Ballard Blair

nameBallard Blair
emailbjblair (@) mit.edu
phone443 695 5786

education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (May 2005-Present)
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole, MA

Doctoral Candidate in MIT/WHOI joint program in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Applied Ocean Engineering.

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

Masters of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2005)

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2002) cum laude


work/research experience

Invited Guest Lecturer Spring 2007 - Olin College of Engineering

Research Assistant 2006-2007
Conducted research on coding for the underwater channel and using Bayesian modeling to improve channel estimates for underwater communication.

Research Assistant 2005-2006
Helped design and build autonomous underwater vehicles PUMA and JAGUAR. Maintained and operated SEABED vehicle.

Space Flight Hardware Engineer, 2002-2005 JHU Applied Physics Labs


Project Engineer, Fall 2001 Fitlinxx (internship)


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

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

professional skills

Operating Systems *nix, Win XP
Text Editor emacs
Typesetting latex
Languages MATLAB, VHDL, Verilog, Java, C, Labview
FPGA Familiarity Actel, Xilinx, Altera
Circuit Design Mentor Graphics, Orcad, Magic, Spice


honors / awards

MIT Presidential Graduate Fellowship
One year fellowship granted to outstanding incoming students for first year of graduate study.

Eta Kappa Nu
Electrical Engineering Honor society

Tau Beta Pi
Engineering Honor Society

Eagle Scout

Golden Key Honor Society
National Society of collegiate Scholars
National Merit Scholar

references

Available upon request.