Rawad Bitar

Short Bio

• • Research group leader at the TUM Chair of Communications Engineering led by Prof. Dr.sc.tech. Gerhard Kramer.

  • Doing a habilitation (accreditation for thesis supervision) at the Technical University of Munich with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh, Prof. Deniz Gündüz, and Prof. Sidharth Jaggi as mentors.

  • Worked with Prof. Dr.-Ing Antonia Wachter-Zeh as a postdoctoral researcher from February 2020 until December 2023.

  • Obtained my PhD from the ECE department of Rutgers University in January 2020.

  • Held short-term visiting positions at Aalto (May - July 2016), Technical University of Berlin (May - July 2018) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (September - December 2019).

  • Worked at the CSI lab with Prof. Salim El Rouayheb from August 2014 to January 2020: as PhD candidate, from August 2014 to August 2017 at the ECE department of Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and from September 2017 to January 2020 at Rutgers University.

  • Received a masters degree in Information and Communication from the Lebanese University after doing the thesis at IIT in 2014.

  • Did the engineering senior project at the Center of Nuclear Science and Science of Matter (CSNSM) in Paris, France, and graduated as a Computer and Communication Engineer from the Lebanese University in 2013.

• • Did an internship at procsim-consulting company in EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2012.

Research Interests

My research interest is centered around privacy, scalability, security and reliability of distributed systems. The applications may differ but the goal remains the same: study theoretical and fundamental limits of innovative storage and computing systems and design codes achieving those limits. My current work is motivated by the following research directions.

• Federated learning

• Private and secure distributed computing

• Distributed storage

• DNA-based storage systems

• Private and secure network coding. 

For more details please check the following pages.

Grants and Awards

• • DFG (German Research Foundation) grant on "Fundamentals of Coding and Information Theory for Edit Errors". (2025 -- 2028)

  • DFG (German Research Foundation) grant for a temporary position for a Principal Investigator "Private Secure and Efficient Codes for Distributed Machine Learning". (2023 -- 2026)

  • EuroTech Visiting Research Programme grant. (March 2024 and March 2023)

  • iDASH 2022 Secure Genome Analysis Competition, second place of Track 4: Secure Record Linkage (November 2022)

  • Best Poster Award on Optimization and Machine Learning in Princeton Day of Optimization, Princeton, New Jersey. (September 2018)

Service

    Workshop Organization (Upcoming)

• General co-chair 2027 IEEE International Information Theory Workshop (ITW)

• Organizing Committee Member 2025 Workshop on Secure and Efficient Federated Learning at ACM ASIACCS

    Workshop Organization (Past)

• Co-organizer 2024 Dagstuhl Seminar on Coding Theory and Algorithms for Emerging Technologies in Synthetic Biology

• Co-organizer 2024 IEEE ISIT Satellite workshop Coding Theory and Algorithms for DNA-based Data Storage

• Co-organizer 2024 Munich Workshop on Coding and Cryptography

• Co-organizer 2022 Munich Workshop on Coding and Cryptography

    Lead Guest Editor

• • • IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory (JSAIT)

    • Frontier in Communications and Networks

    Technical Program Committee (TPC) member

• IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2025

• IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and its Applications (ISITA) 2024

• Conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC) 2023

• IEEE International Workshop on Information Theory (ITW) 2024, 2023

• 13th Annual Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (NVMW) 2022

     Reviewer

• • • More than 20 journals and international conferences