Shrinivas Kudekar  obtained his bachelor in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technoloy, Bombay, India in 2003. He received his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Computer and Communication Sciences from EPFL, Switzerland in 2009. After spending a year and half as a post-doctoral research associate at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he joined the systems group at Qualcomm Research in New Jersey, USA where he is currently working on next-generation wireless communication technologies. He is a co-recipient of the 2013 Information Theory Society Best Paper Award. His research interests include coding theory, wireless communications, learning and inference in graphical models, message-passing algorithms and their analysis.