Farzad Farnoud

Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Contact

Office

(434) 924-4101

Location

Thornton Hall, E-309

Personal Website Google Scholar ResearchGate Information Processing + Storage Lab

About

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.

Education

B.S. Sharif University of Technology, EE, 2006

M.S. University of Toronto, ECE, 2008 / University of Illinois, Mathematics, 2012

Ph.D. University of Illinois, ECE, 2013

Post-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

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, J. Bruck

“The Capacity of String-Duplication Systems,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 811–824, Feb. 2016. F. Farnoud, M. Schwartz, J. Bruck

“Bounds for Permutation Rate-Distortion,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 703–712, Feb. 2016.
F. Farnoud, M. Schwartz, 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, 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, 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, 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, O. Milenkovic

Courses Taught

Inference methods for computational biology Fall 2016

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