Tingjun Chen, Ph.D.

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

I am the Nortel Networks assistant professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering with a secondary appointment in Computer Science 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 a co-founder and advisor 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:

[ARO] Machine Intelligence on Wireless Edge Networks (MIWEN) [proof-of-concept paper]
[Enegis, LLC] Newberry DAS Interrogator and PFI Nodal Seismic Sensor Deployment
[NSF CAREER] Toward Efficient and Scalable Mobile Fronthaul Empowered by Analog Radio-over-Fiber [award info]
[NSF CC* Integration-Large] Scaling Scientific Workloads on Distributed Commodity GPUs and Storage through Campus-level RDMA Networking [award info]
[NEC Labs America] Open Optical Transport System for Data Center Applications
[NTT] Machine Learning Technology for Resilient Optical Network
[Duke DST Launch] The Duke Quantum Network [Duke news]
[NSF NewSpectrum] Enabling Dense and In-situ Spectrum Monitoring via Circuits-system Co-design
[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:

[Duke Engineering BtH Initiative] Lighting a Dark Fiber Network for Hybrid Quantum-Classical Experimental Research [Pratt news]
[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:

[June 2025] ``Scalable Wireless Digital Twins for High-fidelity RF Signal Mapping’’, at Nokia Bell Labs and Samsung Research America.
[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 grants from NSF (CAREER, CC* Integration-Large, NewSpectrum, EAGER, SII-NRDZ, CISE Core, SWIFT, and Athena AI Institute for Edge Computing), ARO (W911NF2510241), SRC/DARPA JUMP 2.0 Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC), Duke Science & Technology Initiative and Pratt School of Engineering, as well as grants and gifts from ACM SIGMOBILE, Google, IBM, NEC Labs America, NTT, and NVIDIA. The findings, positions, or opinions of our research projects do not necessarily represent the official policy of any of these organizations.

news

Aug 08, 2025	Two papers papers were accepted to IEEE MILCOM’25: Multi-channel real-time SDR based on the RFSoC ZCU216 platform in collaboration with Prof. Ali Niknejad’s group, and over-the-air experimentation with Zak-OTFS waveforms using spread pilot in collaboration with Prof. Robert Calderbank’s group.
Aug 07, 2025	Received a grant from ARO (Co-PI: Prof. Dirk Englund) to work on enabling machine intelligence on wireless networks (MIWEN) via ultra-low-power in-physics computing using RF signals and electronics. This is based on our recent work on enabling in-physics computing for deep learning directly at radio frequency, with proof-of-concept results demonstrated in this paper.
Jul 01, 2025	Received the Nortel Networks Professorship from Duke Engineering.
Jul 01, 2025	Received a research grant from NEC Labs America to work on open optical transport system for data center appliations. This project will leverage the programmable Duke BlueFrog optical testbed deployed across the Research Triangle.
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.

selected publications

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{gao2025disaggregated,
  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},
}

OFC

Scalable Machine Learning Models for Optical Transmission System Management

Zehao Wang, Agastya Raj, Giacomo Borraccini, Shaobo Han, Yue-Kai Huang, Ting Wang, Marco Ruffini, Dan Kilper, and Tingjun Chen

In Proc. IEEE/Optica Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC’25) (invited), 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{wang2025scalable,
  title = {Scalable Machine Learning Models for Optical Transmission System Management},
  author = {Wang, Zehao and Raj, Agastya and Borraccini, Giacomo and Han, Shaobo and Huang, Yue-Kai and Wang, Ting and Ruffini, Marco and Kilper, Dan and Chen, Tingjun},
  booktitle = {Proc. IEEE/Optica Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC'25) (invited)},
  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},
}

OFC

4D Optical Link Tomography: First Field Demonstration of Autonomous Transponder Capable of Distance, Time, Frequency, and Polarization-Resolved Monitoring

Takeo Sasai, Giacomo Borraccini, Yue-Kai Huang, Hideki Nishizawa, Zehao Wang, Tingjun Chen, Yoshiaki Sone, Tatsuya Matsumura, Masanori Nakamura, Etsushi Yamazaki, and Yoshiaki Kisaka

In Proc. IEEE/Optica Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC’24), 2024

Postdeadline Paper

Bib

@inproceedings{sasai20244d,
  title = {{4D} Optical Link Tomography: First Field Demonstration of Autonomous Transponder Capable of Distance, Time, Frequency, and Polarization-Resolved Monitoring},
  author = {Sasai, Takeo and Borraccini, Giacomo and Huang, Yue-Kai and Nishizawa, Hideki and Wang, Zehao and Chen, Tingjun and Sone, Yoshiaki and Matsumura, Tatsuya and Nakamura, Masanori and Yamazaki, Etsushi and Kisaka, Yoshiaki},
  booktitle = {Proc. IEEE/Optica Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC'24)},
  year = {2024},
}

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}
}