Clayton W. Shepard
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Contact Information


Email: cws@rice.edu
Phone: 505.480.6763

Rice University
23 Sunset Blvd.
Houston, TX 77005

I am the Founder & CTO of Skylark Wireless, as well as a Lecturer at Rice University, where I also completed my B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2008, M.S. in 2012, and Ph.D. in 2017. I founded and led the Argos project that is developing and deploying next-generation many-antenna wireless systems. I am a 2011 NDSEG Fellow. My research focus is Mobile Systems, however I have a wide array of interests, both academic and recreational. I am an alumni of the Rice Efficient Computing Group, which is led by Dr. Lin Zhong.



I am originally from Albuquerque, NM, where I attended the Albuquerque Academy. Up until college I was very active in various organized sports, and still enjoy playing them casually. In my spare time I enjoy socializing, particularly at Valhalla. As an associate at Jones College I remain active in the undergraduate Residential College system.

  • Clayton Shepard, Rahman Doost-Mohammady, Ryan E. Guerra, and Lin Zhong. "ArgosNet: A Multi-Cell Many-Antenna MU-MIMO Platform," in Proc. IEEE Asilomar Conf. on Signals, Systems, and Computers, November 2017. (data,slides*)
  • Clayton Shepard, Rahman Doost-Mohammady, Ryan E. Guerra, and Lin Zhong. "ArgosV3: An Efficient Many-Antenna Platform," Extended Abstract for demonstration in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), October 2017. (HotWireless '17 slides)
  • Clayton Shepard. "Argos: Practical Many-Antenna MU-MIMO Systems," Ph.D. Thesis, Rice University, September, 2017. (slides*)
  • Clayton Shepard, Jian Ding, Ryan Guerra, and Lin Zhong, "Understanding Real Many-Antenna MU-MIMO Channels," in Proc. IEEE Asilomar Conf. on Signals, Systems, and Computers, November 2016. (data,slides*)
  • Ryan Guerra, Narendra Anand, Clayton Shepard, and Edward Knightly, "Opportunistic Channel Estimation for Implicit 802.11af MU-MIMO," in Proc. Int. Conf. in Networking Science & Practice (ITC), September 2016. (data,slides*)
  • Evan Everett, Clayton Shepard, Lin Zhong, and Ashutosh Sabharwal, "SoftNull: Many-Antenna Full-Duplex Wireless via Digital Beamforming," IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, September, 2016. (data)
  • Clayton Shepard, Abeer Javed, and Lin Zhong, "Control Channel Design for Many-Antenna MU-MIMO," to appear in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), September 2015.
  • Clayton Shepard*, Narendra Anand*, and Lin Zhong. "Practical Performance of MU-MIMO Precoding in Many-Antenna Base Stations," in Proc. ACM workshop on Cellular networks: operations, challenges, and future design (CellNet), June 2013. (*equal contribution)
  • Clayton Shepard, Hang Yu, Narendra Anand, Erran Li, Thomas Marzetta, Richard Yang, Lin Zhong. "Argos: Practical Many-Antenna Base Stations," in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), August 2012. (slides)
  • Clayton Shepard. "Argos: Practical Base Stations for Large-scale Multi-user Beamforming," M.S. Thesis, Rice University, April 2012. (slides)
  • Clayton Shepard, Ahmad Rahmati, Chad Tossell, Lin Zhong, and Phillip Kortum, "LiveLab: measuring wireless networks and smartphone users in the field", in ACM SIGMETRICS Perform. Eval. Rev., vol. 38, no. 3, December 2010. (covered by Technology Review)
  • Clayton Shepard*, Ahmad Rahmati*, and Lin Zhong, "NoShake: Content stablization for shaking screens of mobile devices," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Pervasive Computing and Communication (PerCom), March 2009. (*equal contribution)

  • Chad Tossell, Phil Kortum, Clayton Shepard, Ahmad Rahmati, and Lin Zhong, ""You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him learn: Smartphone use in higher education," in British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET), 2015. (covered by The Washington Post)
  • Chad Tossell, Phil Kortum, Clayton Shepard, Ahmad Rahmati, and Lin Zhong, ""Exploring Smartphone Addiction: Insights from Long-Term Telemetric Behavioral Measures," in International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM), 2015.
  • Ahmad Rahmati, Clayton Shepard, Chad Tossell, Lin Zhong, Philip Kortum, Angela Nicoara, Jatinder Singh, "Seamless TCP migration on smartphones without network support," in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2014.
  • Ahmad Rahmati, Clayton Shepard, Chad Tossell, Lin Zhong, and Phil Kortum, "Practical context awareness: measuring and utilizing the context dependency of mobile usage," in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2012.
  • Chad Tossell, Phil Kortum, Ahmad Rahmati, Clayton Shepard, and Lin Zhong, "Characterizing web use on smartphones," in ACM SIGCHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), May 2012.
  • Chad Tossell, Phil Kortum, Clayton Shepard, Ahmad Rahmati, and Lin Zhong, "Getting real: A naturalistic methodology for using smartphones to collect mediated communications." Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, 2012.
  • Chad Tossell, Phil Kortum, Clayton Shepard, Laura Barg-Walkow, Ahmad Rahmati, and Lin Zhong, "A longitudinal study of emoticon use in text messaging from smartphones." Computers in Human Behavior, 28, 659-663, 2012.
  • Ahmad Rahmati, Clayton Shepard, Chad Tossell, Mian Dong, Zhen Wang, Lin Zhong, and Philip Kortum, "Tales of 34 iPhone Users: How they change and why they are different," Technical Report TR-2011-0624, Rice University, June 2011. (arXiv)
  • Chad Tossell, Phillip Kortum, Clayton Shepard, Ahmad Rahmati, and Lin Zhong, "Assessing the Performance of Common Tasks on Handeld Mobile Computers," in Proc. of Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), September 2010.
  • Ahmad Rahmati, Clayton Shepard, Chad Tossell, Angela Nicoara, Lin Zhong, Phil Kortum, Jatinder Singh, "Seamless flow migration on smartphones without network support," Technical Report 2010-1214, Rice University, December 2010. (arXiv) (Early results presented at MobiCom'10 as a poster)

  • Clayton Shepard, Hang Yu, and Lin Zhong. "ArgosV2: A Flexible Many-Antenna Research Platform," Extended Abstract for demonstration in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), October 2013. PDF Document
  • Li Erran Li, Thomas Marzetta, Clayton Shepard, Yang Richard Yang, Lin Zhong, "Lowering Complexity by Scaling Up: Design Practical, Efficient Cellular Networks with a Large Number of Antennas," Poster at MobiCom'11, September 2011.
  • Clayton Shepard, "Lowering Complexity by Scaling Up: Design Practical, Efficient Cellular Networks with a Large Number of Antennas," Poster in ACM S3 2011, September 2011.
  • Ahmad Rahmati, Clayton Shepard, Angela Nicoara, Lin Zhong, Jatinder Pal Singh, "Mobile TCP usage characteristics and the feasibility of network migration without infrastructure support," Poster at MobiCom'10, September 2010.
  • Ahmad Rahmati, Clayton Shepard, and Lin Zhong, "Demonstration: NoShake: Reducing Perceived Shake on Mobile Displays," in ACM/USENIX Int. Conf. Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), June 2008. PDF Document
  • Ahmad Rahmati, Bryan Grandy, Charlie Ice, Sarah Joiner, Clayton Shepard, and Lin Zhong, "Demonstration: OrbitECG: mobile phone-based ambulatory wearable ECG monitoring," in ACM/USENIX Int. Conf. Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), June 2007. PDF Document

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