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. 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

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

Magazine and Journal

• Pulkit Grover, Kristen Woyach, and Anant Sahai, Towards a communication-theoretic understanding of system-level power consumption (conditionally) accepted to IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Energy-Efficient Wireless communications.


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

Conference

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


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


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


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


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


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


• 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

• I am 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.