Events

Venue: McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium (MDEA)

ABSTRACT

For years, there has been interest in approximation methods for solving dynamic programming problems, because of the inherent complexity in computing optimal solutions characterized by Bellman's principle of optimality. A wide range of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) methods now exists. Examples of ADP methods are myopic schemes, roll-out schemes, and reinforcement learning schemes. It is of great interest to guarantee that the performance of an ADP scheme be at least some known fraction, say β, of optimal. In this talk, we introduce a general approach to bounding the performance of ADP methods, in this sense, in the stochastic setting. The approach is based on new results for bounding greedy solutions in string optimization problems, where one must choose a string (ordered set) of actions to maximize an objective function. This bounding technique is inspired by submodularity theory, but submodularity is not required for establishing bounds. Instead, the bounding is based on quantifying certain notions of curvature of string functions; the smaller the curvatures the better the bound. The key insight is that any ADP scheme is a greedy scheme for some surrogate string objective function that coincides in its optimal solution and value with those of the original optimal control problem. The ADP scheme then yields to the bounding technique mentioned above, and the curvatures of the surrogate objective determine the value β of the bound. The surrogate objective and its curvatures depend on the specific ADP.

This is joint work with Edwin K. P. Chong and Yajing Liu from Colorado State University.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Ali Pezeshki received the BSc and MSc degrees in electrical engineering from University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He earned his PhD degree in electrical engineering at Colorado State University in 2004. In 2005, he was a postdoctoral research associate with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Colorado State University. From January 2006 to August 2008, he was a postdoctoral research associate with The Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. In August 2008, he joined the faculty of Colorado State University, where he is now a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Mathematics. His research interests are in statistical signal processing, machine learning, optimization theory, applied harmonic analysis, and bioimaging.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Shiuh-hua Wood Chiang

Title: Techniques for High-Performance Successive-Approximation-Register ADCs

Date: Sept. 27, 2022, Tue.

Time: 4:00 PM

Venue: Harut Barsamian Colloquia (Engineering Hall 2430)

ABSTRACT

The demand for high-speed, low-power analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) for high-speed wireline transceivers and mmWave radios continues to grow unabated, driven in part by advances in DSP-based architectures and technology-scaling benefits in digital circuits. Recent works on high-speed ADCs operating at > 10 GHz with 6 to 8 bits of resolution have made tremendous progress, but significant challenges remain. This talk discusses techniques to achieve simultaneous high speed and high power efficiency by using the time-interleaved successive-approximation-register (SAR) architecture. We present "constant-matching scaling" and "grouped capacitors" for the digital-to-analog-converter (DAC) to aggressively reduce the capacitance and increase the speed. The ADC also demonstrates a "dual-path" bootstrapped switch to increase the sampling spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR). Employing the above and other low-power, high-speed techniques, the proposed SAR ADC obtains a single-channel speed of 1.25-GHz without the need for pipelining. The ADC uses only 8X time-interleaving to achieve an overall sampling rate of 10 GHz and a signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) of 36.9 dB at Nyquist while consuming 21 mW.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Shiuh-hua Wood Chiang received his B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada in 2007, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Irvine in 2009, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Communication Circuits Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013. From 2013 to 2014 he was a Senior Design Engineer in Qualcomm. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Brigham Young University in 2014. His research interests include low-power RF/analog/mixed-signal circuits for communications and sensing applications.

CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award Ceremony

CPCC celebrated the 2021 and 2022 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Awards. Because of the pandemic, we combined the celebration of the 2021 and 2022 awards on May 23, 2022. The award is an annual award presented to a CPCC alumnus based on the scholarly achievements or societal/industry impact in the years during and after the study at UCI. The 2021 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award was presented to Dr. Afshin Momtaz "for contributions to multi-GHz transceiver design." He is currently the Vice President of Engineering at Broadcom. The 2022 CPCC Distinguished Alumnus Award was presented to Dr. Amitav Mukherjee "for contributions to the theory of physical layer security and 5G standards." Dr. Mukherjee is the founder of Tiami Networks.

CPCC Director Hamid Jafarkhani welcomed the guests and presented the awards to Dr. Momtaz and Dr. Mukherjee. Then, each awardee presented a talk on his technical contributions and their impacts. The ceremony ended by serving lunch.

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Prof. Josef Nossek

Title: How to Achieve Energy Efficiency in Multi-Antenna Systems? A Physical Layer Perspective

Date: Mar. 29, 2022, Tue.

Time: 2:00 PM

Venue: Harut Barsamian Colloquia (Engineering Hall 2430)

ABSTRACT

Looking back at the historical evolution of wireless communications, bandwidth has almost always been a scarce resource. Therefore, spectral efficiency has been the key performance indicator. But in the meantime energy efficiency has become as important as spectral efficiency for the future communications infrastructure. Since the wireless access is a main contributor to the overall energy dissipation, the focus here is on the physical layer of mobile communication systems. The key functional units from an energy dissipation point of view are the high power amplifiers (HPAs) in the transmitter (Tx) and the analog to digital converters (ADCs) in the receiver (Rx). An obvious approach is using constant envelope signals for the HPAs and in the Tx and low resolution ADCs in the Rx. The challenge is how to overcome the performance loss due to these restrictions. Since these systems will employ multiple antennas anyway, it is important to exploit the potential of antenna arrays in terms of antenna gain, diversity and multi-streaming. The basis for that is bridging the gap between electromagnetic theory, circuit design, signal processing and information theory. The Multiport Communication Theory is providing a circuit theoretic framework enabling an information theoretic analysis and optimization which is consistent with the underlying physics.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Josef A. Nossek received the Dipl.-Ing. and the Dr. techn. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Technology in Vienna, Austria in 1974 and 1980, respectively. In 1974 he joined Siemens AG in Munich, Germany as a member of technical staff, in 1978 he became supervisor, and from 1980 on he was Head of Department. In 1987 he was promoted to be Head of all radio systems design. Since 1989 he has been Full Professor for circuit theory and signal processing at the Munich University of Technology where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on circuit and systems theory and signal processing and leads research on signal processing algorithms for communications, especially multiantenna systems. He was President Elect, President and Past President of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 2001, 2002 and 2003 respectively. He was Vicepresident of VDE (Verband der Elektrotechnik, Elektronik und Informationstechnik e.V.) 2005 and 2006, President of VDE 2007 and 2008 and was Vicepresident again in 2009 and 2010. His awards include the ITG Best Paper Award 1988, the Mannesmann Mobilfunk (now Vodafone) Innovationsaward 1998, the Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Bavarian Ministry for Science, Research and Art in 1998. From the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society he received the Golden Jubilee Medal for 'Outstanding Contributions to the Society' in 1999 , the Education Award in 2008 and the Guillemin-Cauer Best Paper Award in 2012. In 2008 he also received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and in 2009 he has been elected member of the German National Academy of Engineering Sciences (acatech). In 2013 he received an Honorary Doctorate and in 2014 the Ring of Honor from VDE. From 2016 to 2019 he has been Full Professor at the Federal University of Ceara in Brasil.

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Prof. Bhaskar Rao

Title: Insights into Sparse Signal Recovery algorithms using an Array Processing perspective

Date: Feb. 25, 2022, Fri.

Time: 9:15 AM

Venue: Virtual

ABSTRACT

Array Processing is a well-developed area with many interesting algorithms for DOA estimation. Sparse Signal Recovery (SSR) and compressed Sensing (CS) methods have been applied to many applications including direction of arrival (DOA) estimation in array processing. In this talk, we will interpret SSR algorithms using beamforming ideas from Array processing to enhance intuition. Our focus will be on Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL) methods that employ a Gaussian scale mixture prior and have been successfully applied for solving the sparse signal recovery (SSR) problem. The Expectation-Maximization (SBL-EM) based inference algorithm will be examined and interpreted using a beamforming framework. A contrast with the classical minimum power distortion-less response (MPDR) beamformer will be drawn and the benefits highlighted. An interesting finding is the explanation to the ability of SBL to deal with correlated sources. For a uniform linear array (ULA), the Toeplitz approximation property of SBL will be discussed and the potential benefits for a nested array demonstrated by locating more sources than sensors.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Bhaskar D. Rao received the B.Tech. degree in electronics and electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, in 1979 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1981 and 1983, respectively. Since 1983, he has been with the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He is the holder of the Ericsson endowed chair in Wireless Access Networks and was the Director of the Center for Wireless Communications (2008-2011). Prof. Rao's interests are in the areas of digital signal processing, estimation theory, and optimization theory, with applications to digital communications, speech signal processing, and biomedical signal processing. Prof. Rao was elected fellow of IEEE in 2000 for his contributions to the statistical analysis of subspace algorithms for harmonic retrieval. His work has received several paper awards; 2013 best paper award at the Fall 2013, IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference for the paper "Multicell Random Beamforming with CDF-based Scheduling: Exact Rate and Scaling Laws," by Yichao Huang and Bhaskar D Rao, 2012 Signal Processing Society (SPS) best paper award for the paper "An Empirical Bayesian Strategy for Solving the Simultaneous Sparse Approximation Problem," by David P. Wipf and Bhaskar D. Rao published in IEEE Transaction on Signal Processing, Volume: 55, No. 7, July 2007, 2008 Stephen O. Rice Prize paper award in the field of communication systems for the paper "Network Duality for Multiuser MIMO Beamforming Networks and Applications," by B. Song, R. L. Cruz and B. D. Rao that appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 55, No. 3, March 2007, pp. 618 630. (http://www.comsoc.org/ awards/rice.html), among others. Prof. Rao is also the recipient of the 2016 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award. Prof. Rao has been a member of the Statistical Signal and Array Processing technical committee, the Signal Processing Theory and Methods technical committee, the Communications technical committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and was the chair of the Machine learning for Signal Processing technical committee (2019-2020).

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Prof. John Baras

Title: Trusted Autonomy: Theory and Applications

Date: Feb. 23, 2022, Wed.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: Calit2 Auditorium

ABSTRACT

Autonomous systems (e.g. robots, cars, UAVs) are becoming ubiquitous. They are also increasingly interacting with humans. Safety is a critical and indispensable requirement for autonomous systems and for their interactions with humans. Trusted autonomy is essential for autonomy. It encompasses self-monitoring, self-adjustment, learning to accomplish safe and high-performance complex task execution in time varying, complex and unknown environments. I will describe our approach to these challenging problems via a methodology that utilizes dynamical systems, optimization, formal models (timed automata, model checking, contracts), and novel approaches to learning and monitoring. I will illustrate the results in diverse applications including teaching robots manipulation tasks, autonomous cars, human-robot collaboration, collaborative UAVs, communication network automation, health care management, smart manufacturing. A key ingredient of the methodology is the development of efficient formal models of tasks and missions and associated safety monitoring methods that combine timed automata and reachability analysis. I will also illustrate why such formal task models are indispensable in executing tasks by different robots, learned in different environments. Two fundamental and universally applicable methodologies will be described: one based on multi-criteria constrained optimization with numerical and logical variables, and one integrating formal logic with constraint-based reasoning and optimization methods. I will close with future research directions and challenges including the fundamental need for systems science and engineering methodologies and software tool suites.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

John S. Baras is a Distinguished University Professor, holding the Lockheed Martin Chair in Systems Engineering and a Permanent Joint Appointment with the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) and the ECE Department at the University of Maryland College Park (UMD). He received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, in 1973, and he has been with UMD since then. From 1985 to 1991, he was the Founding Director of the ISR. Since 1992, he has been the Director of the Maryland Center for Hybrid Networks (HYNET), which he co-founded. He is a Fellow of IEEE (Life), SIAM, AAAS, NAI, IFAC, AMS, AIAA, Member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA). Major honors and awards include the 1980 George Axelby Award from the IEEE Control Systems Society, the 2006 Leonard Abraham Prize from the IEEE Communications Society, the 2017 IEEE Simon Ramo Medal, the 2017 AACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, and the 2018 AIAA Aerospace Communications Award. In 2016 he was inducted in the University of Maryland A. J. Clark School of Engineering Innovation Hall of Fame. In June 2018 he was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa by his alma mater the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. His research interests include systems, control, optimization, autonomy, machine learning, artificial intelligence, communication networks, applied mathematics, signal processing and understanding, robotics, computing systems, formal methods and logic, network security and trust, systems biology, healthcare management, model-based systems engineering. He has been awarded twenty patents and honored with many awards as innovator and leader of economic development.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Christ Richmond

Title: Shared Spectrum for Radar Communications Coexistence - Cooperative Bounds and Radar Performance

Date: May 21, 2021, Fri.

Time: 9:15 AM

Venue: Virtual

ABSTRACT

The limited availability of frequency spectrum coupled with the increasing demands for communication and data services requires achieving greater spectral efficiency. Large amounts of spectrum in the ~1GHz to ~40GHz range is allocated to radar systems, but it's not always in use. This has motivated regulatory bodies and researchers to explore ways additional users can share portions of spectrum already allocated to radars without impacting the radars' normal operations nor its performance. Thus, we explore the possibility of diverse RF systems coexisting within the same frequency band as a means of improving spectral efficiency. Specifically, radars coexisting in the same frequency band as communications systems are of interest, as this presents a set of new challenges for system design and analysis. We first develop a performance bound for a cooperative radar and communications system coexisting within the same frequency band. Second, we develop new theory for predicting the receiver operating characteristics of a radar receiver cooperating with an in-band communications system.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Christ D. Richmond received the bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, and the bachelor's degree in mathematics from Bowie State University, Bowie, MD. He received the master's and electrical engineering degree and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Employed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory from 1996 to 2017, he was a senior staff member in the Advanced RF Sensor Techniques Group where he led research teams as principal investigator on several programs in the development of adaptive algorithms for detection and parameter estimation, performance bounding for active radar/sonar, adaptive communications and passive RF geolocation systems. He was a visiting lecturer and associate at Harvard University from July 2014 to December 2015, and a visiting lecturer at MIT in the Fall of 2000. He is currently an associate professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University, and director of the Signals, Information, Inference, and Learning Group. His research interests include statistical signal and array processing, detection and parameter estimation theory, and information theory with application to radar/sonar and communications. He is the recipient of the Office of Naval Research Graduate Fellowship Award 1990-1994, the Alan Berman Research Publications Award, March 1994 (Naval Research Laboratory), the IEEE Signal Processing Society 1999 Young Author Best Paper Award in the area of sensor array and multichannel (SAM) signal processing, and a fellow of the IEEE. He has served as the technical chairman of the Adaptive Sensor Array Processing Workshop, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, 2007, 2006 and 1998, and served as a member the IEEE Technical Committee on SAM Signal Processing. He served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing from 2002 to 2005. He currently serves as a senior associate editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters and a guest editor for a special issue on "Radar-Communications co-existence for IoT" in the Frontiers in Communications Journal, 2020-2021.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Antonio Ortega

Title: Graph Signal Processing - Theory and Applications

Date: Mar. 5, 2021, Fri.

Time: 9:15 AM

Venue: Virtual

ABSTRACT

Graphs have long been used in a wide variety of problems, such as in analysis of social networks, machine learning, network protocol optimization or image processing. In the last few years, a growing body of work has been developed to extend and complement well known concepts in spectral graph theory, leading to the emergence of Graph Signal Processing (GSP) as a broad research field. GSP methods consider the data attached to the vertices as a "graph signal" and seek to create new techniques (filtering, sampling, interpolation), similar to those commonly used in conventional signal processing (for audio, images or video), so that they can be applied to these graph signals. In this talk, we first introduce some basic graph signal processing concepts, providing a brief overview of wavelet graph filter banks, sampling of graph signals and graph topology learning. We illustrate the basic concepts with example applications in image/video processing and machine learning.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Antonio Ortega received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain, and Columbia University, New York, respectively. In 1994, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California, where he is currently a professor and has served as associate chair. He is a fellow of the IEEE and EURASIP, and a member of ACM and APSIPA. He is the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions of Signal and Information Processing over Networks and recently served as a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has received several paper awards, including the 2016 Signal Processing Magazine award. His recent research is focusing on graph signal processing, machine learning, multimedia compression and wireless sensor networks. Over 40 doctoral students have completed their Ph.D. theses under his supervision, and his work has led to over 400 publications in international conferences and journals, as well as several patents.

CPCC Seminar by Dr. Ryan Gabrys

Title: Coding for Emerging DNA Storage Systems

Date: Nov. 30, 2017, Thu.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: CALIT2 Room 3008

ABSTRACT

DNA-based data storage is an emerging technology of potentially unprecedented density, durability, and replication efficiency. In this talk, we provide an overview of existing DNA storage architectures and the underlying coding techniques enabling these technologies. We then focus our attention to a recent work where we designed the first portable, random-access platform using nanopore sequencers. Our system produced error-free readouts while maintaining the highest reported information rate/density, which represents a crucial step towards the development of a practical DNA-based storage system.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Ryan Gabrys received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California - Los Angeles. Since 2014, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign. Currently, he works at SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific. His research interests include coding theory with applications to storage and synchronization.

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Dr. Reinaldo Valenzuela

Title: 5G New Deployment Scenarios: Opportunities and Challenges

Date: Nov. 17, 2017, Fri.

Time: 9:15 AM

Venue: McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium (MDEA)

ABSTRACT

The insatiable demand for media rich content and the increasing availability of advanced devices such as smart phones, tablets, etc., has forced the mobile communications eco system to start in earnest to consider the next generation solutions to address these needs. Some of the options being mentioned as ingredients for such 5th Generation mobile radio systems include Small Cells, HetNets, Carrier Aggregation, Machine-to-Machine, Internet-of-Things, Relays, Device-to-Device and operation in the millimeter wave spectrum range, among others. In this talk, I will review some of the background trends driving the evolution of broadband wireless access that will impact the technology choices beyond 2020. Then, I will consider in some detail some of the most intriguing options service providers may consider.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Reinaldo Valenzuela received the B.Sc. degree from the University of Chile, and the Ph.D. degree from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London, U.K. At Bell Laboratories, he studied indoor microwave propagation and modeling, packet reservation multiple access for wireless systems, and optical WDM networks. He became the Manager of the Voice Research Department with Motorola Codex, where he was involved in the implementation integrated voice and data packet systems. On returning to Bell Laboratories, he led a multi-disciplinary team to create a software tool for wireless system engineering, now in widespread use with Lucent Technologies. He received the Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff Award and is the Director of the Wireless Communications Research Department. He has published over 80 papers and holds 12 patents. He is interested in microwave propagation measurements and models, intelligent antennas, fifth generation wireless system, and space time systems achieving high capacities using transmit and receive antenna arrays. He is an IEEE Fellow, Bell Labs Fellow, recipient of the IEEE Eric E. Sumner award, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Prof. Jan Rabaey

Title: Human-Centric Computing - The Case for a Hyper-Dimensional Approach

Date: June 2, 2017, Fri.

Time: 9:15 AM

Venue: McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium (MDEA)

ABSTRACT

Some of most compelling application domains of the IoT and Swarm concepts relate to how humans interact with the world around it and the cyberworld beyond. While the proliferation of communication and data processing devices has profoundly altered our interaction patterns, little has been changed in the way we process inputs (sensory) and outputs (actuation). The combination of IoT (Swarms) and wearable devices offers the potential for changing all of this, opening the door for true human augmentation. Yet, making sense of the plethora of information received from the often noisy sensors and making reliable decisions within very tight latency bounds (< 10 ms) typically demands huge computational workloads to be performed in wearable form factors at extreme energy efficiency. In this presentation, we will make the case why alternative non-Von Neumann computational paradigms and architectures may be the right choice for these cognitive processing tasks. Even more, we will focus on a computational model called Hyper-Dimensional Computing (HDC), and illustrate with concrete examples of why this approach may be the right.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Professor Jan Rabaey holds the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a founding director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and the Berkeley Ubiquitous SwarmLab, and is currently the Electrical Engineering Division Chair at Berkeley. Prof. Rabaey has made high-impact contributions to a number of fields, including advanced wireless systems, low power integrated circuits, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing. His current interests include the conception of the next-generation integrated wireless systems over a broad range of applications, as well as exploring the interaction between the cyber and the biological world. He is the recipient of major awards, amongst which the IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Award, the European Design Automation Association (EDAA) Lifetime Achievement award, and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) University Researcher Award. He is an IEEE Fellow, a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium, and has received honorary doctorates from Lund (Sweden), Antwerp (Belgium) and Tampere (Finland). He has been involved in a broad variety of start-up ventures.

CPCC Seminar by Dr. Muralidhar Rangaswamy

Title: Fully Adaptive Radar

Date: Feb. 21, 2017, Tue.

Time: 4:00 PM

Venue: CALIT2 Room 3008

ABSTRACT

This tutorial will provide an overview of adaptive radar processing from the standpoint of bringing to bear optimally and adaptively, all available degrees of freedom on transmit and receive to address the problem of detection, tracking, and classification from a single as well as a multi-sensor perspective. The idea of closed loop radar processing will be introduced. Pertinent research challenges will be identified and addressed. Important issues of training data heterogeneity, computational cost, waveform optimization and design as well as joint transmit-receive adaptive processing will be addressed.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Muralidhar Rangaswamy received the B.E. degree in Electronics Engineering from Bangalore University, Bangalore, India in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, in 1992. He is presently employed as the Senior Advisor for Radar Research at the RF Exploitation Branch within the Sensors Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Prior to this he has held industrial and academic appointments. His research interests include radar signal processing, spectrum estimation, modeling non- Gaussian interference phenomena, and statistical communication theory. He has co-authored more than 200 refereed journal and conference record papers in the areas of his research interests. Additionally, he is a contributor to 8 books and is a co-inventor on 3 U.S. patents. Dr. Rangaswamy served as the Technical Editor (Associate Editor-in-Chief) for Radar Systems in the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems (IEEE-TAES) from 2007-2015 and as an Associate Editor for Radar Systems within the IEEE-TAES from 2004-2007. He was the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the Digital Signal Processing journal between 2005 and 2011. Dr. Rangaswamy was a member of the Senior Editorial Board of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (Jan 2012-Dec 2014). He was a 2 term elected member of the sensor array and multichannel processing technical committee (SAM-TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society between January 2005 and December 2010 and serves as a member of the Radar Systems Panel (RSP) in the IEEE-AES Society. He was the General Chairman for the 4 the IEEE Workshop on Sensor Array and Multichannel Processing (SAM-2006), Waltham, MA, July 2006. Dr. Rangaswamy has served on the Technical Committee of the IEEE Radar Conference series in a myriad of roles (Track Chair, Session Chair, Special Session Organizer and Chair, Paper Selection Committee Member, Tutorial Lecturer). He served as the Publicity Chair for the First IEEE International Conference on Waveform Diversity and Design, Edinburgh, U.K. November 2004. He presently serves on the conference sub-committee of the RSP. He was the Technical Program Chairman for the 2014 IEEE Radar Conference. He received the IEEE Warren White Radar Award in 2013, the 2013 Affiliate Societies Council Dayton (ASC-D) Outstanding Scientist and Engineer Award, the 2007 IEEE Region 1 Award, the 2006 IEEE Boston Section Distinguished Member Award, and the 2005 IEEE-AESS Fred Nathanson memorial outstanding young radar engineer award. He was elected as a Fellow of the IEEE in January 2006 with the citation "for contributions to mathematical techniques for radar space-time adaptive processing". He received the 2012 and 2005 Charles Ryan basic research award from the Sensors Directorate of AFRL, in addition to more than 40 scientific achievement awards.

CPCC Seminar by Roger Piqueras Jover

Title: LTE security, protocol exploits and location tracking experimentation with low-cost software radio

Date: Feb. 16, 2017, Thu.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: Harut Barsamian Colloquia (Engineering Hall 2430)

ABSTRACT

The security flaws of legacy GSM networks, which lack of mutual authentication and implement an outdated encryption algorithm, are well understood among the technology community. Moreover, until now, the main cellular vulnerabilities being discovered and exploited in the mobile security research field were based on 2G base stations and GSM open source implementations. The Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the newest standard being deployed globally for mobile communications, and is generally considered secure. LTE's mutual authentication and strong encryption schemes result in the false assumption that LTE networks are not vulnerable to, for example, rogue base stations, IMSI catchers and protocol exploits. However, these threats are also possible in LTE. Before the authentication and encryption steps of an LTE connection are executed, a mobile device engages in a substantial exchange of unprotected messages with *any* LTE base station (real or rogue) that advertises itself with the right broadcast information. Eavesdropping or spoofing these messages can be leveraged to implement a long list of exploits to which all LTE mobile devices are vulnerable. This talk will demonstrate how to eavesdrop LTE base station broadcast messages, and how to implement full-LTE IMSI catchers and other LTE protocol exploits, such as blocking SIMs and devices. Details will be provided as well on a previously unknown technique to track the location of mobile devices as the connection moves from tower to tower. We will discuss as well the necessary toolset to implement these and other exploits, which are possible with simply $1.5k worth of off-the-shelf hardware and some modifications of the code of widely available LTE open source implementations.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Roger Piqueras Jover is a Wireless Security Research Scientist at the CTO Security Architecture team of Bloomberg LP, where he leads the projects on mobile/wireless security. He is also actively involved in hardware and network security, big data analysis and anomaly detection. Previous to Bloomberg, he spent 5 years at the AT&T Security Research Center leading projects on LTE mobile network security. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. in Telecommunications Engineering from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC Barcelona), a Master's in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Irvine and a Master's/MPhil (EBD) in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. Roger's research interests are in the area of mobile and wireless communications, resource allocation, new network architectures and technologies for 5G and security for wireless networks. In his spare time, he actively works in identifying, implementing on software-radio and proposing solutions to PHY layer threats, rogue base stations and protocol exploits against LTE cellular networks.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Constantinos Papadias

Title: Low complexity antenna arrays and techniques for wireless communication and sensing

Date: Oct. 7, 2016, Fri.

Time: 9:15 AM

Venue: McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium (MDEA)

ABSTRACT

In this talk we will provide an overview of recently developed techniques in the area of compact antenna arrays that have fewer radio frequency (RF) chains than elements. These arrays comprise of both conventionally fed active antennas and passive ones that radiate due to the mutual coupling from neighboring elements. By using load control circuits, the mutual coupling between adjacent elements can be exploited in order to produce the desired radiation patterns. Compared to conventional antenna arrays, which require one RF chain per element, these systems have a clear double benefit: they require fewer RF chains, making them cheaper and less power-consuming; and they occupy a smaller volume, due to the small inter-element distances needed for strong mutual coupling. However, it is not always straightforward to design the mixed analog-digital circuit logic that can produce arbitrary (e.g. channel-dependent) beams or other types of spatial multiplexing and precoding. A number of recent advances in this direction will be provided, including techniques for closed-loop MIMO transmission, as well as multi-user precoding. The corresponding applications range from MIMO handsets to small cell access points and remote radio heads to Massive arrays. The use of such low-complexity arrays in cognitive radio networks and other spectrum sharing systems is another important application that will be emphasized. The talk will conclude with the presentation of a number of recent over-the-air experiments and demos performed at AIT's Broadband Wireless & Sensor Networks (B-WiSE) Research Lab that showcase the benefits of these systems in various setups, which underline their potential for next-generation wireless devices and networks.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Constantinos B. Papadiasis the Dean of Athens Information Technology (AIT), in Athens, Greece, where he is also Professor and Head of its Broadband Wireless and Sensor Networks (B-WiSE) Research Group. He is also Adjunct Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark. He received the Diploma of Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1991 and the Doctorate degree in Signal Processing (highest honors) from the Ecole Nationale Superieuredes Telecommunications (ENST), Paris, France, in 1995. He was a researcher at Institut Eurecom (1992-1995), Stanford University (1995-1997) and Bell Labs (as Member of Technical Staff from 1997-2001 and as Technical Manager from 2001-2006). He was also Adjunct Professor at Columbia University (2004-2005) and Carnegie Mellon University (2006-2011). His research interests span several areas of advanced communication systems, with emphasis on wireless, cognitive, green and next generation networks. He has published over 170 papers, one research monograph, two edited books, 6 book chapters, and has received over 6000 citations for his work. He has also made standards contributions and holds 12 patents. He was a member of the Steering Board of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF) from 2002-2006, a member and industrial liaison of the IEEE's Signal Processing for Communications Technical Committee from 2003-2008 and a National Representative of Greece to the European Research Council's IDEAS program from 2007-2008. He has served as member of the IEEE Communications Society's Fellow Evaluation and Awards Comities, as well as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and the Journal of Communications and Networks. He has participated in several European Commission research grants, including the Horizon2020 project SANSA in the area of satellite-assisted wireless backhauling and another two FP7 research projects where he acts as Technical Coordinator: HARP, in the area of remote radio heads, and ADEL, in the area of licensed shared access. His distinctions include the Bell Labs President's Award (2002); a Bell Labs Teamwork Award (2003); the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Young Author Best Paper Award (2003); ESI's "most cited paper of the decade" citation in the area of wireless networks (2006); his recognition as a "Highly Cited Greek Scientist" (2011); and the co-authorship of two papers that earned Best Student Paper Awards at the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and BioEngineering(2013 & 2014). He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society for 2012-2013. Dr. Papadiasis a Member of the Technical Chamber of Greece and a Fellow of IEEE.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Na Li

Title: Distributed Energy Management with Limited Communication

Date: Sept. 13, 2016, Tue.

Time: 2:00 PM

Venue: McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium (MDEA)

ABSTRACT

A major issue in future power grids is how intelligent devices and independent producers can respectively change their power consumption/production to achieve near maximum efficiency for the power network. Limited communications between devices and producers necessitates an approach where the elements of the network can act in an autonomous manner with limited information/communications yet achieve near optimal performance. In this talk, I will present our recent work on distributed energy management with limited communication. In particular, I will show how we can extract information from physical measurements and recover information from local computation. We will also investigate the minimum amount of communication for achieving the optimal energy management and study how limited communication affects the convergence rate of the distributed algorithms. We will conclude the talk with a discussion on challenges and opportunities on distributed optimization and control for future grids.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Na Li is an assistant professor in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in Harvard University since 2014. She received her Bachelor degree in Mathematics in Zhejiang University in 2007 and PhD degree in Control and Dynamical systems from California Institute of Technology in 2013. She was a postdoctoral associate of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2013-2014. Her research lies in the design, analysis, optimization and control of distributed network systems, with particular applications to power networks. She received NSF career award (2016) and entered the Best Student Paper Award finalist in the 2011 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Farshad Lahouti

Title: Fundamental Limits of Crowdsourcing

Date: March 8, 2016, Tue.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: CALIT2 Room 3008

ABSTRACT

Digital crowdsourcing (CS) is a modern approach to perform certain large projects using small contributions of a large crowd. In CS, a taskmaster typically breaks down the project into small batches of tasks and assigns them to so-called workers with imperfect skill levels. The crowdsourcer then collects and analyzes the results for inference and serving the purpose of the project. In this work, the CS problem, as a human-in-the-loop computation problem, is modeled and analyzed in an information theoretic rate-distortion framework. The purpose is to seek ultimate performance bounds that one can achieve by any form of query from the crowd and any decoding (inference) algorithm with a given budget. The results also shed light on optimized strategies for the design of crowdsourcing systems. We also present and analyze a query scheme dubbed k-ary incidence coding.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Farshad Lahouti is currently a visiting professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he initiated the digital ventures design program. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Tehran, Iran and his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo, Canada both in Electrical Engineering in 1997 and 2002, respectively. In 2005, he joined the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, where he founded the Center for Wireless Multimedia Communications. He also served as the head of the Communications Engineering Department from 2008 to 2012. Dr Lahouti is the recipient of the distinguished scientist award from Iran Nation Academy of Sciences in 2014. His current research interests are coding and information theory, signal processing and communication theory with applications to wireless networks, cyber-physical systems and man-machine symbiosis, and biological and neuronal networks. Information on his recent works can be found here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~lahouti.

What is DARPA? An insider's look

Date: February 9, 2016

Time: 09:00 AM to 10:00 AM

Venue: Calit2 Auditorium.

Learn about DARPA's research priorities, scientific offices and funding opportunities!

Meet Dr. Reza Ghanadan, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program manager with the Defense Sciences Office.

DARPA/UCI Workshop on Mobile and Intelligent Sensor Networks

Date: February 8, 2016

Time: 09:00 AM to 05:00 PM

Venue: Information and Computer Science Building, 6210 Donald Bren Hall, 6th floor.

Sensor networks are crucial for collecting data and understanding the physical world. This workshop will explore fundamental challenges in design and deployment of heterogeneous sensor networks that can benefit from mobility and intelligent distributed decision making. Distributed decision making and deployment is fundamental to large heterogeneous sensor networks as global and central algorithms are not feasible. The fundamental goals of the network deployment are improving the capacity/throughout, connectivity, coverage, bandwidth efficiency, mobility, delay, and security of the heterogeneous sensor networks.

The goal of the workshop is to foster discussion, discovery, and dissemination of the state-of-the-art in this area and identifying potential next generation breakthrough technologies.

The workshop will include invited talks and solicited oral or poster presentations. More information can be found at the following Link .

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Paul Cuff

Title: A Stronger Soft-Covering Lemma that assures Semantic Security in Wiretap Channels

Date: Nov. 2, 2015, Monday

Time: 10:00 am

Venue: Harut Barsamian Colloquia (Engineering Hall 2430).

ABSTRACT

In 1975, Wyner published two very different papers that are unexpectedly connected. One introduced the wiretap channel, showing that information-theoretic secrecy is possible without a secret key by taking advantage of channel noise. This is the foundation for much of physical-layer security. The other paper introduced a notion of common information relevant to generating random variables at different terminals. In that work he introduced a soft-covering tool for proving achievability. Coincidently, soft covering has now become the tool of choice for proving strong secrecy in wiretap channels, although Wyner didn't appear to make any connection between the two results.

We present a sharpening of the soft-covering tool by showing that the soft-covering phenomenon happens with doubly-exponential certainty with respect to a randomly generated codebook. Through the union bound, this enables security proofs in settings where many security constraints must be satisfied simultaneously. The "type II" wiretap channel is a great example of this, where the eavesdropper can actively influence his observations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this tool by deriving the secrecy capacity of wiretap channels of type II with a noisy main channel---previously an open problem. Additionally, this stronger soft covering allows information-theoretic security proofs to be easily upgraded to semantic security, which is the gold standard in cryptography.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Paul Cuff received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, in 2004 and the M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2006 and 2009. His Ph.D. research advisor was Thomas Cover. Since 2009 he has been an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. Over the years Dr. Cuff has interacted with industry in both the technology and the financial sectors, spending summers at Google, Microsoft Research, and elsewhere, and giving talks at a number of hedge funds. In 2005, while in graduate school, he co-founded a tech startup called Adaptive Hearing Solutions with Bernard Widrow centered around signal processing technology. This venture began with the winning of the Stanford business plan competition. As a graduate student, Dr. Cuff was awarded the ISIT 2008 Student Paper Award for his work titled “Communication Requirements for Generating Correlated Random Variables.” This work has led to fruitful and unexpected avenues of research in secure source coding. As faculty, he received the NSF Career Award in 2014 and the AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award in 2015.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Saeed Mohammadi

Title: Bring the System Down – to a Chip

Date: May 28, 2015, Thu.

Time: 4:00 pm

Venue: CALIT2 Room 3008.

Title: Visually-Lossless JPEG2000 for Interactive Multi-Resolution Delivery of Imagery

Date: May 19, 2014, Mon.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

Visibility thresholds play an important role in finding appropriate quantization step sizes in image and video compression systems. After a brief tutorial on the JPEG2000 standard, we present a method of measuring visibility thresholds for quantization distortion in JPEG2000. A quantization distortion model for each subband is developed based on the statistical characteristics of wavelet coefficients and the dead-zone quantizer of JPEG2000. This is in contrast to previous studies which have assumed uniform quantization distortion. The resulting visibility thresholds are further adjusted for locally changing backgrounds through a visual masking model, and then used to determine the minimum number of coding passes to be included in a JPEG2000 codestream for visually lossless quality. In our experiments, the proposed coding scheme achieves visually lossless coding for 24-bit color images at approximately 20% of the bitrate required for numerically lossless coding.

JPEG2000 inherently supports the display of imagery at various resolutions. When an image is displayed at dif¬ferent resolutions, the spatial frequencies of subbands are changed. Previous JPEG2000 visually lossless algo¬rithms have employed a single set of visibility thresholds optimized for full resolution. This generally results in visually lossless quality at all resolutions, but with significant inefficiencies at less than full resolution. In this talk we discuss a method to minimize the amount of data needed for display at lower resolutions. Specifically, we present a layering strategy which effectively incorporates a different set of visibility thresholds for each resolution. This allows for visually lossless decoding at a variety of resolutions, using only a fraction of the full resolution codestream.

All codestreams produced using the methods described in this talk are fully JPEG2000 Part-I compliant. Joint work with Han Oh and Ali Bilgin

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Michael W. Marcellin was born in Bishop, California, on July 1, 1959. He graduated summa cum laude with the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from San Diego State University in 1983, where he was named the most outstanding student in the College of Engineering. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University in 1985 and 1987, respectively.

Since 1988, Dr. Marcellin has been with the University of Arizona, where he holds the title of Regents' Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and of Optical Sciences. His research interests include digital communication and data storage systems, data compression, and signal processing. He has authored or coauthored more than two hundred publications in these areas.

Dr. Marcellin is a major contributor to JPEG2000, the emerging second-generation standard for image compression. Throughout the standardization process, he chaired the JPEG2000 Verification Model Ad Hoc Group, which was responsible for the software implementation and documentation of the JPEG2000 algorithm. He is coauthor of the book, JPEG2000: Image compression fundamentals, standards and practice, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. This book serves as a graduate level textbook on image compression fundamentals, as well as the definitive reference on JPEG2000. Dr. Marcellin served as a consultant to Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), a consortium of Hollywood studios, on the development of the JPEG2000 profiles for digital cinema.

Professor Marcellin is a Fellow of the IEEE, and is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Phi Kappa Phi. He is a 1992 recipient of the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, and a corecipient of the 1993 IEEE Signal Processing Society Senior (Best Paper) Award. He has received teaching awards from NTU (1990, 2001), IEEE/Eta Kappa Nu student sections (1997), and the University of Arizona College of Engineering (2000, 2010). In 2003, he was named the San Diego State University Distinguished Engineering Alumnus. Professor Marcellin is the recipient of the 2006 University of Arizona Technology Innovation Award. He was finalist for the 2012 Arizona Governor's Innovation Awards. From 2001 to 2006, Dr. Marcellin was the Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Professor of Engineering. He is currently the International Foundation for Telemetering Chaired Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Urbashi Mitra

Title: The confluence of communication, sensing and control in large scale wireless networks

Date: Nov. 8, 2013, Fri.

Time: 11:00 - 12:00 am

Venue: DBH 6011

ABSTRACT

Modern wireless technology enables the vision of future large scale systems such as the SmartGrid, a network of ubiquitous and heterogeneous devices wirelessly connected to the Internet, and wireless health monitoring and health modifying sensor networks over communities and not just individuals. All of these applications necessitate methods that simultaneously consider scale, communication, sensing and control. In this talk, key elements of realizing this vision are examined. We shall focus on novel active control methods for networks described by partially observable Markov decision processes. Such models are very general and can encompass sensing networks, as well as communication networks. Following an innovations approach, a Kalman-like filter is derived to estimate the underlying system state. As a case-study, numerical results are provided for physical activity detection in a heterogeneous wireless body area network. We further examine distributed estimation in large scale networks with time-correlated behavior and explore how modern statistical methods such as compressed sensing can be applied to both the distributed estimation problem as well as the network control problem.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Urbashi Mitra received the B.S. and the M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from Princeton University. She is currently a Professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the IEEE Information Theory Society's Board of Governors (2002-2007, 2012-2014) and the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Technical Committee on Signal Processing for Communications and Networks (2012-2014). She is the recipient of: 2012 Globecom Signal Processing for Communications Symposium Best Paper Award, 2012 NAE Lillian Gilbreth Lectureship, USC Center for Excellence in Research Fellowship (2010-2013), the 2009 DCOSS Applications & Systems Best Paper Award, IEEE Fellow (2007), Texas Instruments Visiting Professor (Fall 2002, Rice University), 2001 Okawa Foundation Award, 2000 OSU College of Engineering Lumley Award for Research, and a 1996 NSF CAREER Award. Dr. Mitra has been/is an Associate Editor for the following IEEE publications: Transactions on Signal Processing (2012--), Transactions on Information Theory (2007-2011), Journal of Oceanic Engineering (2006-2011), and Transactions on Communications (1996-2001). Dr. Mitra has held visiting appointments at: the Delft University of Technology, Stanford University, Rice University, and the Eurecom Institute. She served as co-Director of the Communication Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California from 2004-2007. Her research interests are in: wireless communications, communication and sensor networks, detection and estimation and the interface of communication, sensing and control.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Zhi (Gerry) Tian

Title: Enhancing Access to the Radio Spectrum - Compressive Spectrum Sensing

Date: Feb. 13, 2013, Wed.

Time: 1:00 - 2:00 pm

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

This talk has two parts. In the first part, I will briefly discuss several NSF programs related to Communications, Sensing and Cyber-Physical Systems. In particular, I will give an introduction on NSF's initiative on enhancing access to the radio spectrum (EARS). In the second part, I will present a technical discussion on compressed sensing in statistical signal processing, where compressive sampling of random processes is of interest. Our new framework allows for accurate estimation of useful statistics from compressive measurements using simple least-squares solutions, even when the random signal of interest is non-sparse. As an example, I will present a cyclic feature based compressive spectrum sensing approach for wideband cognitive radios. Wideband communication signals possess unique two-dimensional sparsity structures in both the frequency domain and the modulation-dependent cyclic frequency domain. Exploitation of these sparsity elements not only reveals important features of the modulated signals for detection and classification purposes, but also results in fast reconstruction of the cyclic statistics and hence reduced sensing time. Using the new framework of compressed sensing for random processes, compressive spectrum sensing becomes feasible even for (non-sparse) crowded spectrum.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Zhi (Gerry) Tian is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Michigan Technological University. She is currently on leave to serve as a Program Director in the Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems (ECCS) of the Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Her research interests lie in digital and wireless communications, wireless sensor networks, and signal processing. She has served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. She is an IEEE Fellow.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Walid Saad (Univ. of Miami) and Prof. Zhu Han (Univ. of Houston)

Title: Toward Self-Organizing Wireless Small Cell Networks (by Prof. Saad)

Date: Dec. 7, 2012, Fri.

Time: 2:00 - 2:30 PM

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

The deployment of small cells serviced by low-cost, low-power stations (e.g., femtocells, picocells, microcells, etc.) is envisioned to significantly improve the performance of next-generation wireless networks. Maintaining and managing the heterogeneous and dense network architecture resulting from small cell deployments mandates a paradigm shift from centralized optimization toward self-optimizing, self-organizing, and self-configuring networks. In this talk, we study the potential of developing self-organizing algorithms, based on notions from game theory and learning, for addressing various challenges in small cell networks. In particular, we focus on two key problems: (i)- Noncooperative and matching games for strategic access policies and user-to-access point association, and (ii)- Cooperative games for spectrum leasing and interference management. For each problem, we present the key concepts, discuss the proposed solutions, and shed a light on future! opportunities. Finally, we conclude with an overview on future research directions and challenges in the area of small cell networks and adjunct fields.

Prof. Saad'S BIOGRAPHY

Walid Saad received his B.E. degree in Computer and Communications Engineering from the Lebanese University, Faculty of Engineering, in 2004, his M.E. in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2007, and his Ph.D degree from the University of Oslo in 2010. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Miami. Prior to joining UM, he has held several research positions at institutions such as Princeton University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His research interests include wireless and small cell networks, game theory, cognitive radio, wireless security, and smart grids. He has over 60 international conference and journal publications in these areas. He was the author/co-author of the papers that received the Best Paper Award at the 7th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOpt), in June 2009, at the 5th International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection (ICIMP) in May 2010, and at IEEE WCNC in 2012.

Title: Compressive Collaborative Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio (by Prof. Han)

Date: Dec. 7, 2012, Fri.

Time: 2:30 - 3:00 PM

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

To increase spectrum utilization, cognitive radios can detect and share the unused spectrum. However, each cognitive radio can only scan a narrow band of spectrum, and the scan is time consuming. This bottleneck limits spectrum sensing in terms of bandwidth, speed, and accuracy. Aiming at breaking this bottleneck, we propose compressive collaborative spectrum sensing based on the recent technique of compressive sensing, which senses less and computes more. It lets a sensor acquire a signal, not by taking many samples, but rather by measuring a few incoherent linear projections. The sensor transmits the linear projections to a receiver, where the signal is reconstructed by an algorithm. For many applications, such a shift of resource demands from pre-transmission to post-transmission can be of great benefit. This is true for spectrum sensing, where the benefit is less and faster sensing at the cognitive radio nodes, as well as reduced transmission from these nodes to the fusion center.

Prof. Han'S BIOGRAPHY

Zhu Han received the B.S. degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, in 1997, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1999 and 2003, respectively.From 2000 to 2002, he was an R&D Engineer of JDSU, Germantown, Maryland. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Research Associate at the University of Maryland. From 2006 to 2008, he was an assistant professor in Boise State University, Idaho. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Houston, Texas. His research interests include wireless resource allocation and management, wireless communications and networking, game theory, wireless multimedia, security, and smart grid. Dr. Han is an NSF CAREER award recipient 2010. Dr. Han has 6 best paper awards in IEEE conferences, and winner of Fred W. Ellersick Prize 2011.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Michele Zorzi

Title: Optimal Transmission Policies for Energy Harvesting Communication Devices

Date: Dec. 4, 2012, Tues.

Time: 11:00 - 12:00

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

Energy Harvesting (EH) is a new paradigm in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs): sensor nodes are powered by energy harvested from the ambient, rather than by non-rechargeable batteries, thus enabling a potentially perpetual operation of the WSN. However, Energy Harvesting poses new challenges in the design of WSNs, in that energy availability is random and fluctuates over time, thus calling for radically different energy management solutions. In this talk we investigate the following fundamental question: how should the harvested energy be managed to ensure optimal performance? First, we consider a sensor powered by EH which senses data of varying importance and reports them judiciously to a Fusion Center. Assuming that data transmission incurs an energy cost, our objective is to identify low-complexity policies that achieve close-to-optimal performance, in terms of maximizing the average long-term importance of the reported data. We first consider schemes that rely on the assumption of perfect knowledge of the amount of energy available in the battery. Subsequently, we investigate the design of operation policies that maximize the long-term reward under imperfect knowledge of the State-Of-Charge (SOC). Moreover, for both scenarios, we explore the impact of time-correlation in the EH process, showing that simple adaptation to the state of the EH process yields close-to-optimal performance, without requiring full knowledge of the SOC of the battery.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Michele Zorzi is a Professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova. Prior to his current appointment, he was employed at the Politecnico di Milano, the University of Ferrara and the University of California at San Diego, with which he still has an active collaboration. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Padova in 1994.

Prof. Zorzi was the EiC of the IEEE Wireless Communications magazine in 2003-2005, and the EiC of the IEEE Transactions on Communications in 2008-2011, and has served on the Editorial Boards of the top journals in his area of research and on the Organizing and Technical Program Committee for many international conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow. His main research interests are in the area of wireless communications and networking, sensor networks and IoT, underwater communications and networks, and energy-efficient protocol design.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Chengshan Xiao

Title: Optimal Linear Precoding for Finite Alphabet Signaling in Wireless Systems and Networks

Date: Nov. 29, 2012, Thu.

Time: 11:00 - 12:00

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

Finite alphabet signaling refers to commonly used discrete-constellation modulations in practical communication systems, such as PAM, PSK or QAM. In this talk, we will target at how to increase data rate or throughput via linear precoding in wireless systems and networks such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, multiple access channels, broadcast channels, wiretap channels, and cognitive radio networks. We will present backgrounds, theoretical results, hardware implementation, and experimental results for maximizing the mutual information-based achievable data rate or throughput. Our results demonstrate that precoding for finite alphabet signaling can be radically different from the precoding (or power allocation) for Gaussian signaling. Our examples show that the finite-alphabet signaling-based approach provides not only higher achievable data rate but also lower coded bit error rate than the approaches that design the precoder with Gaussian input assumption. Further research topics will be discussed in this talk as well.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Chengshan Xiao is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, Missouri. His research interests include wireless communications, signal processing, and underwater acoustic communications. He is the holder of three U.S. patents. His algorithms were implemented in Nortel's base station radios after successful field trials and network integration. Prof. Xiao is an IEEE Fellow and the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He is also a Member of the Fellow Evaluation Committee, a Member of the Board of Governors, and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society. Previously, he served as the founding Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wireless Communications and the Technical Program Chair of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Cape Town, South Africa.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Michael Langberg

Title: Three Open Problems in Network Communication

Date: Nov. 27, 2012, Tue.

Time: 11:00 - 12:00

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

In this talk I will discuss three natural open questions in the context of multi-source/ multi-terminal network communication via network coding. (a) What is the maximum loss in communication rate experienced from removing a single unit capacity edge from a given network? (b) What is the maximum loss in rate when insisting on zero error communication as opposed to vanishing decoding error? (c) What is the maximum loss in rate when comparing the communication of source information that is ``almost'' independent to that of independent source information? Recent results including intriguing connections between the three questions will be presented. Based on joint work with Michelle Effros.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Michael Langberg is an Associate Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science department at the Open University of Israel. Previously, between 2003 and 2006, he was a postdoctoral scholar in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at the California Institute of Technology. He received his B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from Tel-Aviv University in 1996, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1998 and 2003 respectively.

Prof. Langberg's research is in the fields of Information Theory and Theoretical Computer Science. His work focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms for combinatorial problems; emphasizing on algorithmic and combinatorial aspects of Information Theory, and on probabilistic methods in combinatorics.

CPCC Seminar by Prof. Wing-Kin (Ken) Ma

Title: Semidefinite Relaxation and Its Applications in Signal Processing and Communications

Date: Nov. 9, 2012, Fri.

Time: 2:00-3:00 PM

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

Semidefinite relaxation (SDR) has recently been recognized as a very useful and handy tool in signal processing and communications. It is a powerful approximation technique for a host of difficult optimization problems, generally taking the form of nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic programs. SDR has found numerous applications; among them particularly important applications are MIMO detection (which covers multi-user, multi-antenna, space-time,...), transmit beamforming (which covers classical single-cell multiuser downlinks, multicell coordinated multiuser downlinks, unicasting and multicasting, cognitive radio, physical layer security, one-way and two-way relays...), and sensor network localization. And the application scope is still expanding. This talk aims at giving an overview of SDR. I will describe essential ideas and practical deployment aspects of SDR, and summarize some of the key theoretical results offered by optimization researchers, which will be presented from a non-expert viewpoint. And certainly, the talk will cover the important SDR applications, and some very forefront advances in those applications.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Wing-Kin Ma received the B.Eng. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from the University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, U.K., in 1995 and the M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees, both in electronic engineering, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Hong Kong, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electronic Engineering, CUHK. From 2005 to 2007, he was also an Assistant Professor with the Institute of Communications Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, R.O.C. Prior to that, he held various research positions with McMaster University, Canada; CUHK; and the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research interests are in signal processing and communications, with a recent emphasis on MIMO communication, convex optimization, blind source separation, and signal processing for hyperspectral remote sensing. Dr. Ma is currently Associate Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters. He is also Guest Editor of IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications on the special issue "Signal Processing Techniques for Wireless Physical Layer Security," and IEEE Signal Processing Magazine on the special issue "Signal and Image Processing in Hyperspectral Remote Sensing." He previously served as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and Guest Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He was a Speaker of a Tutorial in EUSIPCO 2011. He is a recipient of the 2009 Exemplary Teaching Award given by the Faculty of Engineering, CUHK, and co-recipient of an ICASSP 2011 Best Student Paper Award and a WHISPERS 2011 Best Paper Award.

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Prof. P. R. Kumar

Title: The Challenge of Cyber-Physical Systems

Date: Oct. 22, 2012, Mon.

Time: 3:00 PM

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are the next generation of engineered systems in which computing, communication, and control technologies are tightly integrated. We present a historical account of paths leading to the present interest in CPSs. Research on CPSs is fundamentally important in many important application domains such as transportation, energy, and medical systems. We overview CPS research from both a historical point of view in terms of technologies developed for early generations of control systems, as well as several foundational research topics that underlie this area. These include issues in data fusion, real-time communication, security, middleware, hybrid systems and proofs of correctness.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

P. R. Kumar obtained his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering (Electronics) from I.I.T. Madras in 1973, and the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis, in 1975 and 1977, respectively. From 1977-84 he was a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. From 1985-2011 he was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Currently he is at Texas A&M University, where he holds the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering.

Kumar has worked on problems in game theory, adaptive control, stochastic systems, simulated annealing, neural networks, machine learning, queueing networks, manufacturing systems, scheduling, wafer fabrication plants and information theory. His current research interests are in wireless networks, sensor networks, and networked embedded control systems. His research is currently focused on wireless networks, sensor networks, cyberphysical systems, and the convergence of control, communication and computation.

Kumar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the USA, and the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule) in Zurich. He received the IEEE Field Award for Control Systems, the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, the Fred W. Ellersick Prize of the IEEE Communications Society, and the Outstanding Contribution Award of ACM SIGMOBILE. He is a Fellow of IEEE. He was a Guest Chair Professor and Leader of the Guest Chair Professor Group on Wireless Communication and Networking at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He is an Honorary Professor at IIT Hyderabad. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, the Alumni Achievement Award from Washington University in St. Louis, and the Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award from the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois.

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by John G. Proakis

Title: Digital Communication Techniques for Underwater Acoustic Channels

Date: Oct. 1, 2012, Mon.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

Underwater acoustic channels are generally characterized as randomly time-varying multipath channels. In this presentation, the characteristics of these channels are described in terms of their time-varying impulse response, time dispersion, frequency dispersion, path loss and additive noise. Then, the design of modulation/demodulation and coding/decoding techniques are considered, including single carrier and multicarrier transmission, turbo coding/decoding, and equalization for intersymbol interference. The performance of these techniques are assessed from the viewpoint of bandwidth efficiency and signal processing requirements.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

John G. Proakis (S'58-M'62-F'84-LF'99) received the BSEE from the University of Cincinnati in 1959, the MSEE from MIT in 1961 and the Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of California at San Diego and a Professor Emeritus at Northeastern University. He was a faculty member at Northeastern University from 1969 through 1998 and held the following academic positions: Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, 1969-1976; Professor of Electrical Engineering, 1976-1998; Associate Dean of the College of Engineering and Director of the Graduate School of Engineering, 1982-1984; Interim Dean of the College of Engineering, 1992-1993; Chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 1984-1997. Prior to joining Northeastern University, he worked at GTE Laboratories and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

His professional experience and interests are in the general areas of digital communications and digital signal processing. He is the co-author of the following books: Digital Communications (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008, fifth edition), Introduction to Digital Signal Processing (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2007, fourth edition); Digital Signal Processing Laboratory (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1991); Advanced Digital Signal Processing (New York: Macmillan, 1992); Algorithms for Statistical Signal Processing(Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2002);Discrete-Time Processing of Speech Signals (New York: Macmillan, 1992, IEEE Press, 2000); Communication Systems Engineering, (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2002, second edition); Digital Signal Processing Using MATLAB V.4 (Boston: Brooks/Cole-Thomson Learning, 2007, second edition); Contemporary Communication Systems Using MATLAB (Boston: Brooks/Cole-Thomson Learning, 2004, second edition); Fundamentals of Communication Systems (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall , 2005)

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Vahid Tarokh

Title: Fundamentals, Regulatory Issues, and the Future of Cognitive Radio Networks

Date: Feb. 24, 2012, Fri.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: Donald Bren Hall (DBH 6011)

ABSTRACT

I will discuss the current regulatory issues for opportunistic transmission, and the future networks based on these concepts. I will argue that the current regulations are very conservative. Then I will overview limits of cognitive transmission, and discuss that they may be hard to achieve in some scenarios. Finally, I will speculate (based on these facts) about the future of cognitive Radio networks.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Vahid Tarokh was an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at MIT until 2002 . In June 2002 , he joined Harvard University, where he is a Perkins Professor of Applied Mathematics and a Hammond Vinton Hayes Senior Fellow of Electrical Engineering. He is the recipient of a number of awards and holds 2 honorary degrees.

CPCC Seminar by Khaled Salama

Title: The Memristor: An Elusive Device

Date: Feb. 23, 2012, Thu..

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: CALIT2 room 3008

ABSTRACT

The memristor (M) is considered to be the fourth two-terminal passive element in electronics, alongside the resistor (R), the capacitor (C), and the inductor (L). Its existence was postulated in 1971, but its first implementation was reported in 2008. Where was it hiding all that time and what can we do with it? Come and learn how the memristor completes the roster of electronic devices much like a missing particle that physicists seek to complete their tableaus. The future of memristors is being modeled today at KAUST.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Salama received his Bachelor's degree with honors from the Electronics and Communications Department at Cairo University in Egypt in 1997, and his Master's and Doctorate degrees from the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University in the United States, in 2000 and 2005 respectively. He was an assistant Professor at RPI between 2005 and 2009. He joined KAUST in January 2009 and was the founding program chair till August 2011. His work on CMOS sensors for molecular detection has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), awarded the Stanford-Berkeley Innovators Challenge Award in biological sciences and was acquired by Lumina Inc. He is the author of 90 papers and 8 patents on low-power mixed-signal circuits for intelligent fully integrated sensors and nonlinear electronics specially memristor devices. He is a senior member of IEEE.

CPCC Seminar by Itsik Bergel

Title: THE SPECTRAL EFFICIENCY OF CSMA AD-HOC NETWORKS

Date: Feb. 22, 2012, Wed.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: Calit2 3008

ABSTRACT

Wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs) allow users to communicate, sharing the same wireless channel, without the need of any infrastructure. The performance of wireless ad-hoc networks (WANET) is mainly limited by its self-interference. The talk will focus on the performance of WANETs applying slotted carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) mechanism and possibly utilizing also directional antennas. The CSMA protocol is based on RTS/CTS messages, which allow each node to evaluate the amount of interference that it will cause to other active nodes, and provide a powerful tool for network coordination.

Our analysis gives simple expressions for the network area spectral efficiency (ASE). The presented ASE expressions allow an evaluation of the optimal system parameters, and give insight on the behavior of the ASE as a function of the various system parameters. In particular we show that the ASE of a CSMA WANET is well approximated by the ASE of an optimized ALOHA WANET, multiplied by the exponent of the network back-off probability. We also show that if the network has a maximal delay constraint then the ASE grows linearly with the allowed delay.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Itsik Bergel was born in Beer-Sheva, Israel, in 1971. He received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the B.Sc. degree in physics from Ben Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel, in 1993 and 1994, respectively, and the M.Sc. degree and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2000 and 2005 respectively. In 2005 he did a postdoc research at the Dipartimento di Elettronica of Politecnico di Torino. He currently is a lecturer at the School of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. His research spans various aspects of communications theory, including add-hoc networks, DSL systems, UWB communications and capacity evaluations of non-coherent channels.

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Ali H. Sayed

Title: BIO-INSPIRED COGNITION AND DIFFUSION ADAPTATION OVER NETWORKS

Date: Feb. 14, 2012, Tue.

Time: 10:00 - 11:00 AM

Venue: EH 2430

ABSTRACT

Complex patterns of behavior are common in many biological networks, where no single agent is in command and yet forms of decentralized intelligence are evident. Examples include fish joining together in schools, birds flying in formation, bees swarming towards a new hive, and bacteria diffusing towards a nutrient source. While each individual agent in these biological networks is not capable of complex behavior, it is the combined coordination among multiple agents that leads to the manifestation of sophisticated order at the network level. The study of these phenomena opens up opportunities for collaborative research across several domains including economics, life sciences, biology, and information processing, in order to address and clarify several relevant questions such as: (a) how and why organized behavior arises at the group level from interactions among agents without central control? (b) What communication topologies enable the emergence of order at the higher level from interactions at the lower level? (c) How is information quantized during the diffusion of knowledge through the network? And (d) how does mobility influence the learning abilities of the agents and the network. Several disciplines are concerned in elucidating different aspects of these questions including evolutionary biology, animal behavior studies, physical biology, and even computer graphics. In the realm of signal processing, these questions motivate the need to study and develop decentralized strategies for information processing that are able to endow networks with real-time adaptation and learning abilities. This presentation examines several patterns of decentralized intelligence in biological networks, and describes diffusion adaptation and online learning strategies that our research group has developed in recent years to model and reproduce these kinds of behavior.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Ali H. Sayed is Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Principal Investigator of the UCLA Adaptive Systems Laboratory (www.ee.ucla.edu/asl ). He has published widely in the areas of adaptation and learning with over 350 articles and 5 books. His research interests span several fields including adaptation and learning, adaptive and cognitive networks,biological networks, cooperative behavior, distributed processing, and statistical signal processing.

CPCC Seminar by Tara Javidi

Title: Active Sequential Hypothesis Testing

Date: Dec. 1, 2011, Thu.

Time: 1:00 - 2:00 PM

Venue: EH 2430 (Colloquium room)

ABSTRACT

Active sequential hypothesis testing problem arises in a broad spectrum of applications in cognition, communications, design of experiments, and sensor management. In all of these applications, a decision maker is responsible to take actions dynamically so as to enhance information about an underlying phenomena of interest in a speedy manner while accounting for the cost of communication, sensing, or data collection. In particular, due to the sequential nature of the problem, the decision maker relies on his current information state to constantly (re-)evaluate the trade-off between the precision and the cost of various actions. In this work, we first discuss active sequential hypothesis testing as a partially observable Markov decision problem. In particular, we provide a brief survey of the design of experiment literature and the dynamic programming interpretation of information utility introduced by De Groot. Using Blackwell ordering, we, then, connect this stochastic control theoretic notion of information utility to the concept of stochastic degradation and uncertainty reduction in information theory. Finally, we discuss the dynamics and expected drift of log-likelihood, entropy, and probability of error as well as their connection to Kullback-Leibler divergence and mutual information in order to approximate the optimal value function (i.e. the solutions to the DP). We then utilize these value function approximations (lower bounds) to provide simple sequential test strategies (heuristics) whose performance is numerically compared to the optimal policies. Finally, we prove the asymptotic optimality of one class of these heuristic test strategies and, as a special case, recover Burnashev's coding scheme in the context of variable-length block coding over memoryless channels with feedback. Time permitting, we will compare and contrast our approach with recent results in Bayesian active learning literature. This is joint work with Mohammad Naghshvar and Ofer Shayevitz.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Tara Javidi studied electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran from 1992 to 1996. She received the MS degrees in electrical engineering (systems), and in applied mathematics (stochastics) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1998 and 1999, respectively. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, she was an assistant professor at the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Washington, Seattle. She joined University of California, San Diego, in 2005, where she is currently an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Tara Javidi was a Barbour Scholar during 1999-2000 academic year and received an NSF CAREER Award in 2004. Her research interests are in communication networks, stochastic resource allocation, stochastic control theory, and wireless communications.

CPCC Seminar by Mohamed-Slim Alouini

Title: Novel Generic Formulas and Relations for the Ergodic Capacity and Average Bit Error Rate over Generalized Fading Channels

Date: Sept. 9, 2011, Fri.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: Bren Hall (DBH) 3011

ABSTRACT

Analysis of the average binary error probabilities (ABEP) and ergodic capacity (EC) of wireless communications systems over generalized fading channels have been considered separately in the past. This talk introduces a novel moment generating function (MGF)-based unified approach for the exact computation of the ABEP and EC of single and multiple link communication with maximal ratio combining. This approach leads to a generic unified performance expression that can be easily calculated and that is applicable to a wide variety of fading scenarios. The talk introduces also a new analytical connection between the EC and the ABEP of binary modulation schemes. In particular formulas to obtain the EC from the ABEP and vice versa are proposed. Analytical and numerical examples are provided to illustrate the mathematical formalism for a variety of fading conditions.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Mohamed-Slim Alouini was born in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, USA, in 1998. He was with the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, then with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Program at the Texas A&M University at Qatar, Education City, Doha, Qatar.

Since June 2009, he has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Division of Physical Sciences and Engineering at KAUST, Saudi Arabia, where his current research interests include the design and performance analysis of wireless communication systems.

CPCC Networkshop

Title: CPCC Networkshop
On August 29, CPCC held an internal workshop on networking. CPCC researchers presented their work and discussed future possible collaborations.

CPCC Networkshop
Monday August 29
EH 2430

12:00-12:45	Lunch
12:45- 2:30	Ali Behbahani "Linear Decentralized Estimation of Correlatd Data for Wireless Sensor Networks" Jie Chen "On the Achievable Sum Rate of Multiterminal Source Coding for a Remote Gaussian Vector Source" Feng Jiang "Phase-Only Analog Encoding for a Multi-Antenna Fusion Center" Roberto Pagliari "Programming and Deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks"
2:30-2:45	Break
2:45-4:00	Furong Huang "Concurrent Load Balancing in Distributed Systems with Partial Information Pegah Sattari "Network Coding for Inference Problems" Maciej Kurant "Walking on a Graph with a Magnifying Glass: Stratified Sampling via Weighted Random Walks"
4:00-4:15	Break
4:15-5:00	Discussion, future directions, collaborations, etc.

CPCC Seminar by Azadeh Vosoughi

Title: Wireless Channel Uncertainty in Relay-Assisted Communication and Distributed Detection Systems

Date: July 20, 2011, Wed.

Time: 11 AM

Venue: Engineering Hall 2430

ABSTRACT

One of the main challenges in wireless communications is coping with channel uncertainty. Dealing with this uncertainty, and the limitations it imposes, is tightly related to the specific system and its application. In this talk, we consider two systems, namely a wireless bi-directional relay-assisted communication system and a wireless distributed detection system. We study the impacts of channel uncertainty on the performance limits of these two systems and investigate optimal transceiver designs that minimize these impacts.

For the bi-directional relay-assisted communications we consider a training-based system, in which receivers learn the channels via employing dedicated pilot symbols. Assuming Gaussian inputs and block Rayleigh fading channel model, we study the trade-off between the accuracy and the bandwidth/energy costs of channel estimation and explore optimal transmit resource allocation, subject to network power constraint. We consider Cramer-Rao lower bound for channel estimation, sum-rate and outage probability bounds as the performance metrics.

Next, we discuss the effects of channel uncertainty on the design and performance of a wireless distributed detection system that is tasked with solving a binary hypothesis testing problem. We consider systems with training-based and blind channel estimation and coherent/non-coherent receptions. We investigate the optimal data fusion rules that maximize the overall system detection reliability and error exponent. Furthermore, we present and compare several detection and data fusion designs that exploit diversity to combat channel uncertainty and enhance system performance.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Azadeh Vosoughi is Wilmot Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester. She received her BS degree from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1997, her MS degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, in 2001, and her PhD degree from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 2006, all in Electrical Engineering. Her research interests lie in the areas of wireless relay-assisted communications, distributed detection and estimation, and distributed source coding and compression. She was the recipient of the Furth award in 2006 and was appointed as Wilmot Assistant Professor in 2009 at the University of Rochester. Dr. Vosoughi received the NSF CAREER award in 2011 for her research on the integration of signal processing and communications for distributed detection systems.

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Ramesh Rao

Title: Enabling Citizen Science to Enhance and Transform Health

Date: April 22, 2011, Fri.

Time: 11 AM

Venue: DBH 6011

ABSTRACT

The dramatic spread in the use, along with significant increases in speed and efficiency, of broadband Internet and wireless devices in recent years has produced an excellent platform for the development of novel approaches to improve health through applications using emerging information technology, telecom, and other technology advances. These new technologies have the potential to advance the science and body of medical knowledge, as well as improve public and personal health across all types of medical conditions including chronic diseases (such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes/metabolic syndrome), trauma, and cancer. The utility of cutting-edge technologies in healthcare is just beginning to be explored.

The wireless devices and services in wide use today are packed with ample sensing, processing, storage and communication capabilities. With adaptation and augmentation, these systems can be transformed into tools for the preservation of health, rapid intervention for acute care and long-term management of chronic conditions, as well as other medical applications. The personal nature of these devices makes it possible to connect one (or more) body sensors for persistent gathering of vital signs to enable a new generation of diagnostics and interventions. These unobtrusive, wirelessly connected devices will play a critical role in the translation of epigenetic understanding in support of personal health. Calit2 is engaged in multiple projects related to these possibilities, and others, which bridge emerging technologies with healthcare delivery, knowledge, research, and outcomes. Working with local, regional, national, and international partners, Calit2 brings together faculty, clinical, student and staff researchers with academic, industry, community, and government collaborators to form multidisciplinary teams to prototype systems of emerging, transformational and disruptive technologies.

We are currently engaged in several projects which investigate the power of information technology to enhance, even transform, healthcare resources, knowledge bases, and outcomes utilizing Web 2.0 technologies. These include efforts to develop decision support tools, wireless patient and population health interventions, integrative databases that support these operations, as well as personal health information exchange, clinical trials, and more. New models are being created for population-specific health information sharing and development, resulting in platforms and ontologies which are not only the best possible implementations, but also the most responsive to the wide-ranging needs of the community at large (patients, healthcare providers, and medical researchers, alike). We are currently in early stages of creating a scalable effort at tracking, organizing and analyzing biometric data, especially metrics pertaining to the heart. Heart rate variability (HRV) is a measure of the beat-to-beat interval. It has become a noninvasive tool for accessing the activities of the autonomic nervous system. The fact that HRV can be easily derived makes it a promising marker for the study of human physiological response. We will share a few _early_ experiences in engaging a group of lay citizen scientists who are involved in gathering, sharing and analyzing physiological data to enhance personal understanding and also developing new data informed practices.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Ramesh Rao is the director of the University of California, San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). He holds the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, where he has been a faculty member since 1984. Previous to Calit2, he was the director of UCSD's Center for Wireless Communications. Prof. Rao is involved on a day-to-day basis with a wide variety of interdisciplinary and collaborative research initiatives, leading several major projects at Calit2. He has been a lead investigator on dozens of major federal-, state-, foundation-, defense-, and industry-funded grants and has authored more than 225 technical papers.

For his leadership in wireless communications, Dr. Rao was named an IEEE Fellow. He has been a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. He is a Senior Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) and is the chair of the CCST's Personalized Health Information Technology Task Force ("pHIT"). He is a member of the Rady Children's Hospital and Health Center's Information Technology Task Force. He is also a member of the Health Authority of Abu Dhabi's Weqaya Advisory Task Force. In 2010, he received a Professional Gordon Engineering Leadership Award from UCSD's Gordon Engineering Leadership Center. He is on the Board of Directors of CommNexus San Diego and is the vice-president of the San Diego Indian American Society (SDIAS). He participates in many other technical, academic and industry organizations, boards, councils and committees. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

About 100 people attended the CPCC Research Showcase

On March 9, CPCC held a research showcase in the Calit2 Building to share its accomplishments and present a look at future opportunities.

An audience of nearly 100 listened intently to researcher presentations, viewed posters and demonstrations, and shared their insights into the constantly evolving field of communications.

School of engineering Interim Dean Dimitri Papamoschou welcomed the guests, followed by John Hemminger, vice chancellor or research, who discussed the CPCC's role at UCI. Other speakers included Calit2 Irvine director G.P. Li and CPCC director Hamid Jafarkhani.

Three CPCC-affiliated professors made research presentations: Payam Heydari discussed circuit and hardware design; Lee Swindlehurst offered a look into communications systems; and Homayoun Yousefi'zadeh shared the center's efforts in networking.

The research showcase was co-sponsored and supported by Calit2.

Jafarkhani presentation
Li presentation

CPCC Research Showcase

Join us Wednesday, March 9 for activities showcasing the center's novel research. Explore some of the technologies in development and discover emerging opportunities for collaboration.

The event is free, but, Registration is required.

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Vincent Poor

Title: Information and Inference in the Wireless Physical Layer

Date: January 14, 2011, Fri.

Time: 11:00 AM

Venue: DBH 6011

ABSTRACT

Wireless networking applications continue to motivate challenging problems in information theory, signal processing, and other fields. A salient feature of wireless networks is the close interaction between the physical layer and the other networking layers. This phenomenon is a result of the principal distinguishing features of wireless, namely mobility and the importance of physical properties (diffusion, interference, fading and radio geometry) in determining link characteristics. For example, the applications layer interacts considerably with the physical layer, as is well known through the importance of quality-of-service in wireless network design. This talk will explore briefly four research areas, primarily involving information theoretic or inferential problems, each of which is motivated by an applications-layer issue. In particular, the four applications of file transfer, inference, real-time multimedia transmission, and social networking, will be used to motivate consideration of four respective research problems involving the physical layer: physical layer security in data networks, distributed inference in sensor networks, finite-blocklength capacity in multimedia networks, and connectivity in small-world networks. Recent progress in each of these four research areas will be reviewed.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

H. Vincent Poor is the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he also Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. His current research interests lie primarily in the area of wireless networking and related fields. Among his publications in these areas are the recent books Quickest Detection (Cambridge, 2009) and Information Theoretic Security (NOW, 2009). Dr. Poor is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the Royal Academy of Engineering of the U.K. He has served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. In 2005, he received the IEEE Education Medal. Recent recognition of this work includes the 2009 Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award of the IEEE Communications Society, the 2010 IET Ambrose Fleming Medal for Achievement in Communications, and the 2011 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award.

CPCC Student Seminar Series Launched

CPCC launched a student seminar series to provide a forum for graduate students to disseminate their research. In this series, CPCC graduate students and sometimes faculty present their research results to fellow researchers, talk about their open problems, and possibly find topics of mutual interest to collaborate on. For the first time, the series is run by current CPCC graduate students during the 2010-2011 academic year. Currently, the series covers topics in communications, networking, and information theory. In future, the topics will be extended to also cover circuit design. The talks take place Tuesdays at 11:00-12:00 in Engineering Hall 2430 and are open to the public. Refreshments will be served at 10:50 AM. The schedule of the talks can be found in the seminar webpage.

CPCC members participated in IEEE Globecom 2010

The IEEE Globecom 2010 was held in Miami, FL, from Dec. 7 to Dec. 10. CPCC faculty members, Ender Ayanoglu, Syed Ali Jafar, Hamid Jafarkhani, and Lee Swindlehurst served as session chairs in the conference. CPCC students, Tiangao Gou, Jing Huang, Feng Jiang, Boyu Li, Feng Li, Liangbin Li, and Chenwei Wang participated and presented 7 papers collaboratively.

CPCC Distinguished Seminar by Bhaskar Rao

Title: Insights into the Stable Recovery of Sparse Solutions

Date: June 9, 2010, Wed.

Time: 11 AM

Venue: Engineering Hall 2430

ABSTRACT

The problem of sparse signal recovery has received much attention recently with the development of compressed sensing. In this talk, we will examine the problem of stable recovery of sparse solutions in noisy environments. First we will briefly review algorithms for sparse signal recovery and discuss the connection between l1 minimization and support recovery of sparse signals to provide context. We then establish a connection between the sparse signal recovery problem and wireless communication models in network information theory. We will show that the stable recovery of a sparse solution with a single measurement vector (SMV) can be viewed as decoding competing users simultaneously transmitting messages through a Multiple Access Channel (MAC) at the same rate. With multiple measurement vectors (MMV), we relate the inverse problem to the wireless communication scenario with a Multiple-Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channel. In each case, based on the connection established between the two domains, we will leverage channel capacity results to shed light on the fundamental limits of any algorithm to stably recover sparse solutions in the presence of noise.

SPEAKER'S BIOGRAPHY

Bhaskar D. Rao received the B.Tech. degree in electronics and electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1981 and 1983, respectively. Since 1983, he has been with the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, where he is currently a Professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His interests are in the areas of digital signal processing, estimation theory, and optimization theory, with applications to digital communications, speech signal processing, and human-computer interactions.

He is the holder of the Ericsson endowed chair in Wireless Access Networks and is the Director of the Center for Wireless Communications. His research group has received several paper awards. Recently, a paper he co-authored with B. Song and R. Cruz received the 2008 Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in the Field of Communications Systems and a paper he co-authored with S. Shivappa and M. Trivedi received the best paper award at AVSS 2008. " He was elected to the fellow grade in 2000 for his contributions in high resolution spectral estimation.

CPCC Fall 2009 Seminar Series Launched

CPCC is continuing its seminar series during the Fall quarter of 2009, with an emphasis on circuits and systems for communications. CPCC faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students are presenting their research results to fellow researchers. Sample topics to be presented are integrated circuits for millimeter applications, equalization techniques for optical communication, and architectures for error correcting coding. The seminars take place Mondays at 10 AM at 2430 Engineering Hall and are open to the public. Weekly announcements are emailed to the EECS graduate student and CPCC mailing lists. In order to receive the talk announcements, subscribe to the CPCC Mailing List or visit the CPCC Mailing List Archives to browse through past announcements.

CPCC Seminar Series Launched

CPCC launched a seminar series in order to provide a forum for dissemination of its research during the Winter quarter of 2009, extending into the Spring quarter of 2009. In this series, CPCC faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students are presenting their research results to fellow researchers. Currently the series covers topics in communication and information theory. This series will be extended into the 2009-2010 academic year and then it will cover networking and circuit design in addition to communication and information theory. The talks take place Mondays at 10 AM and are open to the public. In order to receive talk announcements, subscribe to the CPCC Mailing List or visit the CPCC Mailing List Archives to browse through past announcements.

2005 HSSoE Research Symposium CPCC Session

There is a research symposium organized every spring by the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine. The theme of the Symposium in 2005 was California: Prosperity Through Technology. One of the sessions during this symposium, titled Precursors of the Next Wave in Communications, was organized by CPCC. The session took place May 23, 2005. After a Keynote Opening by Raouf Halim, Chief Executive Officer of Mindspeed Technologies, Inc. (a CPCC donor), five faculty associated with CPCC outlined their most recent research. Presentations used during the session, as well as its video, are available from the links on the right.

Presentation Slides (PPS 14MB)

2005 HSSoE CPCC Panel

UC Irvine The Henry Samueli School of Engineering organized its yearly Research Symposium in 2005 on May 23-24, 2005. Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing contributed a panel, titled Pervasive Communications: All the Time, Everywhere, held on May 23, 2005. The eight panelists, drawn from Southern California academic and industrial organizations, discussed the state and the future of the telecommunications industry during the panel. For a video of the panel as well as the Power Point presentations, follow the links on the right.

Presentation Slides (PPS 12MB)

CPCC Summer 2004 Research Presentation Day for Conexant, Mindspeed, and Skyworks Takes Place

CPCC held a Research Presentation Day for three of its donor companies Conexant Systems, Mindspeed Technologies and Skyworks Solutions on July 15, 2004. The event was organized in order to bring CPCC member and affiliate faculty together with researchers from the three companies and to discuss research interests of both sides. The day was part of a series of planned events to put a process in place so that CPCC and its donors can engage in close cooperative research. The first phase of this plan was a CPCC/Cal-(IT)² Poster Presentation Day held on-site at the lobbies of the Newport Beach facilities of Conexant and Mindspeed on May 14, 2004. The Research Presentation Day of July 15, 2004 will be followed by a number of proposals from CPCC member and affiliate faculty, which will result in the determination of a number of CPCC Research Fellowships for the academic year 2004-2005.

CPCC/Cal-(IT)² Poster Presentation Day for Local High-Technology Companies Takes Place

Graduate students from CPCC and Cal-(IT)² presented their research in a poster presentation session held on-site at the Newport Beach lobbies of Conexant Systems and Mindspeed Technologies May 14, 2004. A total of 30 graduate students, 15 from UC Irvine and 15 from UC San Diego, displayed their research.

The goal of the event was to bring graduate student researchers in close contact with the technical teams from the companies. "It's not easy for our technical staff to get out of their offices and attend off-site research presentations," said Debbie Mountford, director of staffing and university relations at Conexant Systems. "We decided it was a great idea to bring the research to them and based on the reaction it appears to be the way to go."

H. Vincent Poor Gives Distinguished Speaker Talk

H. Vincent Poor, a worldwide known scholar, researcher, and educator in the fields of information theory, communications and signal processing visited UCI and gave a Distinguished Speaker talk on February 18, 2004. The event was co-sponsored by the UCI division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, and the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing. The talk was titled "Signal processing in communications: Issues and trends." In his talk, Professor Poor discussed a number of new areas in communications such as turbo processing, multiple-input multiple-output systems, cross-layer design, and quantum communications in a multiuser detection framework.

Presentation slides (PPS 1MB)

Digital Signal Processing Pioneer Visits CPCC

Professor Lawrence R. Rabiner, one of the pioneers of the field of digital signal processing, and a highly accomplished engineer, scientist, inventor, and research leader, visited the CPCC on February 13, 2003 and gave a presentation entitled "Telecom technology for the 21st century." In his talk, Professor Rabiner described the revolution that has taken place in telecommunications during the last decade and pointed to the new telecommunications network architecture that has arisen as a result of this big change. He outlined what the telecommunications network in the 21st century will look like, and gave demonstrations of new services that have already been built. Examples included a text-to-speech system that delivers the emotion in the text, a highly helpful customer care representative system based on speech recognition, and a travel agent software which employs speech recognition as well as facial expression on a 3-D model. Prior to assuming professor positions at Rutgers University and UCSB, Dr. Rabiner was most recently Vice President of Research at AT&T Laboratories where he managed a broad research program in communications, computing, and information sciences.

Presentation slides (PDF 6MB)

Inventor of TCM Visits CPCC

Dr. Gottfried Ungerboeck, inventor of the technique of Trellis Coded Modulation, visited the CPCC on December 9, 2002 and gave a presentation entitled "Coding with Euclidean-space signals: past, present and outlook." Dr. Ungerboeck, who is currently with Broadcom Corporation, is a well-known scientist and engineer, who has spent most of his career at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. While working on voiceband modems, he made the critical observation that it is possible to enlarge the signal constellation by a factor of two, code in the new signal space, and achieve a rate very close to channel capacity without increasing transmission bandwidth. The invention immediately made its way into voiceband modem standards, microwave transmission, and many other applications. The talk is an overview of the current state of coding and modulation.

Presentation slides (PDF 700KB)

Communication Theory Pioneer Visits CPCC

Dr. Marvin Simon, one of the pioneers of the field of communication theory, visited CPCC on October 28, 2002 and gave a talk titled "Advances in Performance Techniques for Wireless Communications." Dr. Simon is a Principal Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. He has been a technology pioneer for the last 34 years and has performed research applied to the design of NASA's deep-space and near-earth missions. Dr. Simon is currently on a Research Leave in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles where he is responsible from forming research collaboration with academic institutions. Dr. Simon is currently working with the CPCC faculty member Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani on extending the techniques presented in his talk to the analysis of error performance of space-time codes in fading channels. Dr. Jafarkhani is one of the inventors of space-time codes, invented three years ago and have already been adopted by next generation cellular network standards WCDMA and cdma2000.

In his talk, Dr. Simon illustrated techniques that enable a unified analysis methodology for different fading channel models and yield closed form solutions. Until recently, when Dr. Simon and his colleague Prof. Slim-Alouni invented the new closed form techniques, system design for fading channels was mostly based on simulations. In communication engineering, closed form solutions are preferable to simulations since they provide substantially more insight into system behavior. Most of the techniques described by Dr. Simon in his talk can be found in his two books Digital Communication Over Fading Channels: A Unified Approach to Performance Analysis (John Wiley and Sons, 2000) and Probability Distributions Involving Gaussian Random Variables: A Handbook for Engineers and Scientists (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).