Pamela Cosman

Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Inaugural holder of the Dr. John and Felia Proakis Chancellor Faculty Fellowship. (Press release is here)

Jacobs School of Engineering

University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, Mail Code 0407
La Jolla, CA 92093-0407

I am Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. I joined UCSD in July of 1995. Prior to that, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, and a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. I received my Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1993 and my B.S.E.E. from the California Institute of Technology in 1987. At UCSD, I was the Director of the Center for Wireless Communications from 2006 to 2008, and the Associate Dean for Students of the Jacobs School of Engineering from 2013 to 2016. I am also affiliated with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. I do research on image and video compression, wireless communications, and image and video processing.

This is my first children's book. It's for ages 9 to 11. It teaches a little bit about error correction coding and other concepts in wireless communications through a fictional story.

Kids are passing secret messages in school, which gets them in trouble at school when someone changes one bit in the message. But when there's a hostage crisis in a bank, the error correction code ends up playing an unexpected role.

Some instructional materials (questions & answers for each chapter) can be found here.

Check out some reviews of the book at the:

The book is available from Amazon and from the UCSD bookstore.

The Hexagon Clue is the sequel, also for ages 9 to 11. It introduces some concepts of optimization and sphere packing in multiple dimension, useful for solving a crime.

This book is also available from Amazon and the UCSD bookstore.

This one is meant for middle and high school girls who are interested in STEM fields, as well as their parents. It covers some data about trends of women's participation in STEM fields across different countries and across time, which is eye-opening about current conditions. Other topics include imposter syndrome, the problems with "follow-your-passion" advice, and gender effects in career assessment tools.

The book is available from IEEE. It is free for IEEE members.