Draper wins CAREER award
for streaming media architecture, design and feedback
ssistant Professor Stark C. Draper has received a prestigious 2009 Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER). CAREER awards recognize faculty members who are at the beginning of their academic careers and have developed creative projects that effectively integrate advanced research and education.
Draper, who joined the UW-Madison faculty in fall 2007, is researching how to rethink the fundamental architectures of digital communications to improve the delivery of streaming data. The long-term potential of his work could be improved digital communications service and broader availability for lower cost. The project will be funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The central technical question Draper will address is how feedback should be used to transmit delay-sensitive data in real-world systems that are faced with resource-constrained and noisy feedback. The project will address new scenarios (e.g., wireless fading, multiuser networks, inter-action with queuing) to develop architectural insights, appropriate classes of error correcting codes, and improved network protocols.
The research will be incorporated into a variety of UW-Madison courses addressing coding and information theory, as well as the freshman undergraduate course Introduction to Society’s Engineering Grand Challenges. Draper and his team also work with the UW Engineering Summer Program to promote STEM fields to high-school students.
