Welcome to Intelligent Information Processing Lab (IIPL)

The Intelligent Information Processing Lab (IIPL) at the University of Iowa investigates fundamental mathematical principles governing information systems, and provides computational solutions to designing future machine intelligence. Active research areas include high dimensional geometry, machine intelligence, and signal processing. Our lab enjoys close collaborations with theoretical and experimental investigators.

The lab is led by Dr. Weiyu Xu. 

Recent News

  • Two conferences papers, one on semantic communication and another on reinforcement learning, are accepted to CISS 2024 at Princeton University. 
  • Our conference paper on network design for efficient  machine learning is accepted to 49th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing (ICASSP), Seoul, South Korea, December 2024.
  • Our lab member is selected to participate in 2023 Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program Fall Engagement (NFE).
  • We received an Iowa Initiative for Artificial Intelligence grant on AI technology for health. 
  • Our journal paper is accepted to Medical Physics, July 2023. 
  • Our journal paper is accepted to  Information and Inference: A Journal of IMA, July 2023.  Congratulations to all the co-authors! 
  • Two conference papers, one on AI and one on error correction codes for testing, have been accepted to  57th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers,  Pacific Grove, July 2023.
  • Our conference paper DISTRIBUTED DUAL COORDINATE ASCENT WITH IMBALANCED DATA ON A GENERAL TREE NETWORK has been accepted  at 33rd IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP 2023), Rome, Italy. 
  • Our journal paper "A deep learning network with differentiable dynamic programming for retina OCT surface segmentation" is accepted!
  • Our paper is accepted to The 48th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2023.
  • Our paper is accepted to 53rd Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS) 2023, Johns Hopkins University. 
  • Our journal paper "Use of compressed sensing to expedite high-throughput diagnostic testing for COVID-19 and beyond" is accepted!
  • We have received an NSF grant "Collaborative Research: Optimized Testing Strategies for Fighting Pandemics: Fundamental Limits and Efficient Algorithms", September 2022.  Thanks for the generous support from NSF!
  • Our group alumni have joined Southwest University of Finance and Economics and University of Central Florida as assistant professors! 
  • Group member Hui Xie has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, July 2022!  He is working as principal data scientist in Seattle. 
  • Together with Professor Tehrani from Department of Mathematics, Weiyu Xu receives "Dolciani Mathematics Enrichment Grant" from Mathematical Association of America, as a co-director to establish  "Iowa Junior Academy of Math".
  • Our journal paper "Globally optimal OCT surface segmentation using a constrained IPM optimization" has been accepted to Optics Express, January 2021. 
  • Lab member Jirong Yi is working as a machine learning scientist in Hologic, Inc., Santa Clara, California. 
  • Weiyu Xu is going to deliver a tutorial "Signal Processing for Fighting a Pandemic" at the flagship conference 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, June 2021.
  • Our group is recruiting Ph.D. students starting in the spring or fall of 2021.  You are welcome to apply to the University of Iowa and my group, if you are passionate about information processing and machine learning, and have necessary analytical skills. 
  • Our journal paper ``Distributed Dual Coordinate Ascent in General Tree Networks and Communication Network Effect on Synchronous Machine Learning,"  has been accepted for publication in the  IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Series on Machine Learning in Communications and Networks, 2021.
  • Our conference paper has been accepted to International Conference on Communications, 2021. 
  • Weiyu Xu is elected to the Machine Learning for Signal Processing  (MLSP) Technical Committee (TC),  IEEE Signal Processing Society, November, 2020. 
  • Our lab has developed pool testing software/app being used in lab/clinical testing for SARS-CoV-2 viruses! We are excited that the research is seeing real impacts in fighting the pandemic. 
  • Our original work on compressed sensing for (COVID-19) virus and antibody testing has been featured in IEEE Specturm, SIAM News,  University of Iowa news, College of Engineering news, and Department of Electrical and Computer Enginering news!
  • Weiyu Xu has received NSF ECCS grant "CCSS: Collaborative Research: Sketching for High Dimensional Data Analysis in IoT". Many thanks to NSF for their generous support!
  • Weiyu Xu has received NSF RAPID grant "RAPID: High-Throughput and Low-Cost Testing of COVID-19 Viruses and Antibodies through Compressed Sensing and Group Testing". Many hanks to NSF for your generous support! 
  • Weiyu Xu' s group, together with Professor Raghu Mudumbai,  has originated (believed to be the first in the literature) the work of developing compressed sensing technologies for high-throughput and low-cost COVID-19 virus and antibody tests.  This new technology can increase the test thoughput by 10 or even more folds compared with traditional testing. Please see "Low-Cost and High-Throughput Testing of COVID-19 Viruses and Antibodies via Compressed Sensing: System Concepts and Computational Experiments" at https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05759. Our work has garnered attentions from COVID-19 researchers, and has been featured in recent works on this topic, see for example, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.20077727v2.full.pdf . We anticipate this new technology will contribute significantly to mass testing of COVID-19 viruses and antibodies, and to fighting the pandemic. 
  • Weiyu Xu, together with coauthors Dr. Flynn, Dr. Wu, Dr. Kim, Dr. Adams and Hopfensperger,  receives Farrington Daniels Best Paper Award  for "an outstanding paper on radiation therapy dosimetry, planning or delivery" published in journal Medical Physics, awarded by American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). It is one of the two best paper awards given in the year of 2020, selected from journal Medical Physics.
  • JIrong Yi's journal paper "Necessary and Sufficient Null Space Condition for Nuclear Norm Minimization in Low-Rank Matrix Recovery" is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, April, 2020. 
  • Jirong Yi receives graduate college summer and research fellowships, March, 2020. 
  • Group member Khan Zain (undergraduate) is going to Columbia University for gradudate study! Mr. Zain received an undergraduate research fellowship for  work on deep learning in 2019.  
  • Our journal paper "Needle-Free Cervical Cancer Treatment Using Helical Multi-Shield Intracavitary Rotating Shield Brachytherapy with the 169Yb Isotope" is accepted to Medical Physics, February 2020. Congratulations! 
  • Weiyu Xu is an invited speaker at 2019 Workshop on Numerical Algebra in High-Dimensional Data Analysis, Xiamen, China, December, 2019. 
  • Weiyu Xu and Haider Alshamary's journal paper ""Optimal Joint Channel Estimation and Data Detection for Massive SIMO Wireless Systems: A Polynomial Complexity Solution"" has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory! This paper proves, for the first time, that sphere decoders can have truly polynomial expected computational complexity for massive SIMO wireless system, by giving new analysis of the stability of the Cholesky decomposition. Congratulations!
  • Together with Professor. Mudumbai, Dr. Xu Received a faculty award for "Enhancing Ethical Context in the College of Engineering Curriculum."  https://www.engineering.uiowa.edu/college/special-initiatives/enhancing-....
  • Group alumnus Myung Cho has accepted a tenure track assistant professor position at Pennsylvania State University. Congratulations!
  • Group alumnus Yang Yang has accepted a job offer to work at ASML, San Jose, California, as a senior software engineer. 
  • Jirong Yi's conference paper "Outlier Detection using Generative Models with Theoretical Performance Guarantees"  is accepted to SPARS 2019, Toulouse, France. 
  • Our journal paper "Systematic Review of Intensity-Modulated Brachytherapy (IMBT): Static and Dynamic Techniques" is accepted to International Journal of Radiation Oncology • Biology • Physics (IJROBP),  known as "The Red Journal" , May, 2019.
  • Our journal paper "Efficient 169Yb High-Dose-Rate Brachytherapy Source Production using Re-activation" is accpeted to Medical Physics, May, 2019. 
  • Group members Hui Xie and Jirong Yi (co-first authors) 's paper "An Information-Theoretic Explanation for the Adversarial Fragility of AI Classifiers"  has been accepted to the 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Paris, July 2019.  One of the reviewers recommended it for consideration of best student paper award. Congratulations!
  • Our paper is accepted to the 30th  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019. Acceptance rate is 25.2 %. 
  • Our paper  "GENERALIZED DISTRIBUTED DUAL COORDINATE ASCENT IN A TREE NETWORK FOR MACHINE LEARNING" is accepted to 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2019), Brighton, UK.
  • Weiyu Xu will serve as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, starting from December, 2018.  
  • Our journal paper "Optimum Sensor Placement for Localization of a Hazardous Source under Log Normal Shadowing," accepted to Numerical Algebra, Control & Optimization(NACO), a journal of American Institute of Mathematics, October, 2018.
  • Our journal paper "Effectiveness of Rotating Shield Brachytherapy for Prostate Cancer Dose Escalation and Urethral Sparing" is accepted to International Journal of Radiation Oncology • Biology • Physics (IJROBP),  known as "The Red Journal"  in the field, July, 2018.
  • Weiyu Xu is promoted to associate professor with tenure, 2018.
  • Weiyu Xu will serve on the organizing committee of  2020 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT),  Los Angeles, USA.
  • Student from Kate Wickham elementary school mathematics club (4th-5th grade, Weiyu Xu as coach), places the 1st nationally in International Mathematical Kangaroo competition, with perfect score.   http://www.mathkangaroo.us/mk/default.html
  • PhD student Jirong Yi received 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory travel support.
  • Weiyu attended ICASSP 2018 with co-authors, enjoyed presentations, discussions, and hiking in Banff National Park.
  • Our journal paper "Symbol Error Rate Performance of Box-relaxation Decoders in Massive MIMO" has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, April 2018. This approach can rigorously and precisely predict the phase transition performance of box relaxation, and earlier results in the literature relied on non-rigorous replica methods from statistical physics. 
  • Two abstracts have been accepted for presentations at AAPM (The American Association of Physicists in Medicine) Annual Meeting, 2018. 
  • Tianming Wang has successfully defeneded his Ph.D. thesis. Congratulations!
  • Hanqin Cai has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis. Congratulations! 
  • Group member Jirong Yi's (first author) and lab alumnus Myung Cho's paper "Separation-Free Super-Resolution from Compressed Measurements is Possible: an Orthonormal Atomic Norm Minimization Approach"  has been accepted to the 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Vail, Colorado, USA, June 2018.  Congratulations!
  • Our journal paper "Symbol Error Rate Performance of Box-relaxation Decoders in Massive MIMO" has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing with minor mandatory revision, March, 2018. This paper has for the first time precisely and rigorously characterized the error rate of MIMO box-relaxation detectors using Gaussian comparison theorems, without resorting to non-rigorous replica methods in the literature. 
  • Our paper on massive MIMO has been accepted to IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP) 2018, Germany.
  • Group member Yang, Yang receives BALLARD AND SEASHORE DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIP from graduate college, University of Iowa, 2018.
  • Group member Tianming Wang has accepted a postdoc position at the University of Texas at Austin. 
  • Group member Hanqin Cai will be an assistant adjunct professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, in Fall, 2018.
  • Weiyu Xu is invited to give a 1.5-hour tutorial on Foundations of Data Science in Midwest Big Data Summer School, May, 2018.
  • Myung Cho and Kumar Vijay Mishra's journal paper "Computable performance guarantees for compressed sensing matrices" has been accepted for publication in EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, Jan. 2018. Congratulations!
  • Our paper on massive MIMO is accepted to 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2018), Calgary, Canada.  
  • Weiyu is organizing a special session "Fundamental limits of Large-scale Optimization for Structured Signal Inference" at IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP) 2018. Our proposal has been accepted.
  • Weiyu Xu  is organizing the mathematics club for the 4th and 5th grades at Kate Wickham Elementary school, as the lead coach. 
  • Dr. Anh Le has joined our research group as a postdoc scholar. Welcome! 
  • Weiyu Xu is visiting Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, August, 2017. 
  • Myung Cho is starting his postdoc postions at Ohio State University (OSU) and Carnegie Mellon Unversity (CMU), 2017. Congratulations! 
  • Myung Cho's journal paper "Fast Dose Optimization for rotating shield brachytherapy" is accepted to Medical Physics, July, 2017. Congratulations! 
  • Myung Cho successfully defended his Ph. D. thesis! Congratulations, Dr. Cho!
  • Haider Alshamary will be an assistant professor at the University of Diyala, Iraq. Congratulations, Dr. Alshamary!
  • Suhui Liu (AMCS) successfully defended his Ph. D. thesis!  Dr.  Liu will be a faculty member at WuHan Institute of Technology. Congratulaitons, Dr. Liu!
  • Myung Cho's and Kaustubh's two  works are accepted for oral presentations at AAPM (The American Association of Physicists in Medicine) Annual Meeting, 2017. Oral presentations acceptance rate: 23.6 % for AAPM 2016. Congratulations!
  • Ph.D. student Cai, Hanqin is awarded the Graduate College Summer Fellowship, 2017.
  • Weiyu Xu is giving an invited talk at SPIE Wavelets and Sparsity XVII conference in San Diego, 2017. Paper "2D Phaseless Superresolution" is accepted.
  • Weiyu Xu is organizing a minisymposium "Super-resolution in imaging and inverse problems" at the 9th Applied Inverse Problems conference in Hangzhou, 2017.  He is also giving an invited talk at the AIP conference.
  • Three papers are accepted to  2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2017) in New Orleans. Congratulations to Myung Cho and Yang Yang!
  • Weiyu Xu receives the Renewable Energy Impact Award from Iowa Energy Center at the 2016 Iowa Energy Summit, October 26th, 2016.
  • Weiyu's journal paper, "Quickest Sequential Multi-Band Spectrum Sensing with Mixed Observations" has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, August 2016.
  • National Science Foundation (NSF, Division Of Mathematical Sciences) has awaded us "Collaborative Research: Wavelet Frames for Variational Models in Imaging: Bridging Discrete and Continuum", with Weiyu Xu as PI.
  • IIPL welcomes new group members Ms. Haiye Huo, and  Mr. Jirong Yi as Ph. D. students, starting in Fall, 2016!
  • Weiyu's journal paper, "Distributed Channel Estimation and Pilot Contamination Analysis for Massive MIMO-OFDM Systems" has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2016.
  • Haider Alshamary successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on massive MIMO in May, 2016. Congratulations to Haider, the 2nd IIPL Ph. D., and the 1st IIPL Ph. D. with Weiyu as sole advisor!
  • Haider Alshamary's paper, "Efficient optimal joint channel estimation and data detection for massive MIMO systems" is accepted to 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Barcelona, Spain. Congratulations! 
  • Haider Alshamary receives BALLARD AND SEASHORE DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIP from graduate college, University of Iowa, 2016.
  • Weiyu Xu's journal paper "Robust recovery of complex exponential signals from random Gaussian measurements via low rank Hankel matrix reconstruction" is accepted to Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis, 2016.
  • Lab alumnus Kumar Vijay Mishra  starts his new postdoc position at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, working with Prof. Yonina Eldar. Congratulations!
  • Myung Cho is awarded a competitive NSF-funded travel grant to ICASSP 2016, based on ranking of paper quality.
  • Three papers by Myung Cho, Bingwen Zhang, and Weiyu Xu have been accepted to ICASSP 2016.  Myung Cho will also present his IEEE Signal Processing Letters paper at ICASSP.
  • Weiyu Xu will be an invited speaker at Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) Workshop "Optimization and Parsimonious Modeling".  http://www.ima.umn.edu/2015-2016/W1.25-29.16/W1.25-29.16_poster.pdf
  • Myung Cho and Kumar Vijay Mishra's journal paper,  "Block Iterative Reweighted Algorithms for Super-Resolution of Spectrally Sparse Signals" has been accepted to IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 2015.
  • We are looking for a postdoctoral fellow and one graduate student RA in convex optimization for medical applications (and one more graduate student RA in biomedical aspect of radiation oncology). Welcome to apply for these positions!
  • National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded our NIH R01 research project on brachytherapy for cancer treatment, with total project budget at $ 1.48 million dollars (subject to 10% institute budget cut).
  • Weiyu has joined the faculty of the Applied and Computational Mathematical Sciences program at University of Iowa!
  • Weiyu's paper, "Detection of Correlated Components in Multivariate Gaussian Models" accepted to 2015 IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Jeju Island.
  • Weiyu's journal paper, "Improving the Thresholds of Sparse Recovery: An Analysis of a Two-Step Reweighted Basis Pursuit Algorithm" accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2015.
  • Weiyu's journal paper, "Paddle-based rotating-shield brachytherapy" accepted to Medical Physics, 2015.
  • Kumar Vijay Mishra and Myung Cho's journal paper "Spectral super-resolution with prior knowledge" accepted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 2015.
  • Haider Alshamary's paper "Optimal Non-coherent Data Detection for Massive SIMO Wireless Systems: A Polynomial Complexity Solution" accepted to IEEE Signal Processing Workshop and Signal Processing Education Workshop, 2015.
  • Weiyu's journal paper, "Guarantees of Total Variation Minimization for Signal Recovery" accepted to  Information and Inference, a journal published by Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), UK. 
  • Myung Cho and Kumar Vijay Mishra's work won Best Poster Award at the College of Engineering research open house!  
  • Grant  "Achieving Full Potentials of Massive MIMO Systems: Theories and Algorithms" awarded. Weiyu serves as co-PI. 
  • Hema Kumari Achanta successfully defended her doctoral dissertation. She will work as a postdoc at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is Weiyu's first graduated Ph.D. student (coadvised with Professor Soura Dasgupta). 
  • Weiyu's journal paper "Sparse recovery with graph constraints''  accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.  
  • Grant from Iowa Energy Center.
  • Myung Cho's journal paper  "System identification in the presence of outliers and random noises: A compressed sensing approach"  accepted to  Automatica.
  • Haider Ali Jasim Alshamary's journal paper "Optimized Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Signal Detection in MIMO Systems: An Analysis of the Stationary Distribution and Mixing Time" accepted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.       
  • Grant from the Simons Foundation for mathematicians.