Dina Katabi

ACM Prize in Computing (2017)
ACM Fellows (2013)
ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (2012)
ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (2003)
2017 ACM Prize in Computing
Martin Casado And Dina Katabi Named 2012 Recipients Of The Grace Murray Hopper Award For Advances In Network Efficiency

ACM Prize in Computing

USA - 2017

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For creative contributions to wireless networking.

Over the past 20 years, wireless networks have become the predominant mode of network communication for people and their devices. The world is now awash in wireless signals. Dina Katabi has produced a string of exceptional results by applying methods from communication theory, signal processing, and machine learning to solve problems in wireless networking, and to use wireless signals to develop new ways to sense human activity.

Katabi and her collaborators have written several papers on overcoming interference in wireless networks, which occurs when multiple nodes transmit concurrently. These papers model how signals mix in the air as a code, and describe algorithms that allow the receiver to decode such interference-based codes. These methods not only overcome interference, but may even be exploited to increase network throughput.

Over the past few years, Katabi and her students pioneered the use of wireless signals in sensing applications, particularly the ability to "see through" walls with Wi-Fi signals. They showed how to sense humans, track their movements, and measure their vital signs using the reflection of radio signals off their bodies. This work expands the concept of radar and introduces new algorithms to deal with the complexity of indoor multi-path radio reflections, the deformative nature of the human body, and the weak and unknown interaction between vital signs such as human heartbeats and radio signals.

Press Release

ACM Fellows

USA - 2013

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For contributions in cross-layer wireless networking, wireless network coding, and Internet congestion control.

ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

USA - 2012

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For her seminal contributions to the theory and practice of network congestion control and bandwidth allocation.

Dina Katabi's dissertation work on the explicit Control Protocol (XCP) is one of the most important contributions in the area of network congestion control. It has introduced theoretical methods in particular, stability analysis from control theory to the design of scalable practical network protocols. Such protocols aim to minimize network congestion, thereby maximizing utilization efficiency, while ensuring a fair allocation of capacity among different flows that compete for the same bandwidth. Katabi's XCP was the first protocol to achieve both goals simultaneously without imposing the impractical requirement that routers maintain per-flow state. Her innovation is based on the novel and theoretically justified observation that congestion control mechanisms and capacity allocation among flows can be addressed separately. She designed an ingenious packet-marking scheme to carry information about network congestion and used methods from control theory to show that her algorithm provided a stable solution for suitable values of the algorithm's parameters to the delayed-feedback control problem defined by this scheme. Her work thus solved an important practical problem in a novel and rigorous way while opening up hitherto unexplored connections between networking and control theory.

Katabi's research on XCP initiated a new approach to network protocol design and is essential reading for current courses in the area. Her ideas have impacted many subsequent protocols and computer systems. Perhaps more importantly, by changing the way we think about the algorithmic control of network behavior, Katabi's work is likely to impact future Internet developments to an even greater extent.

Press Release

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

USA - 2003

Honorable Mention

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For her dissertation, Decoupling Congestion Control from the Bandwidth Allocation Policy and its Application to High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks, nominated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

2017 ACM Prize in Computing

ACM named Dina Katabi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) the recipient of the 2017 ACM Prize in Computing for creative contributions to wireless systems. Recognized as one of the most innovative researchers in the field of networking, Katabi applies methods from communication theory, signal processing and machine learning to solve problems in wireless networking. Among her contributions, she is cited for co-authoring several highly influential papers on overcoming interference in wireless networks to improve the flow of data traffic. And in inventing a device that seems to be lifted out of the pages of science fiction, she and her team pioneered the use of wireless signals in applications that can sense humans behind walls, determine their movements and even surmise their emotional states. These trailblazing human-sensing technologies hold out promise for use in several applications of daily life including helping the house-bound elderly, and perhaps determining survivors within buildings during search and rescue operations.

The ACM Prize in Computing recognizes early-to-mid-career contributions that have fundamental impact and broad implications. The award carries a prize of $250,000. Financial support is provided by an endowment from Infosys Ltd.

“Innovations which help facilitate communications across mobile networks certainly address an important need,” explained ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. “One recent report estimated that worldwide mobile data traffic grew 18-fold between 2011 and 2016. Dina Katabi’s work has contributed to a seamless increase in traffic, as well as the ever-increasing volumes of data that are shared over mobile systems. The official citation for the ACM Prize in Computing cites Katabi’s creative contributions because she is known for reimagining longstanding challenges in original ways.”

“Infosys is proud to support the ACM Prize in Computing, which this year honors Dina Katabi for her groundbreaking achievements in mobile systems,” said Salil S. Parekh, CEO of Infosys. “By 2020, experts predict that there will be 11.6 billion mobile-connected devices in the world. Our use of these devices, and the underlying networks that they rely upon, will play an increasingly important role in every aspect of life—from the way we communicate with friends and family, to our jobs, to the health of the world economy. By recognizing Katabi’s contributions, we educate the public about the technologies they use every day but may take for granted. Hopefully, we might also inspire the next generation to work in this exciting and very impactful area of computing science and practice.”

Wireless Network Coding
Wired networks simply route (or forward) signals from one point to another, and early wireless networks were based on this blueprint. Wireless networks, however, are fundamentally different from wired networks and at times face challenges including inadequate mobile support, dead spots, and low throughput—or the amount of data that can be moved from one point to another in a given time. As wireless technology developed, many proposed a new unifying design paradigm called network coding in which each node in a network would perform some computation. At each node, the transmission could be mixed (encoded), or re-mixed (re-encoded), in order to be unmixed (decoded) at its final destination. Katabi was a leader in presenting ideas to make the theory of network coding practical as a way to improve network performance. The papers in which she introduced concrete methods to make network coding practical received awards at major conferences and remain staples of the reading lists in wireless classes.

Interference Mitigation
Following up on her work in network coding, Katabi and her collaborators have written several research papers on the fundamental problem of interference in wireless networks, which occurs when multiple nodes transmit concurrently. In these papers, she modeled how wireless signals mix in the air as code, and then outlined algorithms that allow the receiver to decode these interference-based codes. Katabi’s methods were not only shown to overcome interference in wireless transmissions, but in some instances can be exploited to increase the amount of data that can move over the network.

Sensing and Wireless Signals
At ACM SIGCOMM 2013, Katabi presented a highly influential paper, “See through Walls with Wi-Fi!” She demonstrated how Wi-Fi-based devices and their variants can be used to detect people behind walls, their movements, and even their emotional states. The device works by transmitting wireless radio signals that traverse a wall and reflect off a person’s body back to the device. While the data that comes back from these reflections is very minimal, Katabi and her team developed a series of algorithms that separate the meaningful signals from the random noise produced by the walls and other reflections. The technology can identify a person’s silhouette and detect gestures as subtle as the rise and fall of a person’s chest from the other side of a house. Her lab has recently advanced the technology to remotely monitor a person’s heart rate and other vital signs, to infer, among other indicators, their emotional states. The work has generated a huge amount of interest and was one of the invited demonstrations at President Obama’s White House Demo Day.

Sparse Fast Fourier Transform
In computing, the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) is a mathematical technique that is used for processing streams of data in a range of computational tasks including audio/image processing, biochemistry, astronomy, and even GPS. Traditionally, the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was the algorithm that was used to process data for a wide range of computational tasks. Katabi, along with MIT colleague Piotr Indyk and students, developed a new algorithm, the Sparse Fast Fourier Transform (SFFT) that processes data 10 to 100 times faster than the FFT. Among its many other benefits, Katabi’s faster transform means that computers need less power to process the same amount of data.

Background
A native of Damascus, Syria, Dina Katabi is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She received a PhD and MS in Computer Science from MIT, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Damascus University, Syria.

Katabi is the author or co-author of over 100 scholarly publications covering a wide range of topics in networks and data communications. Her papers have been cited more than 20,000 times by researchers. She has been recognized with several honors including a MacArthur Fellowship, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, several ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper Awards, an ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award and a National Science Foundation Career Award. Katabi is an ACM Fellow and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

ACM will present the 2017 ACM Prize in Computing at its annual Awards Banquet on June 23, 2018 in San Francisco, California.

Martin Casado And Dina Katabi Named 2012 Recipients Of The Grace Murray Hopper Award For Advances In Network Efficiency

Martin Casado helped create the Software Defined Networking (SDN) movement, an approach that provides a software alternative to hardware-based network components. He introduced an open interface (OpenFlow) and open-source software components, which uncouple the network from its hardware. This level of abstraction creates virtual networks that are able to deliver the same features as physical networks, but with the operational flexibility of virtualization. These innovations, readily and widely adopted by industry, have spawned a burgeoning SDN research community with the potential to change the field. Casado was Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Nicira, which was acquired by VMware in 2012. He is currently the Chief Network Architect of VMware as well as a consulting assistant professor at Stanford University.

Dina Katabi initiated a new approach to network design using an explicit Control Protocol (XCP) that minimizes network congestion and maximizes utilization efficiency. Her research addressed a strategic technological problem of Internet growth, which requires extreme scalability and robustness. She developed XCP, an algorithm to ensure fair allocation of capacity among different flows that compete for the same Internet bandwidth. Her scheme is the first protocol to achieve both goals simultaneously without imposing excessive per-flow overhead on Internet routers. The design separated the efficiency and fairness policies of congestion control, which delivered the highest possible application performance over a broad range of network infrastructure. Katabi is a professor at MIT and a member of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). She leads the NetworksMIT research group, and is director of WirelessMIT, the MIT center for wireless networks and mobile computing.

Press Release

Background

A native of Damascus, Syria, Dina Katabi is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She received a PhD and MS in Computer Science from MIT, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Damascus University, Syria.