biography

Ballard J.S. Blair is currently a PhD student in the MIT-WHOI joint program in Oceanography / Applied Ocean Science and Engineering. His main area of research is underwater communication, where he has been pioneering new methods for improving the data rate and reliability of practical systems through the use of advanced signal processing. Before coming to MIT, he worked as a space flight hardware engineering at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Labs where he helped design the New Horizons spacecraft currently en-route to Pluto. Ballard's other degrees include a Master of Science in Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University, both in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Ballard received the Office of Naval Research Graduate Traineeship Award in Acoustics starting in 2009, was an MIT Presidential Fellow, and received the IEEE OES scholarship in 2009. He has been invited as a guest lecturer at Olin College of Engineering. He is currently a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, IEEE, MTS, SIAM, and ASA, where he serves on the Signal Processing in Acoustics technical committee.

Rafting in alaska

colleagues

Alex Bahr
Brian Bingham
Ryan Eustice
Chris Murphy
Chris Roman
Sarah Spence
Matt Walter

links

Ocean Acoustics Group
WHOI
Ocean Acoustics and Signals Lab

family and friends

Robin Blair
David Smith
John Vinton

contact

MIT

MIT 36-615A
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139
bjblair (@) mit.edu

WHOI

WHOI, MS#9
266 Woods Hole Rd.
Woods Hole, MA 02543
ballard (@) whoi.edu
work (508) 289 2499

research

My current research involves using physical constraints to reduce the complexity of a multichannel equalizer for an underwater communication system. In this work, I use beamforming approaches to constrain the signal space to reduce the dimensionality and hence the number of coefficients that are adapted.
Other research interests include:

publications

conference publications

Multi-channel DFE equalization with waveguide constraints for underwater acoustic communication Ballard Blair and James Preisig, Proceedings of the Forty-Eighth Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, September 2010 [ PDF ]

Effective noise correlation matrix structure for equalization of shallow water channels Ballard Blair and James Preisig, Proceedings of the MTS/IEEE OCEANS, September 2010 [ PDF ]

Comparison and analysis of equalization techniques for the time-varying underwater acoustic channel Ballard Blair and James Preisig, Journal Acoustical Society America, Vol 126, 2009, pp 2249

Channel estimation for underwater acoustic communications: sparse channels, soft input data, and Bayesian techniques James Preisig, Ballard Blair, and Weichang Li. Journal Acoustical Society America, Vol 123, 2008, pp 3892

On the Design of Direct Sequence Spread-Spectrum Signaling for Range Estimation Brian Bingham, Ballard Blair, and David Mindell. Proceedings of the MTS/IEEE OCEANS, September 2007, pp 1-7 [ PDF ]

talks

12/10/2009

Communicating through the Ocean: Introduction and Challenges (invited talk at U-Mass Dartmouth) [ PDF, powerpoint ]

10/28/2009

Comparison and Analysis of Equalization Techniques for the Time-Varying Underwater Acoustic Channel (presented at the 158th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Antonio) [ PDF, powerpoint ]

10/5/2009

Comparison and Analysis of Equalization Techniques for the Time-Varying Underwater Acoustic Channel (presented for an MIT Acoustics Group Meeting) [ PDF, powerpoint ]

1/3/2008

Soft Channel Estimation (presented in joint group meeting with Andy Singer's group at the University of Illinois) [ PDF, powerpoint ]

4/23/2007

An AWGN MultiaccessChannel: A Look at Gallager's Paper (presented in class for 6.441:Information Theory) [ PDF, powerpoint ]

4/23/2007

Are Acoustic Communications the Right Answer? (presented for an MIT Acoustics Group Meeting) [ PDF, powerpoint ]

4/19/2007

Underwater Communications (presented as invited speaker to Dr. Greg Wornell's MIT Group Meeting) [ PDF, powerpoint ]

research colleagues

James Preisig, research adviser

Milica Stojanovic, thesis committee member

Arthur Baggeroer, academic adviser, thesis committee member

Greg Wornell, thesis committee member

(published with) Brian Bingham, David Mindell, James Preisig, Weichang Li

academics

Doctoral Student
MIT / WHOI Joint Program
Electrical and Oceanographic Engineering

MS (in ECE) Johns Hopkins University

BS (in ECE) Cornell University