Age of Information

Dr. Ahmed Arafa

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dr. Ahmed Arafa, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is engaged in research on networked communication systems that is Inspired by the novel age-of-information (AoI) metric that assesses information freshness. Arafa’s research offers a pathway towards realizing the exchange of data in a timely manner in federated learning (FL), cloud computing, and remote sensing systems. It introduces a novel information timeliness metric, AoI, into the study of these systems, and investigates various approaches to achieve timely learning, computing and sensing over networks. It has the potential to become an enabler for various applications, including collaborative autonomous driving, precision healthcare, and others. 

Dr. Arafa has recently won the NSF CAREER award for his project on AOI that spans three fundamental information processing categories. The first involves intelligent agents in a FL setup. Novel agent scheduling and efficient model compression algorithms are proposed for this category to realize the notion of timely FL at-scale. The second considers clients in cloud computing systems, for which innovative job uploading policies are devised under system-level constraints to achieve timely job completions. Finally, the third category focuses on remote sensing, and presents novel variable length coding schemes to enable timely multi-process tracking over noisy communication channels. This project has the potential to transform the way information acquisition and processing systems operate under stringent communication and resource constraints, while the educational plan provides the necessary tools to reason about the timeliness of information in networked systems.

Dr. Arafa joined the ECE Department at UNC Charlotte in August 2019.