2/11/2014 Meg Dickinson, ECE ILLINOIS
Written by Meg Dickinson, ECE ILLINOIS
Making the transition from industry to academia, new CSL faculty member, Lav Varshney, joined the communications research group in January to continue his work on informational systems involving humans and machines. Varshney comes to Illinois from IBM, where he spent three years at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York.
There, he most recently studied computational creativity. It sounds counterintuitive, he said, but he and his colleagues created a computer that creates novel, flavorful recipes. The topic has garnered media attention from around the world, and Varshney will attend South By Southwest 2014 in March to demonstrate it.
At Illinois, Varshney is an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering and is also affiliated with the Beckman Institute. He decided to join the faculty in order to work with grad students and teach.
He’s familiar with Illinois, as both his father and grandfather were students here. He’s also attended the Allerton Conference on Communication, Control and Computing.
Varshney was married in December, and enjoys playing and watching basketball. He’s a longtime Syracuse Orange fan, as he was born and raised in Syracuse, N.Y.
He and his twin brother once discussed foul calls in basketball on a long drive home from MIT to Syracuse, trying to understand systematic biases that are present. As a result, they started modeling human decision-making from a mathematical point of view, later trying to understand how it influences larger engineering systems involving people.
Varshney will spend the semester honing in his research interests at Illinois. Some questions he’s considering: Whether you can mathematically formulate the fundamental limits of creativity, how much information it takes to overload humans, as well as possibly studying communication systems online, like Twitter. He wants to know how much information can flow, despite human cognitive constraints, and how it influences others, given those limits?
Theories on information overload “seemingly haven’t yet been well-mathematized,” Varshney said, and he’s interested in the answer to, “How do we think in situations where we have more information than we can use?” And how does relevant information get through despite the cacophony of big data?
He’s also researched information theory, with an emphasis on how much information can flow through a noisy receiver. He found reliable communication flows despite noise in a receiver circuit. He’s also studied neuroscience and decision-making, and whether the microarchitecture of the brain is optimal for storing the information it needs to.
Varshney earned a BS in electrical and computer engineering at Cornell, and SM, EE, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.