Dr. Ph.D. Rawad Bitar
Technical University of Munich
Chair of Communications Engineering (Prof. Kramer)
Postal address
Postal:
Theresienstr. 90
80333 München
- Phone: +49 (89) 289 - 25011
- Room: 0104.03.414
- Homepage
- rawad.bitar@tum.de
Biography
- Research group leader at the Chair of Communications Engineering led by Prof. Dr.sc.tech Gerhard Kramer.
- Doing a habilitation with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh, Prof. Deniz Gündüz and Prof. Sidharth Jaggi as mentors.
- Worked with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh as a postdoctoral researcher from February 2020 until October 2023.
- Obtained a PhD from the ECE department of Rutgers University in January 2020.
- Held short term visiting positions at Aalto, Technical University of Berlin and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
- Spent three years as PhD candidate at the ECE department of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).
- Worked at the CSI lab supervised by Prof. Salim El Rouayheb.From August 2014 till January 2020,
- Received a masters degree in Information and Communication from the Lebanese University after doing the thesis at IIT in 2014.
- Did the engineering senior project at Center of Nuclear Science and Science of Matter (CSNSM) in Paris, France and graduated as a Computer and Communication Engineer from the Lebanese University in 2013.
- Did an internship at procsim-consulting company in EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2012.
Research Interests
My research interest is centered around privacy, scalability, security and reliability of distributed systems. The applications may differ but the goal remains the same: study theoretical and fundamental limits of innovative storage and computing systems and design codes achieving those limits. My current work is motivated by the following research directions.
- Federated learning
- Private and secure distributed computing
- Distributed storage
- DNA-based storage systems
- Private and secure network coding.
Awards
- DFG (German Research Foundation) grant for a temporary position for a Principal Investigator "Private Secure and Efficient Codes for Distributed Machine Learning". (2023 -- 2026)
- EuroTech Visiting Research Programme grant. (March 2023)
- Best Poster Award on Optimization and Machine Learning in Princeton Day of Optimization, Princeton, New Jersey. (September 2018)
Service
Workshop co-Organizer
- Munich Workshop on Coding and Cryptography 2022
Guest Editor
- Frontier in Communications and Networks
Technical Program Committee (TPC) member
- Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC) 2023
- IEEE International Workshop on Information Theory (ITW) 2023
- 13th Annual Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (NVMW) 2022
Session Chair
- IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW) 2022
- IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2022
- IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2021
Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
- IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory (JSAIT)
- IEEE Transactions on Forensics and Information Security
- IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
- IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC)
- IEEE Transactions on Communications
- IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
- IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing
- IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
- ScienceDirect Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
- IET Information Security
- IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)
- IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW)
- IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
- IEEE Global Communication Conference: Communication Theory (Globecom)
- IEEE Global Communication Conference: Workshops: Network Coding and Applications (NetCod)
- IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)
Teaching
- Winter semester 2021/2022: Security in Communications and Networks, jointly with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh
- Summer semester 2021: Coding Theory for Storage and Networks, jointly with Dr.-Ing Sven Puchinger
- Winter semester 2020/2021: Security in Communications and Networks, jointly with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh
- Summer semester 2020: Coding Theory for Storage and Networks, jointly with Dr. Alessandro Neri
Theses in Progress
Privacy-preserving synchronization methods
Description
In this internship, the student will explore the literature on privacy-preserving synchronization methods and summarizes the findings.
Supervisor:
Effect of Redundancy in Distributed Learning
Distributed Learning, Gradient Coding, Straggler tolerance
Description
In this project, we investigate the interplay between redundancy and straggler tolerance in distributed learning.
The setting is that of a main node distributing computational tasks to available workers as part of a machine learning algorithm, e.g., training a neural network. Waiting for all workers to return their computations suffers from the presence of stragglers, i.e., slow or unresponsive nodes. Mitigating the effect of the stragglers can be done through the use of redundancy or by leveraging the properties of the convergence of the machine learning algorithm.
The goal of this work is to compare when redundancy is helpful. In this case, we aim to analyze the convergence speed with and without redundancy. Then, we compare the convergence as a function of time of all the schemes.
Further reading:
R. Bitar, M. Wootters and S. El Rouayheb, Stochastic Gradient Coding for Straggler Mitigation in Distributed Learning, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory (JSAIT), Vol. 1, No. 1, May 2020. arXiv:1905.05383
S. Kas Hanna, R. Bitar, P. Parag, V. Dasari and S. El Rouayheb, Adaptive Stochastic Gradient Descent for Fast and Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning, preprint, arXiv:2208.03134.
Prerequisites
Knowledge in the following topics:
- Probability Theory
- Gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent
- Coding theory
Independence and motivation to work on a research topic
Knowledge of implementing neural networks is a plus
Contact
Dr. Rawad Bitar: rawad.bitar@tum.de