Tingjun Chen, Ph.D.

: tingjun.chen [at] duke.edu
: Wilkinson 411 & 429
: (919) 613-1581
: FuNCtions Lab

I am an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science (secondary appointment) at Duke University. I direct the , working with a group of talented students on various projects cutting across the networking, communication, sensing, and energy-efficient computing aspects of wireless, mobile, optical, and quantum networked systems. We also investigate new features and novel applications that can be enabled by these networks, and our research spans both the theoretical and experimental domains. In addition, I am the co-founder and Network Lead of WiLO Networks Inc., a start-up focusing on low-power sensor hardware and end-to-end systems.

Before joining Duke in Fall 2021, I was a postdoc in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Yale University in 2020–2021, working with Prof. Leandros Tassiulas and Prof. Lin Zhong. Before that, I received my Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 2020 (advisor: Prof. Gil Zussman) and my B.Eng. degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2014 (advisors: Prof. Zhisheng Niu and Prof. Sheng Zhou).

Interests: I am interested in the broad areas of future wireless, mobile, optical, and quantum networks as well as intelligent IoT systems. My recent research focuses on both theoretical and experimental aspects of massive antenna systems and millimeter-wave networks, optical and quantum networks, and spectrum sharing systems, and their convergence with edge cloud, energy-efficient computing, and AI/ML. I also enjoy building efficient hardware-software systems and experimental testbeds at scale.

Impacts: My research has been recognized by an NSF CAREER Award (2025), two NVIDIA Academic Awards (2025, 2024), two IBM Academic Awards (2023, 2021), a Google Research Scholar Award (2021), the Columbia Engineering Morton B. Friedman Memorial Prize for Excellence (2021), the Columbia University Eli Jury Award (2021), a Facebook Fellowship (2019), and a Wei Family Private Foundation (WFPF) Fellowship (2014). I have received multiple paper awards from IEEE/Optica OFC’24 (Top-Scored Paper), IEEE/Optica OFC’23 (Top-Scored Paper), ECOC’23 (Best Paper Award), ACM CoNEXT’16 (Best Paper Award), ACM MobiHoc’19 (Best Paper Finalist), and IEEE MTT-S IMS’19 (Advanced Practice Paper Finalist). My Ph.D. thesis received the ACM SIGMOBILE Dissertation Award Runner-up. WiLO Networks Inc. has been supported by NSF SBIR Phase I and Phase II Awards (TI-2108012 and TI-2345381).

I am always looking for motivated and creative B.S., M.S., Ph.D. students, and Postdocs to join my group in Duke ECE. If you are interested, please email me your CV, transcript, and a brief note about your research interests, and I would be happy to chat!

Ongoing Projects:

[NSF CC* Integration-Large] Scaling Scientific Workloads on Distributed Commodity GPUs and Storage through Campus-level RDMA Networking [award info]
[NSF CAREER] Toward Efficient and Scalable Mobile Fronthaul Empowered by Analog Radio-over-Fiber [award info]
[Duke DST Launch] The Duke Quantum Network [Duke news]
[NSF NewSpectrum] Enabling Dense and In-situ Spectrum Monitoring via Circuits-system Co-design
[Duke Engineering BtH Initiative] Lighting a Dark Fiber Network for Hybrid Quantum-Classical Experimental Research [Pratt news]
[NSF EAGER] An Integrated Fiber Sensing and Communication Living Lab in the Research Triangle
[SRC/DARPA JUMP 2.0] Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC) [CUbiC website] [center info]
[NSF SII-NRDZ] Spectrum Sharing via Consumption Models and Telemetry in an Urban FCC Innovation Zone
[NSF CISE] Medium: Softwarizing Millimeter-wave Radio Access Networks at the Edge
[NSF SWIFT] Spectrum Coexistence with Rapid Interferer Learning, Detection, and Mitigation
[NSF NAI] National AI Institute for Edge Computing Leveraging Next-generation Networks [Athena website]

Past Projects:

[NSF PAWR] Cloud Enhanced Open Software-defined Mobile Wireless Testbed for City-scale Deployment [COSMOS website]
[NSF EARS] FlexICoN: Full-duplex Wireless: From Integrated Circuits to Networks (Columbia) [FlexICoN website]
[NSF CISE] EnHANTs: Energy-Harvesting Active Networked Tags (Columbia) [EnHANTs website]

Recent Talks:

[Apr. 2025] ``Toward Intelligent and Efficient Optical Networks: Performance Modeling, Co-existence, and Field Trials’’, MIT Optics and Quantum Electronics (OQE) Seminar.
[Mar. 2025] ``Scalable ML Models for Optical Transmission System Management’’, IEEE/Optica OFC.
[Mar. 2025] ``Scalable Wireless Digital Twins for High-fidelity RF Signal Mapping’’, FCC Technological Advisory Council Working Group on AI/ML (TAC-AIWG).
[Sept. 2024] ``Toward Intelligent and Efficient Optical Networks: Performance Modeling, Co-existence, and Field Trials’’, 6G-XCEL/ACCoRD Joint Workshop.
[Sept. 2024] ``Scalable Wireless Digital Twins for High-fidelity RF Signal Mapping’’, SpectrumX AI/ML Research Community Seminar.
[Aug. 2024] ``Toward Intelligent and Efficient Optical Networks: Performance Modeling, Co-Existence, and Field Trials’’, Optica Technical Group Webinar (Optical Communications Technical Group).
More talks and videos see below…

Talk at the ACM SIGMOBILE community workshop

Overview of the COSMOS testbed at ACM MobiCom'20

My Ph.D. life at Columbia Enginering

Interviewed by WebsEdge Science

Acknowledgments: Our research projects are supported in part by NSF grants OAC-2503010 (CC* Integration-Large), CNS-2443137 (CAREER), ECCS-2434131 (NewSpectrum), CNS-2330333 (EAGER), AST-2232458 (SII-NRDZ), CNS-2211944 (CISE Core), CNS-2128638 (SWIFT), and CNS-2112562 (NAI), the SRC/DARPA JUMP 2.0 program (CUbiC – Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity), a Duke Science & Technology LAUNCH Grant, a Pratt Engineering Beyond the Horizon Initiative Grant, a Google Research Scholar Award, IBM Academic Awards, NVIDIA Academic Awards, NTT Research Grants, an ACM SIGMOBILE Student Community Grant, and NEC Labs America Research Gifts. The findings, positions, or opinions of our research projects do not necessarily represent the official policy of any of these organizations.

news

Jun 23, 2025	Received an NSF CC* Integration-Large Award (PI: Danyang Zhuo, in collaboration with Duke OIT) to design and deploy an RDMA-based campus network that enables the shared use of distributed, heterogeneous GPUs to accelerate scientific applications and fast access to research data storage.
Jun 18, 2025	Received an NSF CAREER Award to work on enhancing the energy efficiency and scalability of mobile fronthaul networks using analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF) technologies. This project will also leverage the programmable wireless-optical testbeds, including the Duke BlueFrog and PAWR COSMOS platforms, to explore new networks capabilties supported by ARoF.
Jun 17, 2025	An extension of our ACM MobiHoc 2023 paper on the optimization, scheduling, and stability analysis of sectorized wireless networks was accepted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON).
Jun 15, 2025	A paper on our developed light-weight method for enhancing radar point cloud using graph neural networks, particularly in complex and dynamic environments, was accepted to IEEE/RSJ IROS’25.
May 10, 2025	Wei Cheng and Zehao Wang received the ECE Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Awards for the 2024–2025 academic year! Wei and Zehao served as the teaching assistants in my ECE 655/CompSci 655 ``Full-Stack IoT Systems’’ course. Congratulations!

selected publications

arXiv

Machine Intelligence on Wireless Edge Networks

Sri Krishna Vadlamani, Kfir Sulimany, Zhihui Gao, Tingjun Chen, and Dirk Englund

arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.12210, 2025

Bib

@article{gao2025disaggregated,
  title = {Machine Intelligence on Wireless Edge Networks},
  author = {Vadlamani, Sri Krishna and Sulimany, Kfir and Gao, Zhihui and Chen, Tingjun and Englund, Dirk},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.12210},
  year = {2025},
}

arXiv

Disaggregated Deep Learning via In-Physics Computing at Radio Frequency

Zhihui Gao, Sri Krishna Vadlamani, Kfir Sulimany, Dirk Englund, and Tingjun Chen

arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.17752, 2025

Bib

@article{gao2025disaggregatee,
  title = {Disaggregated Deep Learning via In-Physics Computing at Radio Frequency},
  author = {Gao, Zhihui and Vadlamani, Sri Krishna and Sulimany, Kfir and Englund, Dirk and Chen, Tingjun},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.17752},
  year = {2025},
}

JOCN

Multi-Span Optical Power Spectrum Prediction Using Cascaded Learning with One-Shot End-to-End Measurement

Zehao Wang, Yue-Kai Huang, Shaobo Han, Daniel Kilper, and Tingjun Chen

Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, 2025

Invited Paper to the JOCN Special Issue on Top-Scored Papers from IEEE/Optica OFC’24

DOI Bib Code

@article{wang2025multj,
  title = {Multi-Span Optical Power Spectrum Prediction Using Cascaded Learning with One-Shot End-to-End Measurement},
  author = {Wang, Zehao and Huang, Yue-Kai and Han, Shaobo and Kilper, Daniel and Chen, Tingjun},
  journal = {Journal of Optical Communications and Networking},
  volume = {17},
  number = {1},
  pages = {A23--A33},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  doi = {10.1364/JOCN.533634},
}

MobiCom

Savannah: Efficient mmWave Baseband Processing with Minimal and Heterogeneous Resources

Zhenzhou Qi, Chung-Hsuan Tung, Anuj Kalia, and Tingjun Chen

In Proc. ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’24), 2024

DOI Bib Code

@inproceedings{qi2024savannah,
  title = {Savannah: Efficient {mmWave} Baseband Processing with Minimal and Heterogeneous Resources},
  author = {Qi, Zhenzhou and Tung, Chung-Hsuan and Kalia, Anuj and Chen, Tingjun},
  booktitle = {Proc. ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'24)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1145/3636534.3690707},
}

MobiCom

Mambas: Maneuvering Analog Multi-User Beamforming Using an Array of Subarrays in mmWave Networks

Zhihui Gao, Zhenzhou Qi, and Tingjun Chen

In Proc. ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’24), 2024

DOI Bib Code

@inproceedings{gao2024mambas,
  title = {Mambas: Maneuvering Analog Multi-User Beamforming Using an Array of Subarrays in {mmWave} Networks},
  author = {Gao, Zhihui and Qi, Zhenzhou and Chen, Tingjun},
  booktitle = {Proc. ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'24)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1145/3636534.3649390},
}

DySPAN

Geo2SigMap: High-Fidelity RF Signal Mapping Using Geographic Databases

Yiming Li, Zeyu Li, Zhihui Gao, and Tingjun Chen

In Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks (DySPAN’24), 2024

DOI Bib Code

@inproceedings{li2024geo2sigmap,
  title = {{Geo2SigMap}: High-Fidelity {RF} Signal Mapping Using Geographic Databases},
  author = {Li, Yiming and Li, Zeyu and Gao, Zhihui and Chen, Tingjun},
  booktitle = {Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks (DySPAN'24)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1109/DySPAN60163.2024.10632773},
}

JLT

Field Trial of Coexistence and Simultaneous Switching of Real-Time Fiber Sensing and Coherent 400 GbE in a Dense Urban Environment

Zehao Wang, Yue-Kai Huang, Ezra Ip, Zhenzhou Qi, Gil Zussman, Dan Kilper, Koji Asahi, Hideo Kageshima, Yoshiaki Aono, and Tingjun Chen

IEEE/Optica Journal of Lightwave Technology, 2024

Invited Paper to the JLT Special Issue on Top-Scored Papers from IEEE/Optica OFC’23

DOI Bib

@article{wang2024field,
  title = {Field Trial of Coexistence and Simultaneous Switching of Real-Time Fiber Sensing and Coherent 400 {GbE} in a Dense Urban Environment},
  author = {Wang, Zehao and Huang, Yue-Kai and Ip, Ezra and Qi, Zhenzhou and Zussman, Gil and Kilper, Dan and Asahi, Koji and Kageshima, Hideo and Aono, Yoshiaki and Chen, Tingjun},
  journal = {IEEE/Optica Journal of Lightwave Technology},
  volume = {42},
  number = {4},
  pages = {1304--1311},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {IEEE/Optica},
  doi = {10.1109/JLT.2023.3319166}
}