Robert Margolies, Ph.D.
Electrical Engineering Columbia University
Office: 815 CEPSR
Email: margolies[dot]rob[at]gmail[dot]com
Robert Margolies received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 2015, under the advising of Professor Gil Zussman in the wim.net research group. He received the B.S. degree (Summa Cum Laude) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2010 and the M.S. degree from Columbia University in 2011, both in Electrical Engineering. His research interests are in cross-layer PHY and MAC layer design for ultra-low-power networks, networks of energy harvesting nodes, and opportunistic cellular scheduling. Robert has received a number of awards including the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, SMART Scholarship (declined), Egleston Doctoral Fellowship, ACM SenSys’11 Best Student Demo Award, and the Columbia University Electrical Engineering Master’s Award of Excellence.
For more information regarding, please be directed to Robert’s resume.
Recent News
[5/13/2016]: A paper I co-authored during my internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, titled “Uncoordinated MAC for Adaptive Multi-Beam Directional Networks: Analysis and Evaluation”, was accepted to and will appear in IEEE ICCCN’16 to be held in August 2016 in Hawaii.
[4/29/2016]: In recognition of my work on the EnHANTs project, I received the Electrical Engineering Collaborative Research Award. The award is “presented to Ph.D. candidates who make a superb contribution to a collaborative research effort”. [news item]
[4/13/2016]: I presented our paper, titled”PANDA: Neighbor Discovery on a Power Harvesting Budget” at IEEE INFOCOM’16, and was awarded the best session presentation award. [slides]
[11/30/2015]: Our paper, titled “PANDA: Neighbor Discovery on a Power Harvesting Budget” was recently accepted to and will appear in IEEE INFOCOM’16 (18% acceptance rate) to be held in April, 2016 in San Francisco, CA. [download]
[7/22/2015]: I successfully defended my dissertation in front of a thesis committee composed of Profs. Augustin Chaintreau, Ioannis Kymissis, Debasis Mitra, and Dan Rubenstein as well as my advisor, Prof. Gil Zussman. [Thesis pdf] [news item] [cp_toggle status=”on” title =”Older News”]
[6/25/2015]: Together with Prof. Dan Rubenstein, I presented the EnHANTs demo as an enabler for Emerging Technologies for First Responders to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the New York City Fire Department (NYFD).
[4/7/2015]: I presented the EnHANTs demonstration at the Columbia Data Science Institute Demo Session. [news item]
[2/6/2015]: I was recently interviewed by Cisco’s Technology News Site, “The Network” and my participation in the Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags project was referenced in an article titled, “The Internet of Everything Goes to School”. [news item] [news item]
[10/10/2014]: I presented my paper titled “Performance Evaluation of Fragmented Structures: A Theoretical Study” at IFIP Performance 2014. [paper] [slides]
[9/26/2014]: I received a student travel grant to attend IFIP Performance 2014 in Turin, Italy this October.
[6/16/2014]: I presented an outline of my thesis at the MobiSys 2014 Ph.D. Forum in Bretton Woods, NH. [download abstract] [youtube] [news item]
[6/4/2014]: My paper titled, “Performance Evaluation of Fragmented Structures: A Theoretical Study” was accepted to IFIP Performance 2014 (~27% acceptance rate) conference to be held in Turin, Italy this Fall! Additionally, this work will be presented via a poster at the Analysis of Algorithms 2014 (AofA’14) conference to be held in Paris, France.
[5/3/2014]: I presented my paper, “Exploiting Mobility in Proportional Fair Cellular Scheduling” at the IEEE INFOCOM’14 conference in Toronto, ON. [youtube]
[4/25/2014]: I successfully defended by Ph.D. Thesis Proposal and completed the requirements for a Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) degree. My proposal committee consisted of Professors Gil Zussman, Dan Rubenstein, and Debasis Mitra.
[4/23/2014]: Along with M.S. student Earvin Caceres, I presented the EnHANTs demonstration in the NYC Media Lab Mobile Futures event in the Razorfish headquarters in Times Square, New York. [news item]
[4/22/2014]: An extended abstract of my dissertation research was accepted to, and will be presented at, the ACM MobiSys’14 PhD Forum to be held on June 16th, 2014 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. In addition, I was selected for the MobiSys’14 travel grant which will fund my registration and travel to the conference. [paper pdf]
[4/11/2014]: In conjunction with Earvin Caceres, Richard Chiou, and Benjamin Zhou, we presented the EnHANTs demonstration as part of the seminar on Connected, Autonomously Powered Systems at Columbia University. [news item]
[2/5/2014]: I received a student travel grant to attend IEEE INFOCOM 2014 in Toronto this April.
[12/5/2013]: Together with M.S. student Earvin Caceres, we presented an overview of the EnHANTs project to 13 high school students from the local Harlem community through the Harlem Educational Activities Fund’s (HEAF) College Quest Program.
[11/26/2013]: My paper, titled “Exploiting Mobility in Proportional Fair Cellular Scheduling: Measurements and Algorithms” was accepted to IEEE INFOCOM 2014 in Toronto (19% acceptance rate)! This work stems from a project completed during my internship and followup collaboration with AT&T Research Labs in New Jersey.
[10/9/2013]: I was nominated by the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia for the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship. This fellowship is incredibly competitive and would fund my education for two years as well as provide a paid internship.
[9/1/2013]: I organized and participated in a poster and demonstration session showcasing the EnHANTs student projects from Summer 2013. Over 100 incoming M.S. students attended.
[4/24/2013]: I was accepted to and will attend the First Internation School on Green Communications and Networking (GreenComNet) this summer on May 28-31 in Boston, Massachusetts.
[4/19/2013]: Following INFOCOM’13, I presented at CTTC in Barcelona work on the design and experimental evaluation of an Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags testbed, and the design and experimental evaluation of a proportional fair scheduling framework in cellular networks. [news item]
[4/17/2013]: At the INFOCOM’13 demo session, along with Maria Gorlatova and Gil Zussman, we presented an EnHANTs testbed demonstartion. [Paper PDF] [Poster PDF] [news item]
[2/15/2013]: At this year’s INFOCOM’13 conference in Turin, Italy, my paper on the EnHANTs testbed was accepted to the mini-conference. Additionally, the EnHANTs demo will appear in the INFOCOM’13 demo session. [Paper PDF]
[6/04/2012]: This summer, I will be interning at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, NJ under the guidance of Vaneet Aggarwal, Rittwik Jana, N. K. Shankaranarayanan, and Vinay Vaishampayan.
[5/11/2012]: I received an “EE MS Award of Excellence” which recognizes outstanding academic achievement while persuing a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. [news item]
[3/03/2012]: Together with the EnHANTs team, I presented the prototype demo at the Science Expo at The School At Columbia University, targeting Kindergarten to Grade 8 students, and their parents. [news item]
[1/17/2012]: For the Spring 2012 semester, I will serve as an instructor for CSEE 4140 – Networking Laboratory.
[11/08/2011]: Along with fellow presenters Maria Gorlatova and Gerald Stanje, we won the Best Student Demo Award for a demo on behalf of the EnHANTs project at the ACM SenSys 2011 conference. [news item] [video]
[04/5/2011]: I recieved the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Award. This will help fund my graduate studies over the next couple of years! Along with this, I also received a Columbia Egleston Fellowship. [news item]
Education
Columbia University, 2010 – Present
- Department of Electrical Engineering
- Degree: Ph.D. Electrical Engineering
- Degree: M.Phil. May 2014.
- Degree: M.S. Electrical Engineering. Oct. 2011, Final GPA: 3.92
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 2007 – 2010
- Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering (ECSE)
- Degree: B.S. Electrical Engineering, Minor in Management Technology Awarded
- Concentration: Communications and Information Processing, Computer Networks
- Final GPA: 4.0 | Summa Cum Laude | 3 years
Honors and Awards
- Columbia Electrical Engineering Master of Science Award of Excellence (2012)
- Best Student Demo Award, ACM SenSys 2011
- NSF Graduate Research Fellow (2011)
- Columbia University Egleston Doctoral Fellow (2011)
- DoD Smart Scholarship Recipient (declined, 2011)
- RPI Palmer C. Rickets Prize for Outstanding Acdemic Success in Electrical Engineering (2010)
- RPI Class of 2010 Academic Achievement Award (2010)
- RPI Honors Convocation 4.0 Award (2010)
Publications
Journal Publications
Conference Proceedings
Conference Extended Abstracts, Demonstrations, and Posters
Thesis
Technical Reports
Patents
Teaching
Instructor
- CSEE 4140 – Networking Laboratory (Columbia University, Spring 2012)
Teaching Assistant
- CSEE W4119 – Computer Networking (Columbia University, Summer 2012)
- CSEE W4119 – Computer Networking (Columbia University, Fall 2011)
- ENGR 2350 – Laboratory Introduction to Embedded Control (RPI, Fall 2009)
Courses
- Introduction to Stochastics, Fall 2010
- Deterministic Models, Fall 2010
- Analysis of Algorithms, Fall 2010
- Computer Communication Networks, Spring 2011
- Network Optimization, Spring 2011
- Modern Analysis, Spring 2011
- Stochastic Modeling I, Fall 2011
- Deterministic Scheduling Models, Fall 2011
- Wireless and Mobile Networking, Fall 2011
- Information Theory, Spring 2013
- Approximation Algorithms, Spring 2013
