WNCG welcomes Alex Dimakis, who joined the research unit in January 2013. Dimakis is at the forefront of distributed coding research, the topic for which he was recently awarded the joint IEEE ComSoc Information Theory best paper award. His expertise will complement existing WNCG research in many ways, particularly in the areas of coding, communications, information theory, and our push towards cloud computing, storage, and BigData. Dimakis has been a faculty member in Electrical EngineeringSystems at the University of Southern California since 2009. He received both his M.S. (2005) and Ph.D. (2008) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, he obtained the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 2003. Dimakis has received several awards, including the 2008 Eli Jury award for his thesis work on codes for distributed storage, two outstanding paper awards, the UC Berkeley Regents Fellowship, and the Microsoft Research Fellowship. Dimakis was also a postdoctoral scholar for the Center for the Mathematics of Information at Caltech in 2008. His research interests center on communications, coding theory, signal processing, and networking, with a current focus on distributed storage, network coding, large-scale inference, and message-passing algorithms.
