta, GA, 2010 for the paper “Is
Witsenhausen’s counterexample a relevant toy?”
• Finalist for best student paper award at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2010.
• Youngest speaker at the Georgia Tech Summer School on Cyber-Physical systems (2011).
• Winner of the General Chairs’ Recognition award for Interactive Papers, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2009, Shanghai, China.
• “Vodafone Fellowship” for 2005-06, and 2006-07 by Dept. of EECS, UC Berkeley.
• “Microsoft Award for Innovation” at IEEE Computer Society International Design Competition (CSIDC) 2002.
• “Best Project Award” by IIT Kanpur, Technical Arts project: “Wire Straightener”(2002).
• National Talent Search Scholarship (Govt. of India. ’97-’03) and State Science Talent Search Scholarship (Govt. of
Rajasthan) in recognition of science talent.
• Represented Rajasthan in Indian National Physics Olympiad (1998).
Teaching and guidance record
• Advising two UC Berkeley undergraduate students on joint design of green codes/decoders using fundamental
results and Cadence/SPICE simulations (October ’10-present).
• Helped design course project for EE 141 — an implementation of LDPC decoders — for Digital Integrated Circuits (EE 141), taught by Prof. Jan Rabaey (Spring ’10).
• Teaching assistant for EE120 “Signals and Systems,” UC Berkeley (Fall 2007).
• Teaching assistant for EE40 “Electronic circuits lab,” Spring 2005, IIT Kanpur, India.
• Tutor for Math 50, elementary mathematics, at San Quentin State Prison, California (2008-09).
Pulkit Grover, pulkit@stanford.edu
Curriculum vitæ: Page 2 of 6
Industry experience and summer internships
• With Stephan ten Brink, Wionics Research, Realtek, Irvine, USA, 2007: “Active Interference Cancelation for
OFDM systems.”
• At the California Center for Innovative Transportation, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2006: “Sensor motes for traffic monitoring.”
• With Rudiger Urbanke and Amin Shokrollahi at EPFL, Lausanne, 2004: “Properties of capacity-approaching
LDPC and raptor codes”
• With Christian Calude, Auckland University, Auckland, NZ: “Turing computability and quantum computation.”
• With KR Parthasarathy at Institute for Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, Summer 2002: “Quantum computing and quantum information theory.”
• At Daimler-Chrysler Research Center, Bangalore, India, Summer, 2001. “CDMA for car phones.”
Service
• Volunteered for teaching Math 50, elementary mathematics, at San Quentin State Prison, California (2008–09).
• Co-chair for session on “Stochastic Control” for IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2010.
• Student co-organizer of Net/Comm/DSP Seminar, UC Berkeley (2007–2011).
• Co-founder and organizer of EE Graduate Student Seminar, UC Berkeley (2008–09).
• Coordinator of Ham and amateur radio club, IIT Kanpur (2002–04).
• Reviewer for (journals) IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, IEEE Journal on Selected areas in Communications,
IEEE Trans. on Communications, Systems and Control letters. For (conferences) IEEE International Symposium
on Information Theory (ISIT), IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), IEEE Communication Theory
Workshop (CTW), IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), American Control Conference (ACC), among others.
Invited talks and seminars (excluding conference paper presentations)
“Green” communications
• “Fundamental limits on transmission and computation power: why “whispering” is suboptimal,” to be presented at the Workshop on Information Theory and its Applications (ITA), San Diego, Feb. 2012.
• “Interactive communication on chip: understanding Shannon’s “magic trick”,” to be presented at the Workshop
on Interactive Information Theory, Banff, Canada, Jan. 2012.
• “Fundamental limits on “green” communication.” Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, Oct 6, 2011.
• “Cyber-Physical Systems: the need to look beyond Turing’s machine.” Georgia Tech Summer School on CyberPhysical Systems, June 28, 2011.
• “Low-power wireless systems: communication and computation” LIDS, MIT, Cambridge, May 13, 2011.
• “Towards a theory for low-power wireless system design.” Workshop on Information Theory and its Applications
(ITA), San Diego, Feb. 2011.
• “Low-power wireless systems: A theory-practice ping-pong.” Berkeley Wireless Research Center Summer Retreat, Berkeley, CA, Jun. 7, 2010.
• “Green codes for Short Distance Wireless Communication.” LNMIIT, Jaipur, India, Jan 17, 2007.
Decentralized control
• “Understanding information flows in decentralized systems” Georgia Tech, April 25, 2011.
• “Understanding information flows in decentralized systems.” University of Toronto, April 20, 2011.
• “Actions can speak more clearly than words.” Comm/Net Seminar, USC, Oct. 27, 2010.
• “Actions can speak more clearly than words.” Electrical Engineering department, UCLA, Oct. 26, 2010.
Pulkit Grover, pulkit@stanford.edu
Curriculum vitæ: Page 3 of 6
• “Actions can speak more clearly than words.” LIDS, MIT, Oct. 18, 2010.
• “Distributed Control: A New Frontier for Information Theory.” ISS Seminar, Princeton University, Mar. 25, 2010.
• “Distributed Control: A New Frontier for Information Theory.” Graduation day talk, Workshop on Information
Theory and its Applications, San Diego, Feb. 3, 2010.
• “Understanding Implicit Communication in Distributed Control.” Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics, UC San Diego, Nov. 13, 2009.
Journal papers, Magazine articles (with brief descriptions of contributions)
In preparation:
[J9] “Fundamental limits on transmission and computation power: why “whispering” is suboptimal.” Pulkit
Grover, Andrea Goldsmith, Anant Sahai, Jan Rabaey. In preparation for submission to IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, 2011.
Short description: Expands on conference paper [C27], presents my strongest fundamental bounds on power
required in encoding, and decoding. Focusing on interconnect power in encoding/decoding circuits, I use tools
from communication complexity to show that the total (transmit+encoding+decoding)
power, as well as the
q
optimizing transmit power, must increase at least as fast as 3 log P er1 r , regardless of the code construction. Ignoring processing power, traditional information theory proposes (what I call) “whispering” strategies that use
bounded transmit power as P er r → 0. I show that can be highly suboptimal for encoding/decoding power.
[J8] “Joint designs for minimizing transmit and decoding power: an empirical viewpoint.” Karthik Ganesan, Yang
Wen, Pulkit Grover, Jan Rabaey, Andrea Goldsmith. In preparation for submission to IEEE Trans. on communications, 2011.
Short description: An experimental complement to theoretical bounds in [J9]. We show that the “greenest”
code/decoder design becomes less and less complex as the distance decreases, or P er r increases. Provides total
power numbers based on circuit simulations which are significantly lower than existing state-of-the-art systems.
[J7] “A general lower bound on number of iterations for message-passing decoding.” Anant Sahai and Pulkit
Grover. In preparation for submission to IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, 2011.
Short description: Shows that the number of clock-cycles required for decoding must scale at last as fast as
log
1
P er r
log (C −R)
2 , where C is the channel capacity, and R is the code rate. The energy/power implications appear in [J4].
In review:
[J6] “The finite-dimensional Witsenhausen counterexample.” Pulkit Grover, Se Yong Park and Anant Sahai. Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, 2010.
Short description: Building on [J2, J5], provides the first approximately-optimal solution to original (scalar) Witsenhausen counterexample, and its finite dimensional extensions. Uses tools from large-deviations and information theory, establishing that understanding “implicit communication” is important for decentralized control.
[J5] “Information embedding and the triple role of control.” Pulkit Grover, Aaron Wagner and Anant Sahai. Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, 2010.
Short description: Building on [J2], provides tightest known upper and lower bounds for infinite-dimensional
Witsenhausen counterexample. Shows “dirty-paper coding” is optimal in the limit of zero error. Establishes
connections with information-embedding problems in information theory.
Pulkit Grover, pulkit@stanford.edu
Curriculum vitæ: Page 4 of 6
Published
[J4] “Towards a communication-theoretic understanding of system-level power consumption.” Pulkit Grover, Kristen Ann Woyach and Anant Sahai. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication (JSAC), special issue on
Energy-Efficient Wireless Communication, vol. 29, no. 8, Sept 2011. In top 25 accessed JSAC articles, Sept. 2011
and Oct. 2011.
Short description: Provides fundamental bounds on energy/power required in computational nodes at the decoder using bounds of [J7]. Shows that regular LDPC codes are order optimal in this model, while capacityapproaching LDPCs are not.
[J3] “Demystifying the Witsenhausen Counterexample.” Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. IEEE Control Systems
Magazine (‘Ask the experts’), vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 20-24, Dec. 2010.
Short description: Why is Witsenhausen’s counterexample so important? How can understanding this toy problem enhance our understanding of decentralized control significantly? This paper addresses these questions
from a “big-picture” perspective.
[J2] “Witsenhausen’s counterexample as Assisted Interference Suppression.” Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. International Journal of Systems, Control and Communications (IJSCC), Special Issue on Information Processing and
Decision Making in Distributed Control Systems, 2(1), Jan 2010. Pages: 197-227.
Short description: Proposes an information-theoretic path to obtain approximate solutions to the counterexample. For an asymptotically infinite-length extension of the scalar problem, I derive upper and lower bounds
that are within a factor of 2 of each other for all problem parameters. [J5] establishes tighter bounds for the
asymptotic problem, and [J6] takes the result all the way to scalar (and other finite-length problems).
[J1] “Upper Bounds on the Rate of LDPC Codes for a Class of Finite State Markov Channels.” Pulkit Grover and AK
Chaturvedi. IEEE Trans. on Information Theory 53(2), Feb. 2007 Pages: 794 - 804.
Short description: Extends Gallager’s bounds (in his thesis) to Markov channels. Shows that “code-density” of
LDPC codes needs to diverge to infinity as the rate approaches channel capacity.
Conference Papers
Submitted/in preparation
[C31] “Cancelation of retroactive interference in biological signaling cascades: an application of Witsenhausen’s
counterexample.” Pulkit Grover, Vishwesh Kulkarni and Andrea Goldsmith. IEEE Conference on Decision and
Control (CDC) 2012, in preparation.
[C30] “Securing Inductively Coupled Communication.” Lav Varshney, Pulkit Grover, and Anant Sahai. To be
presented at the Workshop on Information Theory and its Applications (ITA), UCSD, Feb. 2012 (Invited).
[C29] “Implicit communication for security in cyber-physical systems.” Pulkit Grover and Andrea Goldsmith. To
be presented at Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS) Mar. 2012 (Invited).
[C28] “The importance of “implicit” communication with context misalignment.” Abhishek Gupta, Pulkit Grover,
Cedric Langbort and Tamer Başar. To be presented at Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS)
March 2012, Princeton, NJ (Invited).
Published
[C27] “Information theory meets circuit design: why capacity-approaching codes require more chip area and
power.” Pulkit Grover, Andrea Goldsmith, Anant Sahai and Jan Rabaey. 49th Annual Allerton Conference on
Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, Illinois, 2011.
Pulkit Grover, pulkit@stanford.edu
Curriculum vitæ: Page 5 of 6
[C26] “Near vs far field: interference aggregation in TV whitespaces.” Kristen Ann Woyach, Pulkit Grover and
Anant Sahai. IEEE Globecom 2011.
[C25] “The role of common context in facilitating coordination.” Pulkit Grover and Cedric Langbort. IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2011.
[C24] “The “source-simplification” aspect of signaling.” Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2011, St. Petersburg, Russia.
[C23] “Simple models for power optimization across transmission, equalization and decoding.” Pulkit Grover,
Anant Sahai and Ji-Hoon Park, European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) 2011.
[C22] “The power cost of over-designing codes.” Karthik Ganesan, Pulkit Grover and Jan Rabaey. IEEE Workshop
on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS) 2011.
[C21] “Decoding power consumption can increase significantly with increased wire-lengths and code performance:
Empirical results.” Karthik Ganesan and Pulkit Grover, DAC ’11, Work-In-Progress session.
[C20] “Fundamental lower bounds on wiring complexity of decoder implementations.” Pulkit Grover and Anant
Sahai. Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS) 2011.
[C19] “Is Witsenhausen’s counterexample a relevant toy?” Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. IEEE Conference on
Decision and Control (CDC) 2010, Atlanta, Georgia. Recipient of the Student Best Paper Award.
[C18] “Implicit and explicit communication in decentralized control.” Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. 48th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, Illinois, 2010.
[C17] “An interference perspective on decoding power.” Pulkit Grover, Kristen Ann Woyach, Hari Palaiyanur and
Anant Sahai. 6th Int. Symp. on turbo codes and iterative information processing (ISTC), Brest, France, 2010.
[C16] “Distributed signal cancelation inspired by Witsenhausen’s counterexample.” Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2010, Austin, Texas. Finalist for Student Best
Paper Award.
[C15] “Shannon meets Tesla : wireless information and power transfer.” Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. IEEE
International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2010, Austin, Texas.
[C14] “Information-theoretic tradeoffs on throughput and chip power consumption for decoding error-correcting
codes.” Pulkit Grover, Hari Palaiyanur and Anant Sahai. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory
(ISIT) 2010, Austin, Texas.
[C13] “Information embedding meets distributed control.” Pulkit Grover, Aaron Wagner and Anant Sahai. IEEE
Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Cairo, Egypt, 2010.
[C12] “A Generalized Witsenhausen Counterexample.” Pulkit Grover, Se Yong Park and Anant Sahai. 47th Annual
Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, Illinois, 2009.
[C11] “The Finite Dimensional Witsenhausen Counterexample.” Pulkit Grover, Anant Sahai and Se Yong Park.
Control over Communication channels (ConCom), Seoul, South Korea, 2009.
[C10] “A constant factor approximately optimal solution to the Witsenhausen counterexample.” Se Yong Park,
Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Shanghai, China, 2009. (Winner of the General Chairs’ Recognition award for Interactive Papers).
[C9] “Time-division multiplexing for green broadcasting.” Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. IEEE International
Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Seoul, South Korea, 2009.
[C8] “A vector version of Witsenhausen’s counterexample : Towards convergence of control, communication and
computation.” Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. IEEE Conf. on Decision and Control (CDC), Mexico, 2008.
[C7] “Green Codes: Energy-Efficient Short-Range Communication.” Pulkit Grover and Anant Sahai. International
Pulkit Grover, pulkit@stanford.edu
Curriculum vitæ: Page 6 of 6
Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Toronto, 2008.
[C6] “On the need for knowledge of the phase in exploiting known primary transmissions.” Pulkit Grover and
Anant Sahai. IEEE Inter. Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks (DySPAN) symp., Dublin, Ireland, 2007.
[C5] “Bounds on the tradeoff between decoding complexity and rate for codes on graphs.” Pulkit Grover. IEEE
Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Lake Tahoe.
[C4] “Writing on Rayleigh faded dirt: a computable upper bound to the outage capacity ” Pulkit Grover and Anant
Sahai. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2007.
[C3] “Upper Bounds on the Rate of LDPC Codes for a class of Finite-State Markov Channels.” Pulkit Grover and
Ajit Kumar Chaturvedi. National Conference on Communications (NCC) 2005.
[C2] “Upper Bounds on the Rate of LDPC Codes for Gilbert-Elliott Channels.” Pulkit Grover and Ajit Kumar
Chaturvedi. IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) 2004, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
[C1] “Geolocation Using Transmit and Receive Diversity.” Pulkit Grover, R Agarwal and Ajit Kumar Chaturvedi.
IEEE Globecom 2004, November 27–December 03 2004, Dallas, Texas, USA
Theses
• [T2, Ph.D. Thesis] “Actions can speak more clearly than words,” UC Berkeley, December’10. 2011 Eliahu Jury
Award.
Short description: The dissertation discusses many intellectual and practical applications of understanding Witsenhausen’s counterexample, an unsolved problem in decentralized control. It also provides approximately optimal solutions to the counterexample, and realistic versions of the problem. Understanding the counterexample can help us understand larger problems that are not convex, and hence thought to be intractable. It lays
down my vision of what toy problems in decentralized control need to be addressed in order to obtain insights
for design of practical systems.
• [T1, MS Thesis] “LDPC Codes: Bounds on the rate and some results on minimal stopping sets,” IIT Kanpur,
July’05.