Faculty Profiles
Bhaskar D. Rao
Professor Emeritus, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Digital signal processing, estimation theory, and optimization theory, with applications to digital communications, speech signal processing, and human-computer interactions.
Professor Rao’s research interests are in the areas of digital signal processing, estimation theory, and optimization theory, with applications to digital communications, speech signal processing, and biomedical signal processing. His work has received several paper awards, including the 2012 Signal Processing Society (SPS) best paper award for the paper “An Empirical Bayesian Strategy for Solving the Simultaneous Sparse Approximation Problem,” with David P. Wipf and the Stephen O. Rice Prize paper award in the field of communication systems for the paper “Network Duality for Multiuser MIMO Beamforming Networks and Applications,” with B. Song and R. L. Cruz.
Capsule Bio:
Bhaskar D. Rao is a pioneer in the theory and use of sparsity in signal processing applications. Since co-authoring the first paper on the seminal FOCUSS algorithm in 1992, he has been driving the field of sparsity forward, including co-organizing the first special session on sparsity at ICASSP 1998 entitled "SPEC-DSP: Signal Processing with Sparseness Constraint”.
He received his B.Tech. degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, in 1979 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1981 and 1983, respectively. He has been teaching and conducting research at the University of California in San Diego, La Jolla since 1983, where he is currently a Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He has also been the holder of the Ericsson Endowed Chair in Wireless Access Networks and Distinguished Professor until 2023 and the Director of the Center for Wireless Communications (2008-2011).
Professor Rao was elevated to fellow of IEEE in 2000 for his contributions to the statistical analysis of subspace algorithms for harmonic retrieval. He received the 2016 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award and the 2023 IEEE Signal Processing Society Norbert Wiener Society Award. He has been a member of the Statistical Signal and Array Processing Technical Committee, the Signal Processing Theory and Methods Technical Committee, the Communications Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, SPS Fellow Evaluation Committee (2023-2024) and was the chair of the Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee (2019-2020).
Selected Publications:
Email:
brao@ucsd.edu
Office Phone:
858-534-6186
Institute Affiliations:
Center for Wireless Communications
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology