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Aaron B. Wagner

Professor

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Aaron B. Wagner
Aaron B. Wagner
Graduate Field Affiliations
Applied Mathematics
Computer Science
Data Science (minor)
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Biography

Aaron Wagner joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University as an assistant professor in 2006 and was elevated to professor in July 2018.

During the 2005-2006 academic year, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell. Wagner did his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley and received an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Wagner’s research and teaching have been recognized with several awards including the IEEE Information Theory Society’s James L. Massey Research & Teaching Award for Young Scholars(2017), the Douglas Whitney ’61 Excellence in Teaching Award from Cornell Engineering (2015), the Cornell Michael Tien ’72 College of Engineering Teaching Award (2009), the NSF CAREER award (2007), the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize from the U.C. Berkeley EECS Dept. (2006), and the Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics from the U.C. Berkeley Dept. of Mathematics (2005). Two of his students won the 2010 Information Theory Society Student Paper Award.

Research Interests

Wagner studies problems at the intersection of information theory and other fields including networking, statistics, queueing theory, security, computational linguistics, and learning. His primary research interest lies in information theory, especially compression, feedback communication, security, and quantum information.

  • Information Theory and Communications
  • Signal and Image Processing
  • Systems and Networking
  • Information, Networks, and Decision Systems

Select Publications

  • Wagner, Aaron B., S. Unal. 2016. “LP Bounds on Rate-Distortion with Variable Side Information.” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

  • Wagner, Aaron B., I. Issa, S. Kamath. 2016. “An operational measure of information leakage.”

  • Wagner, Aaron B., S. Unal. 2016. “Vector Gaussian multi-decoderrate-distortion: traceconstraints.”

  • Wagner, Aaron B., I. Issa. 2016. “Maximal leakage minimization for the Shannon cipher system.”

  • Wagner, Aaron B., N. Shende. 2016. “The stochastic-calculus approach to multi-receiver Poisson channels.”

Aaron B. Wagner's Google Scholar

Select Awards and Honors

  • Ralph S. Watts '72 Teaching Award, College of Engineering, Cornell University 2020
  • Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2020
  • James L. Massey Research & Teaching Award for Young Scholars, IEEE Information Theory Society 2017
  • Douglas Whitney '61 Excellence in Teaching Award, College of Engineering, Cornell University 2015
  • IEEE Information Theory Society Student Paper Award (coauthored with one of my students), IEEE Information Theory Society 2010
  • Michael Tien '72 Teaching Award, College of Engineering, Cornell University 2009
  • NSF CAREER Award, National Science Foundation 2007

Education

  • B.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Michigan Ann Arbor 1999
  • M.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California Berkeley 2002
  • Ph.D., Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California Berkeley 2005

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