I am a graduate student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley. I am a member of the Wireless Foundations Center and my advisor is Prof. Anant Sahai. I received my Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2006, and my Masters from UC Berkeley in 2008. From August 2006 to August 2009, I was supported by a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship.

I am broadly interested in wireless communications and spectrum sharing. Specifically, I am interested in the regulatory issues associated with cognitive radio. This includes understanding the concerns of policy and law-makers dealing with spectrum issues, and then investigating the corresponding technical questions.

At the moment, my work concerns enforcement -- once sharing rules for spectrum are defined, how can we be sure that devices will actually follow them? To this end, I am working on understanding the performance limits of identity codes, which allow a radio to be identified without necessarily being able to decipher what it is saying. I am also working on a game-theoretic model for punishment to correctly align incentives such that once you can identify a radio, you can encourage it to follow the sharing rules.

Masters Thesis

1. Kristen Woyach, Crime and Punishment for Cognitive Radios, Dec 2008, UC Berkeley.

Magazine and Journal

1. Pulkit Grover, Kristen Woyach, and Anant Sahai, Towards a communication-theoretic understanding of system-level power consumption IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communication (JSAC) Special Issue on Energy-Efficient Wireless Communications, Vol 29, No, Sept 2011, pp 1744-1755.
   Winner of the Leonard G. Abraham Prize


2. Anant Sahai, Kristen Woyach, George Atia, and Venkatesh Saligrama, A technical framework for light-handed regulation of cognitive radios, IEEE Communications Magazine, March 2009, pp 96-102.
   
   A bug was introduced during the production process. Eqn 1 should be:
   


3. Anant Sahai, Mubaraq Mishra, Rahul Tandra, and Kristen Woyach, Cognitive Radios for Spectrum Sharing, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, January 2009, pp 140-146.

Conference

1. Kristen Woyach, and Anant Sahai, Should primaries be considered victims or police? DySpan 2012.


2. Kristen Woyach, Kate Harrison, Gireeja Ranade, and Anant Sahai, Comments on unknown channels ITW 2012.


3. Kristen Woyach, Pulkit Grover, and Anant Sahai, Near vs. Far Field: Interference Aggregation in TV Whitespaces Globecom 2011.


4. Kristen Woyach and Anant Sahai, Why the caged cognitive radio sings DySpAN 2011. (code)


5. Pulkit Grover, Kristen Woyach, Hari Palaiyanur, and Anant Sahai, An interference-aware perspective on decoding power ISTC 2010.


6. Kristen Woyach, Padmini Pyapali, and Anant Sahai, Can we incentivize sensing in a light-handed way? DySpAN 2010.


7. Hari Palaiyanur, Kristen Woyach, Rahul Tandra, and Anant Sahai, Spectrum zoning as robust optimization DySpAN 2010.


8. Anant Sahai, Kristen Woyach, Kate Harrison, Hari Palaiyanur, and Rahul Tandra, Towards a "Theory of Spectrum Zoning" Allerton 2009.


9. Kristen Woyach, Anant Sahai, George Atia, and Venkatesh Saligrama, Crime and Punishment for Cognitive Radios Allerton 2008.


10. Kristen Woyach, Daniele Puccinelli, and Martin Haenggi, Sensoreless Sensing in Wireless Networks: Implementation and Measurements, 2006 Second International Workshop on Wireless Network Measurement (WiNMee '06).

• In Fall 2009, I was the GSI for EE126: Probability and Random Processes

• From 2009-2011 I was one of the student organizers for the UC Berkeley Net/Comm/DSP Seminar


• For the 2008-2009 school year, I was co-president of WICSE, the Women in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering group here at Berkeley.


• I am currently dabbling in amateur photography. My favorite photos can be seen here.