Thuan Nguyen, PhD | Engineering Technology

Engineering, Engineering Technology, Interior Architecture, and Surveying

 

Photo of Dr. Thuan Nguyen Assistant Professor

Dr. Thuan Nguyen

Assistant ProfessorEngineering Technology

Biography

Dr. Thuan Nguyen obtained a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Oregon State University in 02/2021. He joined the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University as a postdoctoral researcher from 03/2021 to 08/2023. Afterward, he was a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at WPI from 08/2023 to 08/2024. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Engineering, Engineering Technology, and Surveying at East Tennessee State University. Thuan is the recipient of the Gold medal of the 17th Vietnam National Olympic Mathematics Competition in 2009, the best dissertation award from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University in 2021, and the best paper award at IEEE Machine Learning for Signal Processing in 2024.

Research Interests

Thuan's research interests are wireless communications theory, statistical signal processing, and machine/deep learning, including but not limited to quantization for maximizing mutual information, minimizing impurity partition, channel capacity, domain generalization/ domain adaptation, and contrastive learning. Thuan has published 9 journal papers and 25 conference papers, and he was the leading author in most of his works.

Education

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 2021
M.S., Electrical Engineering, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 2018
B.S., Electrical Engineering, Post and Telecommunications Institute of Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam, 2013

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Journal papers:
1. Thuan Nguyen and Thinh Nguyen. On binary quantizer for maximizing mutual information. In IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2020.
2. Thuan Nguyen and Thinh Nguyen. On bounds and closed-form expressions for capacities of discrete memoryless channels with invertible positive matrices. In IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2020.
3. Thuan Nguyen and Thinh Nguyen. Capacity achieving quantizer design for binary channels. In IEEE Communications Letters, 2020.
4. Thuan Nguyen and Thinh Nguyen. Structure of optimal quantizer maximizing mutual information for continuous-output channels under quantized-output constraints. In IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2021.
5. Thuan Nguyen, Duong Nguyen-Huu and Thinh Nguyen. Achievable zero-error rate regions using novel location-assisted coding (LAC) for short-range FSO communications. In IEEE/KICS Journal of Communications and Networks, 2021.

 

Conference Papers:
1. Thuan Nguyen, Ruijie Jiang, Shuchin Aeron, Prakash Ishwar, and Donald Brown. On neural collapse in contrastive learning with imbalanced datasets. In International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, MLSP 2024. (Best paper award.)
2. Thuan Nguyen, Ruijie Jiang, Prakash Ishwar, and Shuchin Aeron. Supervised Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples. In International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IJCNN 2024.
3. Thuan Nguyen, Matthias Scheutz, and Shuchin Aeron. On the failure of invariant risk minimization and an effective fix via classification error control. In International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, MLSP 2023.
4. Thuan Nguyen, Boyang Lyu, Matthias Scheutz, Prakash Ishwar, Shuchin Aeron. A principled approach for model validation for domain generalization. In International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2023.
5. Thuan Nguyen, Boyang Lyu, Prakash Ishwar, Matthias Scheutz, Shuchin Aeron. Conditional entropy minimization principle for learning domain invariant representation features. In International Conference on Pattern Recognition, ICPR 2022. 
6. Thuan Nguyen, Boyang Lyu, Prakash Ishwar, Matthias Scheutz, Shuchin Aeron. Joint covariate-alignment and concept-alignment: a framework for out-of-distribution generalization. In International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, MLSP 2022. 
7. Thuan Nguyen, Boyang Lyu, Prakash Ishwar, Matthias Scheutz, Shuchin Aeron. Trade-off between reconstruction loss and feature alignment for domain generalization. In International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, ICMLA 2022. 
8. Thuan Nguyen and Thinh Nguyen. Optimal threshold maximizing mutual information of multiple input one-bit output quantization. In International Symposium on Information Theory, ISIT 2021. 
9. Thuan Nguyen, Hoang Le and Thinh Nguyen. Constant approximation algorithm for minimizing concave impurity. In International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2021. 
10. Thuan Nguyen and Thinh Nguyen. Communication-channel optimized impurity partition. In Global Communications Conference, GLOBECOM 2020.