Payman Arabshahi

Payman Arabshahi is Professor, and Associate Chair for Education at the University of Washington’s Department Electrical & Computer Engineering; and Principal Research Scientist with the UW Applied Physics Laboratory. He directs UW ECE's Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program, ENGINE. From 1994-1996 he served on the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. From 1997-2006 he was on the senior technical staff of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in the Communications Architectures and Research Section, working on Earth orbit and deep space communication networks and protocols, and design of planetary exploration missions. While at JPL he also served as affiliate graduate faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Caltech, where he taught the three-course graduate sequence on digital communications.

Arabshahi has a broad research interest in both the fundamentals and the applications of networks. Specific topics of his research include environmental monitoring and wireless sensor networks, resilience of critical networks (e.g., power, telecom), emergency communications, underwater and space communication networks, and challenges prevalent in social networks such as mobility, health, and disaster resilience and response. These topics span across various layers of the network stack, graph theory and optimization, smart cities, and connected communities. His work has included fundamental theoretical research, lab and field experimentation, and community outreach. He is the UW Director of the NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center on Soil Technologies, SOILTECH.

• Three EE Faculty Honored with UW Innovation Awards
• Department Chair’s Award, Entrepreneurial Capstone Program, 2017
• Technology Teaching Fellow Award, 2014
• JPL innovation awards, 1999, 2000, 2001.

Four NASA Tech Brief awards:

• Adaptive thresholding and parameter estimation for PPM, NASA Tech Briefs, March 1, 2005. 
• Scalable architecture for multihop wireless ad Hoc networks, NASA Tech Briefs, May 1, 2004.
• Finding minimum-power broadcast trees for wireless networks, NASA Tech Briefs, April 1, 2004.
• Algorithm for rapid acquisition of a PPM optical signal, NASA Tech Briefs, January 2000

• M. Fotouhi, M.T. Bahadori, O. Feyisetan, P. Arabshahi, D. Heckerman, “Fast training dataset attribution via in-context learning,” ATTRIB 2024 (@ NeurIPS), 2nd Workshop on Attributing Model Behavior at Scale, Vancouver, Canada, Dec. 2024.
• R. Wei, A.K. Das, D. Kirschen, P. Arabshahi, “Post-disaster restoration of electrical distribution networks: introducing a new variant of the TSP,” INFORMS Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, Oct. 2024.
• M. Inonan, B. Chap, P. Orduna, R. Hussein, P. Arabshahi, “RHLab Scalable Software Defined Radio (SDR) Remote Laboratory”. International Conference on Remote Engineering and Virtual Engineering, Thessaloniki, Greece, March 1-3, 2023.
• M. Fotouhi, H. Wang, P. Arabshahi, W. Cheng. “Extraction of Reliable And Actionable Information from Social Media During Emergencies”, IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, Santa Clara, CA, September 8-11, 2022.
• R. Elliott, P. Arabshahi, D.S. Kirschen, “Stabilising transient disturbances with utility scale inverter-based resources,” IET Generation, Transmission & Distribution, vol. 14, no. 26, December 2020.
• R. Elliott, P. Arabshahi, D.S. Kirschen, “A generalized PSS architecture for balancing transient and small-signal response,” IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, vol. 35, no. 2, March 2020.
• Y. Tan, A.K. Das, M. Ahumada-Paras, P. Arabshahi, D.S. Kirschen, “Scheduling post disaster repairs in electricity distribution networks with uncertain repair times,” Proc. CINS 2019: 3rd International Workshop on Critical Infrastructure Network Security} (ACM SIGMETRICS), Phoenix, Arizona, June 28, 2019.
• Y. Tan, F. Qiu, A.K. Das, D.S. Kirschen, P. Arabshahi, J. Wang, “Scheduling post-disaster repairs in electricity distribution networks,” IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 2611-2621, July 2019.
• Y. Tan, A.K. Das, P. Arabshahi, D.S. Kirschen, “Distribution systems hardening against natural disasters,” IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, vol. 33, no. 6, pp. 6849-6860, Nov. 2018.