Ahmed Arafa, Ph.D.
Prior to joining UNC Charlotte in August 2019, Dr. Arafa spent two years in Princeton’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, hosted by Vince Poor. In 2017, he received my Ph.D. under the supervision of Sennur Ulukus in the University of Maryland’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2022.
Education
- Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 2017
- M.Sc., Nile University, Egypt, 2012
- B.Sc., Alexandria University, Egypt, 2010
Research
General:
- Communication and Information Theory
- Signal Processing
- Machine Learning
Recent focus:
- Federated and Distributed Learning
- Semantic Communications
- Information-Theoretic Privacy and Security
Selected Publications
- A. Ali and A. Arafa, “Delay Sensitive Hierarchical Federated Learning with Stochastic Local Updates,” IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking, to appear.
- I. Hasan and A. Arafa, “RC-Gossip: Information Freshness in Clustered Networks with Rate-Changing Gossip,” in Proceedings of the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, Pacific Grove, California, October 2025.
- A. Arafa, K. Banawan, K. G. Seddik, and H. V. Poor, “Sample, Quantize and Encode: Timely Estimation Over Noisy Channels,” IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 69, No. 10, pp. 6485–6499, October 2021
- H. H. Yang, A. Arafa, T. Q. S. Quek, and H. V. Poor, “Age-Based Scheduling Policy for Federated Learning in Mobile Edge Networks,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Barcelona, Spain, May 2020.
- A. Arafa, J. Yang, S. Ulukus, and H. V. Poor, “Age-Minimal Transmission for Energy Harvesting Sensors with Finite Batteries: Online Policies,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 534—556, January 2020.