Faculty Profiles

Professor Rao's interests are in the areas of digital signal processing, estimation theory, and optimization theory, with applications to digital communications, speech signal processing, and human-computer interactions. His research work has spanned several areas in signal processing including finite wordlength effects in digital filters, adaptive filtering, model based spectral estimation, subspace based direction of arrival estimation methods, speech compression and recognition and space-time processing. His current interests in speech processing are in the area of speech coding where his group is involved in developing efficient and low complexity vector quantization techniques, and in speech recognition where the research efforts are focused on developing robust speech recognition techniques, in particular robust front-ends. In digital communications his research work is in the development of multiple antenna systems for improving the reliability and capacity of wireless networks. His group is also involved in the development of novel algorithms for computing sparse solutions to linear inverse problems which have many potential applications such as biomagnetic imaging, signal representation etc.

Capsule Bio:

Bhaskar Rao joined the UCSD faculty in 1983, after receiving his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California the same year. He became an Associate Professor in 1989 and a full Professor in 1995. On sabbatical in 1989-90, he was a Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford's Integrated Systems Laboratory. Rao was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2000 for his work on the statistical analysis of subspace algorithms for harmonic retrieval. Rao and his research group have received six paper awards in the last eight years with the most recent one being the 2008 Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in the Field of Communications Systems jointly with Bongyong Song and Rene Cruz. In May 2008, Rao was named the inaugural holder of the Ericsson Endowed Chair in Wireless Access Networks in the Jacobs School. Among the courses Rao teaches: Digital Signal Processing, Array Processing, Parameter Estimation, Probability and Random Processes. Rao is affiliated with the Center for Wireless Communications at UCSD as well at the UCSD Division of Calit2. Rao currently serves at the Director of UC San Diego's Center for Wireless Communications.

Selected Publications:

Google Scholar Publications