Piya Pal
Center for Wireless Communications
University of California San Diego
Email: pipal@ucsd.edu
I am a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego. I am a member of the Center for Wireless Communications and a founding faculty of HDSI.
I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Caltech under the supervision of Prof. P. P. Vaidyanathan in 2013. I completed my undergraduate studies in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering at IIT Kharagpur in 2007.
I am broadly interested in mathematical and algorithmic aspects of signal processing and machine learning that concern optimal ways to sample and sense the environment, and extract relevant information in a computationally efficient manner. I am specifically interested in computational sensing with sparse arrays and samplers, super-resolution imaging, sensing and architecture design for next-generation communication systems, and machine learning for inverse problems.
My research has been recognized by several awards and distinctions, including the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), Early Career Technical Achievement Award from IEEE Signal Processing Society, among others.
See Smart Sensing and Information Processing (SSIP) Lab for more details.
- 08/2025 My former Postdoc Dr. Robin Rajamaki started his tenure-track as an Assistant Professor at Tampere University, Finland. Congratulations Robin!
- 10/2025 Served as Technical Area Chair for Array Processing and Multisensor Systems, 2025 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers.
- 05/2025 Our paper NEAR (Neural Electromagnetic Array Response) has been accepted to 2025 ICML. This is the first paper that lays theoretical and algorithmic foundations of implicit neural representation (INR) for radar sensing with very few measurements and a single temporal snapshot.
- 04/2025 Two papers were presented at 2025 IEEE ICASSP. These works develop machine learning methods for radar and channel sensing with scarce measurements.
- 02/2025 Organized a special session on “Coding and Sensing” at 2025 ITA Workshop, along with collaborators Prof. Hessam Mahdavifar and Dr. Robin Rajamaki.
- 11/2024 Elected to Board of Directors of Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers.
- 11/2024 Sina Shahsavari successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis. He is joining Apple as a Machine Learning Engineer. Congratulations Sina!
- 08/2024 Jiawen Chen successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis (co-advised with Prof. Eric Ahrens, Professor of Radiology, UC San Diego). She is joining Philips Research. Congratulations Jiawen!
- 08/2024 Mehmet Can Hucumenoglu successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis. He is joining Qualcomm to work on autonomous vehicles, radar, and sensing. Congratulations Mehmet!
- 07/2024 Delivered a plenary talk on “Sensing, Coding and the Quest for Super-resolution” at the 2024 International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM), Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.
- 07/2024 Our paper Subspace Coding for Spatial Sensing (with Prof. Hessam Mahdavifar and Dr. Rajamaki) was presented at 2024 IEEE ISIT. This work introduces the idea of viewing sparse sensor arrays as optimum analog sensing subspace codes.
- 06/2023 Congratulations to Ph.D. graduate Dr. Pulak Sarangi, now an algorithm engineer at Apple.