Ballard Blair

personal

Hello, my name is Ballard, and I am a graduate student in the MIT / WHOI Joint Program currently working towards my PhD. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology I am a member of the EECS department (Course 6) where I work with Arthur Baggeroer and Milica Stojanovic. At the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute I am in James Presig's Lab in the Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department . My interests are in digital communication, signal processing, channel modelling, underwater netowrks, coding and information theory, and underwater channel physics. Beyond academics, I enjoy spending time with my wife Emily, swing dancing, outdoor adventures, sailing, playing the tuba, dogs, biking, rock climbing, and reading science fiction.

contact

MIT MIT 5-430 77 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139 bjblair (@) mit.edu cell (443) 695 5786

WHOI WHOI, MS#9 266 Woods Hole Rd. Woods Hole, MA 02543 ballard (@) whoi.edu work (508) 289 2499

Family Robin Blair Rebecca Depasquale David Smith Friends Alex Bahr Brian Bingham Ryan Eustice Michael Leviton Chris Murphy Chris Roman Sarah Spence Greg Struve John Vinton Matt Walter

links Ocean Acoustics Group netflix woot shirt bigwords campus books xkcd MITAAH PETA our wedding

research

I work on using (bayesian) statistical and phyisical models of the underwater channel to more intelligently design codes and signal processing that will enhance the reliability of underwater digital communication between stationary and non-stationary nodes.

c.v

view my c.v. / resume

publications

On the Design of Direct Sequence Spread-Spectrum Signaling for Range Estimation Brian Bingham, Ballard Blair, and David Mindell. Proceedings of the MTS/IEEE OCEANS, September 2007, pp 1-7 [ PDF ]

Channel estimation for underwater acoustic communications: sparse channels, soft input data, and Bayesian techniques James Preisig, Ballard Blair, and Weichang Li. Journal Acoustical Society America, Vol 123, 2008, pp 3892

talks

4/19/2007	Underwater Communications (presented as invited speaker to Dr. Greg Wornell's MIT Group Meeting) [ PDF, powerpoint ]
4/23/2007	Are Acoustic Communications the Right Answer? (presented for an Acoustics Group Meeting) [ PDF, powerpoint ]
4/23/2007	An AWGN MultiaccessChannel: A Look at Gallager's Paper (presented in class for 6.441:Information Theory) [ PDF, powerpoint ]
1/3/2008	Soft Channel Estimation (presented in joint group meeting with Andy Singer's group at the University of Illinois) [ PDF, powerpoint ]

class projects

6.375

Difference of Gaussian Scale Space Pyramids for SIFT Feature Detection: an ASIC design coded in Bluespec ™ (with Chris Murphy) [ report, presentation ]

colleagues

James Preisig, research adviser

Milica Stojanovic, co-research adviser

Arthur Baggeroer, academic adviser

(published with) Brian Bingham, David Mindell, James Preisig, Weichang Li

academics

Doctoral Student
MIT / WHOI Joint Program
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

MS (in EE) Johns Hopkins University

BS (in ECE) Cornell University

Spring '09 enrollment

6.981	Teaching Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (TA for 6.011)
6.THG	PhD Thesis

past enrollment

12.808	Introduction to Observational Physical Oceanography
2.687	Time Series Analysis and System Identification (Listener)
2.688	Principles of Oceanographic Instrumentation Systems
6.341	Discrete Time Signal Processing
6.438	Algorithms for Estimation and Inference
6.441	Information Theory
6.375	Complex Digital Systems Design
2.068	Computational Ocean Acoustics
6.011	Introduction to Communication, Control, and Signal Processing
6.450	Principles of Digital Communication I
6.840	Theory of Computation
6.986	Inference and Information (now 6.437)
6.431	Applied Probability
6.866	Machine Vision
6.829	Computer Networks (Listener)