Vaibhav Singh

Vaibhav Singh is a third year Ph.D student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a wireless communication and mobile systems researcher advised by Prof. Swarun Kumar and Prof. Osman Yağan. His research at the WiTech Lab focusses on developing solutions for satellite networking and mm-wave wireless. His work has been published at premier venues in wireless communications and networks such as MobiCom, MobiSys and UbiComp. Check out Vaibhav's website [here].

Can you tell me about your research interests and focus?
I work on designing new or improved wireless communication and sensing systems, mostly from the physical layer side of things. In my projects, I have combined hardware and signal processing techniques to design systems that have either improved the communication performance - throughput in Full Duplex systems, or reduced the cost and form factor of receiver hardware while keeping the signal quality intact - distributed satellite ground station receiver. I have also assisted in a few wireless sensing projects like Tire wear sensing, speech recognition and localization.

What are the research accomplishments that you are most proud of?
The first thing that comes to my mind is finally finishing the satellite project after almost 2 years. Despite all the challenges and change in project directions, I was able to finish the project thanks to my awesome collaborators who helped in different ways, from pitching interesting ideas for different components to running experiments at insane hours of the day. Almost all of the projects I have been involved in have had some crazy deadline situations when things didn't look very positive but being able to pull through in these situations with the help of my collaborators and advisors is something I am proud of, although I would love to avoid these situations in the future :-). I would say the growth in knowledge and skillset, and the ability to giving up while trying to make things work are some of the tiny but important personal accomplishments for me.

Can you tell me about the work culture and environment at CMU?
I am fortunate to have advisors who have always given me the freedom to pursue different ideas even if they don't tie into a common theme. I have noticed that Inter and intra research group collaborations are very common and even encouraged here. I have worked with almost all the members of my lab during the course of different projects. Not only did this help me in learning and getting great ideas from people with different sets of expertise but also helped me to improve other aspects of my research like writing and presentation skills.

Can you share a little known fact about yourself?
I am very interested in teaching. Apart from this, I am always excited about outdoor sports. I never say no to any opportunity to go out and play irrespective of the weather or time of the day. Over the last year, I have taken to running. Goal is to finish a marathon before I graduate. Let's see how it goes :D.