Grants and Awards

Channel Coding for Beyond 5G (2022-2024)

ARC Discovery Project 2022-2024

The University of Sydney, The University of Newcastle, and Nokia-Bell Labs

Significant improvements are required for ICT services if they are to meet the needs of rapid urbanization and industrial transformation while also addressing the current digital divide, which sees half of the world's population currently without sufficient access to the internet. The 6th-generation (6G) of mobile standards will be a key solution to the constantly increasing demands on our communications infrastructure. This project will develop novel communication strategies for 6G to service new applications with requirements way beyond what 5G can achieve. The outcomes of the project are expected to significantly improve users' data rate and enhance the reliability and coverage of mobile networks.

Australian Award for University Teaching (AAUT) - Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning (2020)

Universities Australia

The AAUT recognise the impact that educators have on the learning and teaching experiences and outcomes of university students. They celebrate and reward programs and practices that support students and enhance learning. They promote excellence in learning and teaching in all aspects of higher education. Recipients, with the support of their institutions, contribute to systemic change in learning and teaching through the ongoing sharing and dissemination of knowledge.

Reimagine Education Award-Nurturing Employability Award (Shortlisted Idea Factory) (2020)

Wharton-QS Reimagine Education

Reimagine Education is a global conference and competition, open to educational innovators from all around the world. The conference brings together edtech startups, academic faculty from top institutions, Chief Innovation Officers, university leadership, teachers, and other stakeholders in the future of higher education teaching and learning. The Reimagine Education Awards – the ‘Oscars’ of Education – reward innovative approaches that enhance student learning outcomes and employability, offering $50,000 in funding to the overall winners.

Dean's Excellence Award - Outstanding Teaching Innovation (2020)

Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Sydney

The award recognizes, rewards, and promotes excellence in teaching innovation at the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, The University of Sydney. Powered by his creativity, Dr Shirvanimoghaddam has found new ways to educate students, as shown in the elective unit of study: IoT for Critical Infrastructure, which he designed, developed and taught, resulting in a high engagement rate among students from many disciplines. He also initiated a multidisciplinary teaching innovation project with the Sydney Business School, called the Idea Factory, to increase interaction with students from different disciplines, which was later funded by the Faculty of Engineering’s Educational Innovation Unit in 2018.

Vice-Chancellor Excellence Award - Outstanding Early Career Teaching (2019)

The University of Sydney

Employed in 2016 as a Scholarly Teaching Fellow in Telecommunications, Dr Shirvanimoghaddam has been developing, coordinating and lecturing more than 10 units of study at the School of Electrical and Information Engineering. A highly dedicated professional, he has been recognized for his genuine interest in student engagement and learning. Powered by his creativity, Dr Shirvanimoghaddam has found new ways to educate students, as shown in the elective unit of study: IoT for Critical Infrastructure, which he designed, developed and taught, resulting in a high engagement rate among students from many disciplines. He also initiated a multidisciplinary teaching innovation project with the Sydney Business School, called the Idea Factory, to increase interaction with students from different disciplines, which was later funded by the Faculty of Engineering’s Educational Innovation Unit in 2018.

Robust and Sustainable Communications for Massive Internet of Things (2019)

Early Career Researcher Development Fund 2019

The University of Sydney

By 2020 there will more than 50 billion embedded devices around the world, seamlessly monitoring their environments, processing information and communicating wirelessly with other devices. This will be driven by the internet of things, the name given to the ubiquitous connectivity of everything everywhere. Although wireless cellular network is considered the best option for providing IoT services, they must be revolutionized to accommodate these new devices. This project aims to facilitate expanded wireless connectivity by designing novel random access strategies and multilevel channel codes to enable new massive multiple access communication strategies for cellular networks.

The Idea Factory (2019)

Educational Innovation Grant, Faculty of Engineering and IT, 2019

The University of Sydney

This project aims at developing an interactive learning platform for students from faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies and Sydney Business School to work together in solving real world problems and explore both technological and business aspects of a real product. The students will engage in the whole process of developing a real product from both technical and business viewpoints. In the proposed framework, engineering students will be paired with business students and jointly work on identifying real world problems, seeking feasible solutions, identifying targeted customers, studying customer needs, and developing a product and potentially launching it. This process will be facilitated by a new web-based software, developed through this project and each project module will be separately evaluated. Several example modules will be prepared to show the students how to complete the tasks and adapt them according to their needs. This project aims to close the gap between engineering and business students and provide a framework for effective collaboration through multiple specially designed modules to develop a real product. Students will be engaged during the design process and their feedback will be considered when designing the modules and platform.

Short Code Design for Mission Critical Communications (2019-2021)

ARC Discovery Project 2019-2021

The University of Sydney and Aalborg University

This project aims to develop the fundamental science to enable transmission and channel coding technologies, which will be essential for building and rolling out of future ultra reliable and low latency wireless networks. Reliable and low latency communications are central to the development of the next generation mobile communications and many emerging critical applications. The project is expected to provide the foundations and tools for transforming, modernizing and safeguarding Australia's national critical infrastructure. The project is expected to provide novel applications such as smart grids, telemedicine, intelligent transportation and industry automation.

Communication Strategies for the Internet of Things (2018-2020)

ARC Discovery Project 2018-2020

University of Newcastle, The University of Sydney, King's College London, German Aerospace Center

By 2020 there will be 25-50 billion embedded devices around the world, seamlessly monitoring their environments, processing information and communicating wirelessly with other devices. This massive growth in wirelessly connect devices will be driven by the internet of things, the name given to the ubiquitous connectivity of everything everywhere. The internet of things is expected to generate incremental revenue exceeding $300 billion. However, wireless cellular networks must be upgraded to accommodate these new devices. This project aims to facilitate expanded wireless connectivity by designing novel random access strategies and multilevel channel codes to enable new massive multiple access communication strategies for cellular networks.

Channel Code Design for Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communication (URLLC) (2017)

Universities Australia, Australia-Germany Research Collaboration Scheme (2017)

Rateless codes can automatically adapt to the channel condition without requiring channel state information (CSI) feedback and retransmission, thus effectively reducing the latency. Existing rateless codes have been constructed based on graphs. Short block length will introduce short cycles in the graph, significantly degrading the decoding performance of belief propagation decoders, used fordecoding graph based rateless codes. In our recent initial investigation, we showed that BCH codes outperform other codes under ML decoding in terms of block error probability in the short block-length region and perform close to the PPV normal approximation bound. However, the existing binary BCH codes are fixed-rate and for a given block-length, there are only a limited number of code rates for BCH codes. Although several methods such as puncturing, shortening or extension can be used to generate codes from a mother code, the generated codes will not be optimal. In this project, we will design a rateless semi-structured channel coding scheme to achieve the analytical bounds.