Business Wire IndiaWhen he came to Stanford to pursue his MS and PhD a few years ago, Dinesh Bharadia, an Electrical Engineering graduate of IIT Kanpur, wanted to solve “an interesting, hard problem.” He chose one that had stumped scientists for almost 150 years. Now, the 28-year-old Stanford PhD, currently a researcher at MIT, has been honored for the resulting work with the 2016 Marconi Society Paul Baran Young Scholar Award.
Bharadia will receive the award at a ceremony at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on November 2.
(Brad Parkinson, considered the “father of GPS,” will be honored with the annual Marconi Prize for 2016 on the same occasion)
Bharadia’s research disproved a long-held assumption that it is “generally not possible for a radio to receive and transmit on the same frequency band because of the interference that results.” His work culminated in making full-duplex radios a reality through the development of effective self-interference cancellation technology.
“Let’s say you are shouting at someone and they are shouting at you,” Bharadia explains. “Neither of you can hear the other, because you are both shouting in the same frequency. The noise in your ears (“interference”) from your own shout prevents you from hearing the other person. That’s a good analogy for why radios have needed to use two different frequencies to transmit and receive simultaneously. It’s also why solving the challenge of developing ‘full duplex radios’ effectively doubles the amount of available spectrum.”
The problem is more difficult than it sounds, says Bharadia. First, the interference is extremely strong—nearly a hundred billion times stronger than the signal that the radio might be trying to receive—and the resulting interference depends on the environment and its reflectors, changing in real-time as people move around. Plus, typical radios (e.g., Wi-Fi) span many frequencies and use multi-antenna systems. Nonetheless, Bharadia was able to demonstrate systems that overcame all these obstacles. He turned full-duplex radios into a commercial reality by inventing new formulas that could in real-time, model the non-linear, time-varying self-interference as well as analog and digital self-interference cancellation circuits to apply the model to the known transmitted signal and cancel the self-interference.
The analog cancellation filter Bharadia developed, also unleashed the potential for many more applications. The unique architecture had to allow cancellation in 
all environments. According to Bharadia’s PhD advisor at Stanford, Prof. Sachin Katti, “Dinesh’s work enables a whole host of new applications, from extremely low-power Internet of Things connectivity to motion tracking. It has the potential to be used for important future applications such as building novel wireless imaging that can enable driverless cars in severe weather scenarios, help blind people to navigate indoors, and much more.”
Bharadia thinks receiving the Marconi Young Scholar award is especially rewarding because his work has a direct connection to Marconi. “Marconi, invented the radio but couldn’t solve the problem of duplexing,” he says. “It’s fitting that this work should be recognized by the Marconi Society.”
Asked how he thought his work could help leverage communications in a developing scenario like India, Bharadia says: "India has much denser users when it comes to cellular data connectivity and very few cellular towers. In simple words, if I can talk and listen at the same time in context of wireless radio, then one can double the data we can service. Second, this technology can be used easily to build relays which can listen to signal from the cellular tower and transmit it instantaneously, which would help us to extend the range very easily in India. This is very much needed as we have a very few towers; by deploying simple relay, we don't need to put in entire infrastructure for the cellular towers."
Young Scholar candidates are nominated by their academic advisors. Winners are selected by an international panel comprised of engineers from leading universities and companies, and receive a $4000 prize plus expenses to attend the annual awards event. Three other Young Scholars were selected this year.
India Connection: The first woman to receive the Marconi Society’s Paul Baran Young Scholar award was also an Indian researcher: Aakanksha Chowdhery, now a researcher at Princeton. Jay Kumar Sundararajan, a 2003 graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, with a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of the first recipients. Himanshu Asnani, a Stanford University Electrical Engineering School PhD who currently is a lecturer there, won the Young Scholar Award in 2014, while Kartik Venkat, a PhD student, also from Stanford’s EE department, won in 2015. Out of 23 Young Scholars selected since 2008, five have been Indians. Additionally, India-born Stanford Professor Emeritus A.J. Paulraj won the 2014 Marconi Prize, honored for his pioneering contributions to developing the theory and applications of MIMO antennas.
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The Marconi Society was established in 1974 by the daughter of Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel Laureate who invented radio. The organization promotes awareness of key technology and policy issues in telecommunications and the Internet. The Society is best known for its annual $100,000 Marconi Award and Fellowship given to living scientists whose scope of work and influence emulate the principle of “creativity in service to humanity." For more information, go to www.marconisociety.org
Photo Caption:
Dinesh Bharadia adjusting the antenna of the full duplex radio setup that lies at the core of his innovation. This has won him the 2016 Marconi Society Young Scholar Award
Dinesh Bharadia, winner of the 2016 Marconi Society Young Scholar Award
