Bio

B.S. ​Sharif University of Technology, EE, 2006M.S. ​University of Toronto, ECE, 2008 / University of Illinois, Mathematics, 2012Ph.D. ​University of Illinois, ECE, 2013Post-Doc ​California Institute of Technology, 2013-2016

"My research facilitates modeling, analysis, and storage of large datasets, especially biological data."

Farzad Farnoud, Assistant Professor

Research interests: Information and Coding Theory, Stochastic Modeling, Machine Learning, Bioinformatics

Farzad Farnoud is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia. Previously, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He received his MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2008. From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he received his MS degree in mathematics and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2012 and 2013, respectively. His research interests include the information-theoretic and probabilistic analysis of genomic evolutionary processes; rank aggregation and gene prioritization; and coding for flash memory and DNA storage. He is the recipient of the 2013 Robert T. Chien Memorial Award from the University of Illinois for demonstrating excellence in research in electrical engineering and the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Data Storage Best Student Paper Award.

Awards

  • Robert T. Chien Memorial Award from the University of Illinois for demonstrating excellence in research in electrical engineering 2013
  • IEEE Data Storage Best Student Paper Award 2014

Research Interests

  • Information and Coding Theory
  • Stochastic Modeling
  • Computational Biology
  • Machine Learning

Selected Publications

  • “On the duplication distance of binary strings,” in 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 2016. N. Alon, J. Bruck, F. Farnoud, and S. Jain
  • “Duplication-correcting codes for data storage in the DNA of living organisms,” in 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 2016. S. Jain, F. Farnoud, M. Schwartz, and J. Bruck
  • “The Capacity of String-Duplication Systems,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 811–824, Feb. 2016. F. Farnoud, Moshe Schwartz, and Jehoshua Bruck
  • “Bounds for Permutation Rate-Distortion,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 703–712, Feb. 2016. F. Farnoud, M. Schwartz, and J. Bruck
  • “MetaCRAM: an integrated pipeline for metagenomic taxonomy identification and compression,” BMC Bioinformatics, vol. 17, p. 94, 2016. M. Kim, X. Zhang, J. G. Ligo, F. Farnoud, V. V. Veeravalli, and O. Milenkovic
  • “HyDRA: gene prioritization via hybrid distance-score rank aggregation,” Bioinformatics, vol. 31, no. 7, pp. 1034–1043, Apr. 2015. M. Kim, F. Farnoud, and O. Milenkovic
  • “An Axiomatic Approach to Constructing Distances for Rank Comparison and Aggregation,” IEEE Trans. Information Theory, vol. 60, no. 10, pp. 6417–6439, Oct. 2014. F. Farnoud and O. Milenkovic
  • “Multipermutation Codes in the Ulam Metric for Nonvolatile Memories,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 919–932, May 2014. F. Farnoud and O. Milenkovic
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ResearchGate

Courses Taught

  • Inference methods for computational biology Fall 2016