News

Ramón y Cajal Fellow

I am a recipient of the ‘Ramon y Cajal’ Fellowship, granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and  Innovation.

The ‘Ramon y Cajal’ programme includes a five-year employment grant and additional funding for my research activities. With this programme, the Ministry aims at promoting the incorporation of researchers with an outstanding track record at R&D centers, leading up to tenured professorship. It is one of the most prestigious research fellowships (tenure-track) in Spain.

Since March 2022, I am a ‘Ramón y Cajal’ Research Professor at University of Granada.

New Appointment at UMA

New Appointment at UMA

Since July 2021, I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Engineering at University of Málaga (UMA). Most of my teaching and research activities will be carried out at the Faculty of Telecommunication Engineering (ETSI Telecomunicación) of UMA.

I have also been appointed a member of the Communications and Signal Processing (COMSP) Lab within the TELMA Research Institute at UMA.

Congrats Dr. Faraz!

Big congratulations to Dr. Syed Faraz Ahmed for his PhD at HKUST!

Faraz made a brilliant defense of his thesis entitled “Genetic Sequence Analysis to Inform Design of Universal Vaccines against Infectious Diseases“, which was jointly supervised by Prof. McKay and myself on topics related to data science, computational immunology and vaccine design. Part of Faraz’s PhD work uses computational methods based on random matrix theory. He is going to continue his research as a post-doctoral fellow in Prof.  McKay’s group at University of Melbourne (Australia). We wish him all the best in his new endeavour!! 

Congrats again Dr. Faraz!

IEEE TSP: Robust Linear Discriminant Analysis

Our paper “Large-Dimensional Characterization of Robust Linear Discriminant Analysis” with Nicolas Auguin and Matthew McKay (HKUST) has just appeared in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

The work focuses on a robust version of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classifiers, extensively used in machine learning. To account for potential spurious (e.g., non-Gaussian) or mislabeled observations in the training data (i.e., outlying samples), we here propose and characterise the large-dimensional performance (when both the numbers of samples and variables are large) of LDA classifiers employing robust regularised M-estimators of the covariance matrix, essential to the design of a robust discrimination rule when the dataset is corrupted with outliers.

Comms Magazine: The Road to 6G

Our paper “The road to 6G: Ten physical layer challenges for communications engineers” with M. Matthaiou, O. Yurduseven, H. Q. Ngo, S. L. Cotton and V. F. Fusco (QUB) has just appeared in IEEE Communications Magazine.

This magazine article discusses some of the most relevant open problems and challenges in the road ahead towards the realisation of 6G wireless networks. It stems from a collaborative effort between members (including myself) of the Center for Wireless Innovation (CWI) at Queen’s University Belfast.

IEEE SPCOM TC: Elected Member

I have just been appointed as an elected member of the Technical Committee on Signal Processing for Communications and Networking (SPCOM) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society for a 3-year term, effective from 1 January 2020.

I am deeply honoured for the given confidence and the opportunity to serve in this prestigious committee, and look forward to working closely with the rest of the team. 

The IEEE SPCOM TC plays a key role in the technical and professional activities of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). Among its key responsibilities are coordinating the review process for flagship conferences such as ICASSP and SPAWC, awards nominations, elections, and educational activities of the SPS. More information at http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/list/spcom-tc/

Bioinformatics: RocaSec, Robust Co-evolutionary Analysis of Proteins

Our paper “RocaSec: A standalone GUI-based package for robust co-evolutionary analysis of proteins” with Ahmed A. Quadeer and Matthew R. McKay (HKUST) has been accepted for publication in Bioinformatics.

This work presents a standalone software package with a convenient graphical user interface for co-evolutionary analyses of proteins. The software, along with several data examples for HIV and HCV proteins is now publicly accessible at https://github.com/ahmedaq/RocaSec

Nuclear Physics B: Jacobi random matrices

Our paper “Extreme eigenvalue distributions of Jacobi ensembles: New exact representations, asymptotics and finite size corrections”, with Laureano Moreno-Pozas and Matthew McKay (HKUST) just appeared in Nuclear Physics B.

This work presents theoretical advances in the field of high-dimensional random matrix theory and, in particular, of relevance to the applied statistics community. Statistical distributions for the extreme eigenvalues of Jacobi random matrices are derived and, for the first time, we bridge the gap between exact (finite-dimensional) results and asymptotic results, providing finite-size corrections to the asymptotic results. These fundamental results find application in many cross-disciplinary problems including statistical hypothesis testing, multi-antenna wireless communication systems with co-channel interference and quantum conductance in mesoscopic physics.

Our Sinica paper selected for JSM special session

Our Statistica Sinica paper “Asymptotics of eigenstructure of sample correlation matrices for high-dimensional spiked models” with Iain Johnstone and Jeha Yang (Stanford) and Matthew McKay (HKUST) has been selected to be part of Sinica’s invited special session at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) 2020.  Sinica hold an invited session at JSM (a huge stats meeting) only once every 2 years. Last time there were only 3 papers in the Sinica special session.