TelePathy: Telecommunication Systems Modeling and Engineering of Cell Communication Pathways  
Agency: National Science Foundation
Sponsor Award Number: MCB-1449014
PI: Massimiliano Pierobon1
co-PI: Nicole Buan2
Start/End Dates: 07/15/2014 -  06/30/2017  (No-cost Extension)

1Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
2Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The goal of this project is to explore the application of telecommunications systems engineering to the quantitative modeling of information exchange among biological cells, and the design of techniques able to leverage these pathways for the realization of artificial communication systems.

MBiTe Lab students on the project: Natalie Hanisch, Aditya Immaneni, Colton Harper, Zahmeeth Sakkaff, Alireza Khodaei, Karthik Reddy Gorla, Justin Firestone

Products from MBiTe Lab:

  • Khodaei, A.  Pierobon M., “An Intra-body Linear Channel Model Based on Neuronal Subthreshold Stimulation,” In Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 2016. [PDF]
  • Khodaei, A.,   Pierobon, M., “Subthreshold Linear Modeling of Dendritic Trees: A Computational Approach,” In Proceedings of the Annual International Conference of IEEE in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), Orlando, FL, August 2016. [PDF]
  • Marcone, A., Pierobon, M.,  Magarini, M. “The Gaussian Approximation in Soft Detection for Molecular Communication Via Biological Circuits,” In Proceedings of the IEEE 18th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC), July 2017. [PDF]
  • Marcone, A., Pierobon, M.,  Magarini, M. “A Biological Circuit Design for Modulated Parity-check Encoding in Molecular Communication,” In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), May 2017. [PDF]
  • Marcone, A., Pierobon, M.,  Magarini, M. “A Parity Check Analog Decoder for Molecular Communication based on Biological Circuits,” In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Atlanta, GA, May 2017. [PDF] [IEEE INFOCOM Best Paper Runner-up Award]
  • Martins, D. P., Barros, M. T., Pierobon, M., Kandhavelu, M., Lio’, P., and Balasubramaniam, S. "Computational Models for Trapping Ebola Virus Using Engineered Bacteria,"  IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 217-2027, November/December 2018. [PDF]
  • Akyildiz, I. F., Pierobon, M. , Balasubramaniam, S. , Koucheryavy, Y., "The Internet of Bio-Nano Things," IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 32-40, March 2015. [PDF]
  • Cohen, M. B., Firestone, J.,  Pierobon, M., “The Assurance Timeline: Building Assurance Cases for Synthetic Biology,” In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Assurance Cases for Software-Intensive Systems (ASSURE 2016), Trondheim, Norway, September 2016. [PDF]
  • Laddomada, M., Pierobon, M., "A Biochemical Filter for Frequency-Based Signal Reception in Molecular Communication," In Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM), San Diego, USA, December 2015. [PDF]
  • Laddomada, M., Pierobon, M., "A Cross-talk-based Filter Design in Biochemical Signal Transduction Pathways for the Internet of Bio-Things," In Proceedings of the 40th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2015, Brisbane, Australia, April 2015. [PDF]
  • Pierobon, M., Sakkaff, Z., Catlett, J. L., and Buan, N. R., “Mutual Information Upper Bound of Molecular Communication Based on Cell Metabolism,” In Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International workshop on Signal Processing advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC 2016), Edinburg, UK, July 2016. [PDF]
  • Hanisch, N.,   Pierobon, M. “Digital Modulation and Achievable Information Rates of Thru-body Haptic Communications,”  In Proceedings of the SPIE International Conference on Defense + Security (DCS), April 2017. [PDF]
  • Chahibi, Y., Pierobon, M., and Akyildiz, I. F., "Pharmacokinetic Modeling and Biodistribution Estimation through the Molecular Communication Paradigm," IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 62, no. 10, pp. 2410-2420, September 2015. [PDF]
  • Sakkaff, Z., Catlett, J. L., Cashman, M., Pierobon, M., Buan, N., Cohen M.,   Kelley, C. A. “End-to-end Molecular Communication Channels in Cell Metabolism: an Information Theoretic Study,” In Proceedings of the ACM 4th International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication (NanoCom 2017), September 2017. [PDF][ACM NanoCom Best Paper Award 2017]