Parthasarathy Guturu

Electrical Engineering

Associate Professor

Discovery Park B235

About

Dr. Parthasarathy (Partha) Guturu has Bachelor's Degree with Honors In Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering, Postgraduate Diploma in Computer Technology and Ph.D. (Engineering) in Pattern Recognition- all from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He has more than ten years of teaching and research experience in academia and over 7 years of research experience in design and development of complex real-time systems in industry. While in academia, he supervised 4 doctoral and a number of graduate and undergraduate dissertations. He published over 35 papers in international journals and conferences and contributed to disparate areas of Electrical and Computer Engineering including Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision/Image Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and solultions of ill-posed and combinatorial optimization problems with Neural Networks/Genetic Algorithms. In corporate research, he contributed to the areas of Intelligent Networks and 3G Wireless Systems and came up with 3 patents. The patents are in the areas of fault-tolerant message replication & database synchronization and call fail-safe wireless traffic distribution across multiple frequency bands. A paper based on the latter work has been published in IEEE GlobeCom 2003 and another one is ready for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Dr. Guturu plans to integrate his past experience in Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning and the latest experience in Wireless Networks and apply to research on Wireless Sensor Networks and Systems.

I. Introduction

My research focus over the past 15 years has been on the design of complex software systems, and the development of innovative computer algorithms for solving complex problems in the diverse fields of Computer and Communication Engineering. I contributed to both academic and corporate research. My research contributions span over the areas of Advanced Intelligent Networks, Wireless 3G Networks, Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision and Image Processing, Knowledge-based systems, Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms. While continuing to build upon my current strengths in 3G Wireless systems, I plan to expand the scope of my research into new areas like Data Mining and Bio-informatics taking advantage of my earlier background in Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Should the planned growth our new EE department dictate the need for exploring new areas such as MEMS and BIOMEMS, I am ready to take the challenge. Because of my success in diverse areas and quick changing industrial environments, I am confident that I will be a success in the new discipline too.

II. Prior Research Accomplishments in the Field

A. Academia

As a faculty member of Computer Science & Engineering and Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering departments at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, I have supervised four doctoral dissertations, published extensively and coordinated many sponsored research projects in the above-mentioned areas of Computational Intelligence. My research work in these areas includes a knowledge-based system for automatic data classification, contributions to the theory and algorithms for occluded object recognition based upon diagnostic reasoning, recursive neural network theory and its application to computer vision, computer algorithms for fast recognition of patterns with a large number of attributes and new classification methods that make an effective use of limited training samples. All this research been published in international conferences and peer-reviewed international journals: such as the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, IEE Proceedings, Pattern Recognition, Information Sciences and Pattern Recognition Letters.

B. Industry

My most recent R&D work at Nortel Networks, Richardson, Texas is in the area of
Software Engineering. My co-workers and I developed methods for isolation of software objects for automated unit testing and patented the work. Prior to that, I contributed to the Nortel’s main stream work in 3G-Wireless. I primed the BSC (Base Station Controller) Data Call Processing software development in the 1XRTT project, which is now customer-ready. Continuing later with the Multi-carrier Traffic Allocation feature, I primed the BSC design and came up with a novel algorithm for traffic distribution across 800 and 1900 MHz bands. This work has been filed for a patent. A paper based on this work has been presented at IEEE GlobeCom 2003 and an advanced version of the same has been accepted for publication in IEEE transactions on Wireless Communications.

My earlier work at Nortel Networks, Ottawa, Canada, involves a distributed system design for an Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) application. More specifically, the work is in the area of message replication and database synchronization. This work resulted in two US patents.

More details about these three patents are available in patents section.

III. Plan for Future Research

I shall obtain funding from the Government and Industry by projecting my achievements in solving practical problems for the industry and continue my research work in the Wireless Network and AIN areas. In addition, I plan to expand the scope of my research to novel application areas- some related to my past background and some that fall in the overlapping region of my past and present expertise. These areas include:

Intelligent algorithms for Ad-hoc Sensor Networks.
Ad-hoc and Fixed Infrastructure network composites
Multi-sensor Data fusion
Medical Imaging
Bio-informatics, for example, application of pattern and image analysis to bio-informatics problems such as analysis of gel images, analysis of gene expression data, etc.

I expect that, in view of the importance these areas are gaining now, funding for research in these areas should not be a problem.

Industrial

Software Architect, Nortel Networks, Richardson, Texas, U.S.A., April 2002 – Nov. 12, 2004
- As an architect of Call Services Vocoder Subsystem (CSVS), directed the design and development of base call processing at base-station controller.
- As an architect for 3G Operational Measurements feature, revamped the whole architecture and spearheaded the design that is portable to new high capacity Base Station Control (BSC) architecture on an ATM platform. Also, rendered architectural help in the development of call processing in a new vocoder subsystem.

Senior Member of Scientific Staff, Nortel Networks, Richardson, Texas, U.S.A., Jan. 17, 2000 – April 2002.
- As a design prime of Multi-carrier Traffic Allocation project, lead the development after designing a novel carrier determination algorithm for an efficient distribution of load among co-located inband Basestation-TransReceiver-Subsystems (BTSes) as well as out-band BTSes not necessarily co-located. This algorithm is being patented (please see Annex- I). In recognition of this achievement, I was assigned the role of an architect for a number of critical projects such 3G Operational Measurements.
- As a design prime of the call processing in the packet session interface in the base-station controller for the1XRTT project (enabling 3G wireless data transmission capability), designed and implemented dormant packet session software and helped to solve many day-to-day and anticipatory card crash problems to bring the project into customer-ready state.
- Mentored junior colleagues and gave chalk talks to the teams belonging to other areas related to this project such as the designers of the Public Data Switching Network (PDSN).

Senior Software Designer, Nortel Networks, Ottawa, Canada, June 1997 - January 16, 2000.
As a design prime of Network-side Update (NSU) Replication project,
- Designed a fault-tolerant high performance message replication and multi-site database synchronization subsystem required for deployment of distributed intelligent network services.
  A part of the project work involving the above innovations has been filed for two patents described in Annex-I.
- Developed C++ coding standards for the internal use of the Nortel Networks Service Builder division and published on the internal web page.
System Analyst, Capricorn Systems Inc., Atlanta, GA, USA, Sept. 1996-June 1997.
- As an on-site coordinator of our team working on a GUI based Object-oriented taxation system for AATS, Sarasota, Florida
- Mentored a team of consultants on the OOD paradigm.

Academic

Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of North Texas (UNT), Denton, Nov. 15, 2004 – till date.
- Designed and Supervised the development of website for the new EE department.
Adjunct Facukty Member, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, UNT, Fall 2002 - Fall 2004.
- Taught 2 Graduate courses in Software Engineering and got very high rating in student evaluations.
Visiting Research Professor, Electrical Engg. Deptt., Universite du Quebec, Montreal, Canada, Aug. 1994- Aug. 96
- Working on a project sponsored by a Montreal based company called Coreco, designed an expert system for vision applications. Also developed a real-time pyramidal algorithm for template matching in industrial environments for the same company.
- Developed a genetic algorithm for blind image restoration. This algorithm employs stochastic regularization based on the compound Gauss-Markov random field model and outperforms the traditional Wiener filter and other restoration methods in terms of quality of results.

Faculty Member, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (I.I.T.), India.
- Was offered Full Professorship in absentia while visiting University Of Quebec, but did not take it up because of plans to settle in North America.
- Associate Professor- Sept. 1991 - Aug. 1994.
- Assistant Professor- Aug. 1985 - Sept. 1991.
- Lecturer- Apr. 1984 - Aug. 1985.
- Senior Scientific Officer- Nov. 83 - Apr. 84.
- Junior Scientific Officer- Sept. 83 - Nov. 83.
Prior to Ph.D. and after postgraduate diploma, worked as a Senior Research Assistant at I.I.T., Kharagpur. During this time, I was engaged partly in my Ph.D. work and partly in teaching and research assistance. I developed digital filter simulation software and student record database software as a part of my duties then.

A U.S. patent (No. 7,289,484 B2) entitled "A call fail-safe method for wireless traffic distribution across bands" was filed on July 12, 2002 and issued on Oct. 30, 2007.

This research work is in the area of Wireless Networks. It has been done at Nortel Networks Corporation at Richardson in response to customer requirement for a feature to effectively distribute wireless CDMA traffic over 800 and 1900 MHz bands. An efficient and efficacious min-max algorithm was developed for making decisions about call migrations from a carrier in a 1-1 overlay system in one band to another carrier in a related non 1-1-ovelay system in another band with robustness against call-failures without being too restrictive about cross-band decisions to preclude effective call distribution. Extensions of this algorithm for next generation wireless systems working in more than two bands are also provided in this invention.

A US patent (No. 6,581,075 B1) entitled "System and Method for Database Synchronization" was issued on June 17, 2003. (Filing Date: Dec. 28, 2000).
A US patent (No. 6, 826, 182) entitled "An AND-OR multicast routing method for high performance fault-tolerant message replication." was issued on Nov. 30, 200. (Filing Date: Dec. 10, 1999).

These two patents are offshoots of an R&D project for design of a distributed system for Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) applications at Nortel Networks Corporation, Ottawa, Canada. High availability requirements for AIN services (e.g., calling card services) mandate that redundant databases containing the service information (such as a customer's current balance) are maintained at numerous Service Control Points (SCPs) spread over multiple LANs and WANs and are synchronized to reflect new updates. New data update from SS7 network (the so-called network-side update or simply NSU) can be handed over to any SCP, but must be propagated to all the SCPs in the consortium, so that each database is consistently updated. This problem is called message replication, because each message is replicated and propagated to all computers in a system. To address the problem, I designed and implemented a novel high performance message asynchronous replication subsystem taking a paradigm shift from those implementing traditional 2-phase and 3-phase commit type of algorithms which are synchronous by nature and hence are slow. I also enhanced it to be fault tolerant by using for each primary source of replication one or more surrogates to take up the responsibility for replication in the event of failure of the primary. Above two inventions are by-products of this design and are related to message replication and database synchronization aspects of the problem. The first one is a fault-tolerant message routing method that minimizes the network WAN traffic during replication. The second one is a new database conflict resolution method that facilitates data base synchronization despite conflicting updates originating at different sources. The second method differs from traditional conflict resolution methods in that it addresses a number AIN peculiarities such as the distributed mode of operation of SCPs that can be overridden by one or more Service Management Systems (SMSs) acting as masters.

Elevated to the grade of Senior Member, IEEE in recognition of my professional standing.
Accorded Adjunct Professorship at Ecole de Technologie Superieure, Universite du Quebec, Montreal, Canada.
Chaired a session at Canadian Conference in Electrical Engineering.
Chosen a number of times as a referee for evaluating the papers of other researchers.
Awarded monetary awards and innovation certificates for filing patents for the Nortel Networks Corporation.
Awarded UNDP fellowship for a study of Loans at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.