Prakash Narayan Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor, Institute for Systems Research University of Maryland Institute for Systems Research 2353 A.V. Williams Building College Park, MD 20742 Phone: (301) 405-3661 Fax: (301) 314-8586 E-mail: prakash@isr.umd.edu Home Page: http://www.isr.umd.edu/People/faculty/Narayan.html

Dr. Narayan received his M.S. degree in Systems Science and Mathematics and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MO in May 1978 and August 1981, respectively. He received his Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering in August 1976 from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India.

He has been with ISR since 1985 and holds a joint appointment with the Institute. Since 1991, Dr. Narayan also has been a member of the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks at the University of Maryland. He has held the position of Visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Zurich), the Technion (Haifa, Israel), the University of Bielefeld (Bielefeld, Germany), the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest, Hungary), the Laboratory for Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering (Padova, Italy), and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

Dr. Narayan's research and teaching interests are in information and communication theory, performance evaluation issues in hybrid wideband terrestrial and satellite communication networks, and statistical signal processing.

He has served as a consultant to Bell Communications Research, Morristown, NJ. He is a reviewer for several IEEE Transactions, NSF and other publications and organizations.

Dr. Narayan is Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and a Fellow of the IEEE. He was co-organizer of the IEEE Workshop on Multi-User Information Theory and Systems in Hot Springs, VA, in June 1983. He served as Program Chair of the IEEE/IMS Workshop on Information Theory and Statistics, Alexandria, VA, in September-October 1994. Dr. Narayan is Co-Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Washington, D.C., June 2001.

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

• Multiuser information theory
• Communication theory
• Cryptography
• Wireless networks
• Information theory and statistics

Dr. Narayan's research interests are in the areas of information and communication theory, performance evaluation issues in hybrid wideband terrestrial and satellte communication networks, and system modeling and identification. Applications include data and video compression, transmitter-receiver designs for communication systems, speech recognition, and switching and capacity assignment in high-speed networks.

His current research activities include the statistical modeling of data and universal data compression.  This work, which is at the interface of information theory and statistics, involves an investigation of general models for "real" data and the associated theoretical limits of compressibility, together with the development of finite-state algorithms for compressing the data efficiently and on-line. A related activity concerns a study of the fundamental limits of, as well as efficient schemes for, hierarchical or multi-resolution data/video compression and routing in multicasting applications. The issues of bit allocation and rate control for video compression are also being addressed.

Another activity focuses on design and performance analysis for high-speed terrestrial and satellite networks. This study includes the development of models for multimedia traffic displaying short- and long-range dependencies, and the evaluation of component performance and end-to-end quality of service with applications to buffer engineering and capacity assignment.

PUBLICATIONS