Hassanieh Honored With Graduate Student Achievement Award

Haitham Hassanieh, a graduate student in Professor Dina Katabi’s Networks@MIT research group at CSAIL, has been awarded the MIT Arab Student Organization’s (MIT-ASO) Graduate Student Achievement Award. The award, which recognizes the top Arab or Arab-American graduate student studying at American universities, was presented during the MIT-ASO’s 10^th Annual Science and Technology Awards Banquet on Saturday, May 4 at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA.

 

Hassnieh’s research focuses on developing algorithms that reduce the acquisition and processing time of big data problems. Along with CSAIL Principal Investigators and Professors Dina Katabi and Piotr Indyk, Hassanieh developed a new algorithm that improves on the fast Fourier transform (FFT), a fundamental concept in the information sciences that provides a method for representing irregular signals, compressing image and audio files, and solving differential equations and stock options. The new algorithm, which can provide up to a tenfold increase in speed on the FFT in some cases, could be particularly useful for image compression when sending files from a smart phone. The algorithm, called the sparse Fourier transform (SFT), was named to MIT Technology Review’s 2012 list of the world’s 10 most important emerging technologies.