Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

My research draws from my background in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and aims to propose solutions to problems in Computer Networks and Bioinformatics. I work on various aspects of wireless sensor networks, which are an exciting new development in Computer Science and Engineering. Sensor networks are a wireless network formed by tiny battery-powered nodes that are capable of doing computation and communication. Typically these nodes are deployed in some random manner and then they self-organize into a coherant network that can be queried by a remote user. These networks have applications in many scenarios including regions dangerous for humans or regions where human activity is not desirable. I am especially interested in the problem of localization or determination of geographical locations of sensor nodes in a distributed manner. My previous work (supported by NSERC) resulted in better algorithms for sensor network localization. I plan to work on localization in more general scenarios as well as other problems in this area. I would also like to improve performance by making use of better battery models. I will also work on designing efficient algorithms for computational problems in Bioinformatics. Recent advances in Biology have resulted in the generation of huge volumes of data that cannot be analyzed by hand. For example, many new genomes are being sequenced and automated analysis is essential for understanding them. I collaborate with Biologists at York University as well as the University of Rochester to solve computational problems and design efficient algorithms that result in tools that Biologists can use in their research. Much of my work is in the area of genomic signal processing which is a new field that involves application of ideas developed for signal processing (including image processing and speech processing) to Biological data.