Particle Conversations
The first formal paper on particles talking to particles. Limits of Information Flow Between Classically Interacting Particles, with Miles Miller-Dickson, in Physical Review E.
Professor of Engineering · Brown University
Christopher Rose
Wireless & beyond
Communication and information theory applied to just about everything — which, it turns out, is a defensible research program and not only a character flaw.
Interaction is usually defined by what we can observe about outcomes: reactants move toward equilibrium, momentum and energy are conserved, elements of an organism signal each other chemically, mechanically, electrically. Frame those observations mathematically and the equations confer predictive power — which is the whole point of science. However, any interaction is a communication, and communication implies information exchange. So to a communication theorist trained in the physical sciences, one question is inescapable:
What are all these interacting elements saying to one another, how are they saying it, and can I join the conversation?
Latest
What's live right now
STEMJazz @ Brown
Improvisation, ensemble, and standards — applied to how we bring students into science and engineering. Slides · MIT Equity Forum panel · MIT alum piece
Thinking Out Loud
Brown's presidential lecture series — deciphering mysteries of our world and beyond. Chaired since 2014.
Curriculum vitae
Formal academic puffery, in PDF. See also the Wikipedia page, which is personal puffery.
Who
The short version, told slowly
Chris received the S.B. (1979), S.M. (1981) and Ph.D. (1985) degrees, all from MIT. Following graduate school he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, as a member of the Network Systems Research Department, where he regaled his peers with levitated-center-conductor high-Tc superconducting cables, annoyed them by showing that random lightwave network architectures perform about as well as carefully sculpted ones, and puzzled them with odd applications of cellular automata.
In 1990, when Arno Penzias told everyone in "Area 11" to go to academe if they weren't keenly interested in the corporate bottom line — including his Nobel partner Bob Wilson — Chris was congratulated on his timing, having joined Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rutgers the very next week.
He stayed at Rutgers until 2015, when he moved to Brown as Professor of Engineering and Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives. In 2020 he was appointed Associate Provost for STEM Initiatives, and served as the inaugural Director of STEMJazz Programs until 2026. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, cited "for contributions to wireless communication systems theory," and served as a full member of the Army Science Board (2013–2014).
He was Associate Director of WINLAB (1999–2007). His current technical interests include applications of communication and information theory to just about everything: biology, nano- micro- and macro-mechanical systems, and — tantalizingly — maybe even supersymmetry, by way of Jim Gates' intriguing Adinkra formalism.
Past wireless interests include novel mobile communication networks, genetic algorithms applied to control problems in networks, and interference avoidance — universal radios negotiating peaceful coexistence in the wireless ecology of the 5 GHz U-NII bands. That work, with Sennur Ulukus and Roy Yates, received the 2003 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications. Here's a picture of the ecstatic authors at the Globecom 2004 ceremony (credit: Aylin Yener).
And for fun — as an outgrowth of research on opportunistic communications — he took on a problem everyone has wondered about at least once: how will first contact actually happen? The interesting twist is that it can be far more efficient for distant little green people to send information-bearing physical artifacts than electromagnetic signals, which is seemingly at odds with current SETI wisdom. That story is over here.
Reachable at Christopher_Rose at brown.edu
Research
Six threads, one question
Different systems, same move each time: treat the interaction as a channel, then ask what the channel can and cannot carry.
Talking particles
If two billiard balls collide, how many bits did they exchange? Conservation laws turn out to be the null space of the interaction channel. This is the current obsession.
Follow the thread →Communicating with molecules
What are the fundamental limits when your symbols are actual molecules — released, diffusing, arriving late and out of order? Timing, payload, and 40 bps using alcohol and a photoionization detector.
Follow the thread →Write, don't radiate
Sending inscribed matter beats radiating photons across interstellar distances, by a lot. Nature cover, September 2004 — plus an astounding amount of press, a NY Times editorial, and a cartoon competition.
Follow the thread →Cells, signals, shape
Organization emerges and repeats despite everything the world throws at biological systems. What is the code-to-structure transformation, and does it have coding theorems?
Follow the thread →Interference avoidance
Radios that adapt their codewords until everyone can hear. Class warfare, water filling, and the U-NII bands. Marconi Prize Paper, 2003.
Follow the thread →Adinkras
Jim Gates' graphs encode supersymmetry algebras — and look suspiciously like error-correcting codes. Somewhere between profound and ludicrous, which is the fun part.
Follow the thread →Teaching
The beer-and-pizza theorem
A long-running experiment in undergraduate education, conducted with insufficient controls and reported here with full transparency about the confounds.
Theorem
Beer + Pizza = Academic Excellence
Proof: three Rutgers EGC Teaching Excellence Awards. ∎
Corollary (2011)
Beer + Pizza + BBQ = Universal Academic Excellence
Proof: 2011 EGC Best Teacher in Engineering Award. ∎
Odds & ends
Things that don't fit anywhere else
- Tool Visual talk timer Genuinely useful if you chair conference sessions. Green, amber at five minutes, red in the final minute, and past the end it counts up.
- Memoir Cellular Dreams and Cordless Nightmares Dick Frenkiel — "Father of Cellular" and National Medal of Technology winner — on life at Bell Labs in interesting times. A must-read.
- Service A proposal that got declined, with its reviews Posted deliberately. Possibly useful to new faculty, if only as an example of what not to do.
- Musing Everything in the light of day On sousveillance, and why loss of public privacy might not be the disaster everyone assumes.
- Fiction Michael Crichton weighs in The Andromeda Strain, pp. 222–225. Courtesy of Rich Howard.
- Video A favorite NOVA segment The NOVA scienceNOW profile of James McLurkin as a kid. The video itself has expired from PBS, but the page survives with his picture and the write-up. Proof that an engineer can have it all.
- Fund The Stephen C. Rose Legacy Fund
