Archives
IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecture
Date and time: Monday, July 9, at 11 am
Location: Room 418, Macleod Building, UBC, 2356 Main Mall, Vancouver
Abstract: Today’s communication networks are highly complex, carry heterogeneous traffic in diverse environments, and are often owned by multiple profit-making entities. To successfully maintain, optimize, and upgrade such large distributed networks, it is important to design new economic incentive mechanisms as well as develop new technologies. The market deregulation of the telecommunication industry in many countries makes such economic consideration even more urgent, as there are often conflicting goals between the regulators and the commercial operators. We will first illustrate how economics can help us better understand the networking industry reality, predict user behaviors, envision new network services, and provide policy recommendations. Then we will focus on the case study of incentive mechanisms for user-provided networks (UPNs). UPNs is a new communication paradigm, which enables users to improve their communications experiences by exploiting the diverse communication needs and resources of other users. The success of UPNs, however, relies on carefully designed incentive mechanisms that effectively encourage users’ voluntary participations and cooperations. We will introduce a new paradigm of cooperative video streaming based on the concept of UPN, where mobile users crowdsource their Internet connectivities and adaptively choose video downloading sequences and streaming qualities. We will introduce a multi-dimensional auction framework, which effectively incentivizes users to cooperate in a distributed fashion.
Biography: Jianwei Huang is an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Communications Society, and a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher in Computer Science. He is a Professor and Director of the Network Communications and Economics Lab (ncel.ie.cuhk.edu.hk), in the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2005, and worked as a Postdoc Research Associate at Princeton University during 2005-2007. His main research interests are in the area of network economics and games, with applications in wireless communications, networking, and smart grid. Dr. Huang is the co-author of 9 Best Paper Awards, including IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications in 2011, the IEEE Communications Society Young Professional Best Paper Award in 2017, and Best (Student) Paper Awards from IEEE WiOpt 2015/2014/2013, IEEE SmartGridComm 2012, WiCON 2011, IEEE GLOBECOM 2010, and APCC 2009. He has co-authored six books: “Wireless Network Pricing,” “Economics of Database-Assisted Spectrum Sharing,” “Monotonic Optimization in Communication and Networking Systems,” “Cognitive Mobile Virtual Network Operator Games,” “Social Cognitive Radio Networks,” and “Radio Resource Management for Mobile Traffic Offloading in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks.” He received the CUHK Young Researcher Award in 2014 and IEEE ComSoc Asia-Pacific Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2009. Dr. Huang has served as an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Editor of IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking, Editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Editor of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications – Cognitive Radio Series, Editor and Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Communications Society Technology News. He has served as a Guest Editor of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, IEEE Network, and IEEE Communications Magazine. He also serves as a Co-Series-Editor of Wiley Information and Communication Technology Series, an Area Editor of Springer Encyclopedia of Wireless Networks, and a Section Editor for Springer Handbook of Cognitive Radio. Dr. Huang has served as Chair of IEEE Communications Society Cognitive Network Technical Committee, Chair of IEEE Communications Society Multimedia Communications Technical Committee, and a Steering Committee Member of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He has served as or will serve the General/TPC/Symposium Co-Chairs of IEEE ICC 2020, NetGCoop 2018/2014, IEEE WiOpt 2018/2017/2012, IEEE SDP 2017/2016/2015, IEEE ICCC 2015/2012, IEEE SmartGridComm 2014, IEEE GLOBECOM 2017/2013/2010, IWCMC 2010, and GameNets 2009. He is the recipient of IEEE ComSoc Multimedia Communications Technical Committee Distinguished Service Award in 2015 and IEEE GLOBECOM Outstanding Service Award in 2010.
IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecture
IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecture, sponsored by the IEEE Vancouver Joint Communications Chapter
Date and time: Monday, June 11, 2018, at 4 pm
Location: Room 418, Macleod Building, UBC, 2356 Main Mall, Vancouver
Abstract: Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications is viewed as the key enabler of 5G cellular networks due to vast spectrum availability that could boost peak rate and capacity. Due to increased propagation loss in mmWave band, transceivers with massive antenna array are required to meet link budget. While massive antenna arrays enable high gain, directionality and user multiplexing, practical realizations face many challenges in radio design and physical layer processing. In this talk, we first review emerging massive array architectures for mmWave communications and compare their performance, power consumption, and cost with comprehensive hardware block model under typical application use cases. We then discuss two important physical layer design aspects in mobile mmWave networks: directional link establishment via initial access and directional link maintenance via mmWave channel tracking. Lastly, we present the state-of-the-art designs of current mmWave standards, discuss their limitation and provide perspectives on innovative approaches for performance boosts and hardware improvements.
Biography: Danijela Cabric is Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include novel radio architectures, signal processing, communications, machine learning and networking techniques for cognitive radio, 5G and massive MIMO systems. Dr. Cabric received the Samueli Fellowship in 2008, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2009, Hellman Fellowship in 2012 and the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2012. She served as an Associate Editor in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Cognitive Radio series) and IEEE Communications Letters, and TPC Co-Chair of 8th International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks (CROWNCOM) 2013. She is now an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions of Cognitive Communications and Networking. She is a Senior Member of IEEE and ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer.
IEEE Seminar
IUniversità degli Studi di Milano, Italy
Title: Computational Intelligence Technologies for Ambient Intelligence
When: Monday, April 23, 2018, 4 pm to 5 pm
Where: Room 418, MacLeod Building (MCLD)
The University of British Columbia
2356 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4
The event is open to public.
Abstract: Adaptability and advanced services for ambient intelligence require an intelligent technological support for understanding the current needs and the desires of users in the interactions with the environment for their daily use, as well as for understanding the current status of the environment also in complex situations. This infrastructure constitutes an essential base for smart living. Computational intelligence can provide additional flexible techniques for designing and implementing monitoring and control systems, which can be configured from behavioral examples or by mimicking approximate reasoning processes to achieve adaptable systems. This talk will analyze the opportunities offered by computational intelligence to support the realization of adaptable operations and intelligent services for smart living in an ambient intelligent infrastructure.
Speaker’s Biography: Vincenzo Piuri received his Ph.D. in computer engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy (1989). He is a Full Professor in computer engineering at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy (since 2000). He has been Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Italy and Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and at George Mason University, USA. His main research interests are: intelligent systems, signal and image processing, machine learning, pattern analysis and recognition, theory and industrial applications of neural networks, biometrics, intelligent measurement systems, industrial applications, fault tolerance, digital processing architectures, and cloud computing infrastructures. Original results have been published in more than 400 papers in international journals, proceedings of international conferences, books, and book chapters. He is Fellow of the IEEE, Distinguished Scientist of ACM, and Senior Member of INNS. He has been IEEE Vice President for Technical Activities (2015), IEEE Director, President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, Vice President for Education of the IEEE Biometrics Council, Vice President for Publications of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society and the IEEE Systems Council, and Vice President for Membership of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Systems Journal (2013-19), and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers and the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, and has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement. He received the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Technical Award (2002). He is Honorary Professor at Obuda University, Budapest, Hungary, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, China, Muroran Institute of Technology, Japan, and the Amity University, India.
More information are available at http://www.di.unimi.it/piuri
IEEE Solid-State Circuits and Technologies Joint Chapter
IEEE / UBC ECE Seminar
Date and time: Friday, February 23, 2018, at 11 am
Location:Room 418, Macleod Building, UBC, 2356 Main Mall, Vancouver
Abstract: I will describe our recent experience of implementing a news content organization system in collaboration with Tencent that can discover hot events from vast streams of breaking news and connect events into stories for easy viewing. Our real-world system has distinct requirements in contrast to previous studies on document topic modeling and detection, in that 1) an event does not only contain articles of a similar topic, but is a cluster of documents that report exactly the same physical incidence; 2) we must evolve news stories in a logical and online manner. In solving these challenges, we propose Story Forest, a state-of-the-art news content organization system based on artificial intelligence and natural language processing. I will briefly describe the key enabling technologies in Story Forest, including identifying the relationship between text objects, e.g., whether they talk about the same event or whether one article is a follow-up of another, based on deep learning. Our system has been deployed in Tencent QQ Browser mobile app.
Biography: Dr. Di Niu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, specialized in the interdisciplinary areas of machine learning, distributed systems, data mining, cloud computing and optimization algorithms. He has coauthored nearly 50 papers in top journals and conferences in computer science and engineering, including the Web Conference (WWW), AAAI, INFOCOM, CIKM, ICDM, Multimedia, SIGMETRICS, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, ACM TOMPECS, etc. He was the winner of the Extraordinary Award (No. 1 out of all 18 award holders) of the CCF-Tencent Rhino Bird Open Grant 2016 for his invention of the Story Forest system for news data understanding at scale, which has been deployed in Tencent’s products.
IEEE / UBC ECE Communications Seminar
Date and time: Friday, September 29, at 11 am
Location: Room 418, Macleod Building, UBC, 2356 Main Mall, Vancouver
Abstract: To stabilize output variability of distributed renewable energy sources (RESs), integrating large-scale RESs is highly utilized, and aggregated RESs are treated almost as any other conventional generators in existing electricity markets. In this talk we first propose a coalitional framework to cope with the uncertainty of RESs when RES owners can participate in a wholesale electricity market as sellers, where a market operator financially penalizes RES owners for deviations between day-ahead and real-time markets. Our theoretical approach incentivizes participants in a coalition by mitigating penalty fees caused by renewable variability. Furthermore, we propose a bidding strategy called Gaussian residual bidding (GRB) to maximize a coalition gain of participants. We prove that the considered game is convex game when GRB is used for all participants. Our extensive simulations with real data demonstrate that the proposed bidding strategy combined with the coalitional framework outperforms other bidding strategies as well as non-coalition cases under various market scenarios. Our results exhibit the revenue of GRB is improved up to 200% compared to the existing empirical quantile bidding and forecast bidding strategies.
Biography: Dr. Hongseok Kim is an Associate Professor at Sogang University, Seoul, Korea. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea, in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA, in 2009. From 2000 to 2005, he was a Member of the Technical Staff in Korea Telecom Labs. From 2009 to 2010, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, and from 2010 to 2011, as a Member of technical staff in Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. His research interests include resource allocation, optimization and machine learning with applications to smart grid and wireless networks such as optimal power flow, microgrid, energy storage and battery management system, load and renewable prediction, power economics, 5G wireless system with renewables, green communications, scheduling in MAC layer, etc.
ICICS-ECE-IEEE Workshop on Future Communications and Multimedia Systems: Connectivity for the Internet of Things
Details are available at http://icics.webi.it.ubc.ca/workshops/index.php/home/
IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecture
Title: EdgetIoT: Mobile Edge Computing for the Internet of Things
Presented by: Prof. Nirwan Ansari, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Speaker
Abstract: In order to overcome the scalability problem of the traditional Internet of Things (IoT) architecture (i.e., data streams generated from distributed IoT devices are transmitted to the remote cloud via the Internet for further analysis), mobile edge computing has been proposed to provision IoT by handling the data streams at the mobile edge. Specifically, each base station is connected to a fog node, which provides computing resources locally. On the top of the fog nodes, the software defined networking (SDN) based cellular core is designed to facilitate packet forwarding among fog nodes. Meanwhile, we propose a hierarchical fog computing architecture in each fog node to provide flexible IoT services: each user’s IoT devices are associated with a proxy VM (located in a fog node), which collects, classifies, and analyzes the devices’ raw data streams, converts them into metadata, and transmits the metadata to the corresponding application VMs (which are owned by IoT service providers). Each application VM receives the corresponding metadata from different proxy VMs and provides its service to users. In addition, a novel proxy VM migration scheme is proposed to minimize the traffic in the SDN-based core.
Biography: Nirwan Ansari is Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He has also been a visiting (chair) professor at several universities such as High-level Visiting Scientist at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Professor Ansari has authored Green Mobile Networks: A Networking Perspective (IEEE-Wiley, 2017) with T. Han, and co-authored two other books. He has also (co-)authored more than 500 technical publications, over 200 published in widely cited journals/magazines. He has guest-edited a number of special issues covering various emerging topics in communications and networking. He has served on the editorial/advisory board of over ten journals. His current research focuses on green communications and networking, cloud computing, and various aspects of broadband networks. Professor Ansari was elected to serve in the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Board of Governors as a member-at-large, has chaired ComSoc technical committees, and has been actively organizing numerous IEEE International Conferences/Symposia/Workshops. He has frequently been delivering keynote addresses, distinguished lectures, tutorials, and invited talks. Some of his recognitions include IEEE Fellow, several Excellence in Teaching Awards, a few best paper awards, the NCE Excellence in Research Award, the ComSoc AHSN TC Technical Recognition Award, the NJ Inventors Hall of Fame Inventor of the Year Award, the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award, Purdue University Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer Award, and designation as a COMSOC Distinguished Lecturer. He has also been granted over 30 U.S. patents. Professor Ansari received a Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1988, an MSEE from the University of Michigan in 1983, and a BSEE (summa cum laude with a perfect GPA) from NJIT in 1982.
IEEE / UBC ECE Communications Seminar
Title: Internet-of-Things: Challenges and Future Trends
Presented by: Prof. Jianguo Ma, Guangdong University of Technology, China
Abstract: The talk begins with the hot topic of Internet-of-things (IoT) together with the confused definition of IoT. IoT has been introduced as the results of the informationization. The definition of IoT will be given with the differences from the RFID/Wireless-sensing-networks/Internet perspectives. We define IoT as TO LET THE THING TALK! The key characteristics of IoT will be discussed followed by the key challenges of IoT. From application point of view IoT has those principles: Prediction, Protection, and Prevention. The privacy issues for IoT will also be discussed.
Biography: Jianguo Ma received the B. Sc. degree from Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China, in 1982, and doctoral degree in engineering from Duisburg University, Duisburg, Germany. He was with Technical University of Nova Scotia (TUNS), Halifax, NS, Canada from April 1996 to September 1997 as a postdoctoral fellow. He was with Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, from October 1997 to November 2005 as a faculty member, where he was also the founding director of the Center for Integrated Circuits and Systems, NTU. From December 2005 to October 2009, he was with University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu, China. He was the Technical Director for Tianjin IC Design Center from November 2008 to November 2016, and concurrently served as Dean of the School of Electronic Information Engineering of Tianjin University of China from October 2009 and the founding Director of Qingdao Institute of Ocean Engineering of Tianjin University from April 2014. Since November 2016 he is with the School of Computer of Guangdong University of Technology, China. His research interests are: Microwave Electronics; RFIC Applications to Wireless Infrastructures; Microwave and THz Microelectronic Systems; as well as Industrial Internet-of-Things. In these areas, he has published 300 technical papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, 7 U.S. patents granted and 40 filed/granted China patents, and 4 books. Dr. Ma was awarded the Changjiang Professorship by the Ministry of Education of China. He was also awarded Distinguished Young Scholar by National Natural Science Foundation of China. He was a member for IEEE University Program ad hoc Committee (2011~2013). He served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters from January 2004 to December 2005. He has been a Member of the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of IEEE since January 2013. He is Fellow of IEEE.
IEEE / UBC ECE Communications Seminar
Title: Molecular Communication: From Theory to Practice
Presented by: Prof. Andrew Eckford, York University, Canada
Abstract: How can we communicate using molecules? This question may unlock new applications in nanorobotics and medicine, but has only recently attracted attention from communication and information theorists. The answer to the question is surprisingly difficult: not only is the medium unfamiliar to communication engineers, but the mathematical details of the communication environment are complicated. In this talk, we present three examples to illustrate the current state of the field: for nanonetworking applications, we present the additive inverse Gaussian channel model; for biological applications, we discuss the information-theoretic capacity of intercellular signal transduction; and for experimental applications, we present a new low-cost, easy-to-use platform to evaluate macroscale molecular communication.
Biography: Andrew Eckford received the B.Eng. degree from the Royal Military College of Canada in 1996, and the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto, in 1999 and 2004, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at York University, Toronto, Ontario. He held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Toronto, prior to taking up a faculty position at York in 2006. His research concerns the application of information theory to nonconventional channels and systems, especially the use of molecular and biological means to communicate. Dr. Eckford’s research has been covered in media including IEEE Spectrum, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. He is also a co-author of the textbook Molecular Communication, published by Cambridge University Press, and was a finalist for the 2014 Bell Labs Prize.
*Co-sponsored by the IEEE Vancouver Joint Communications Chapter
IEEE / UBC ECE Communications Seminar
Title: Broadband Mobile Communications for High Speed Vehicles: Challenges and Opportunities
Presented by: Prof. Pingzhi Fan, Southwest Jiaotong University, China
Abstract: In the blink of an eye, you may miss the 350 km/h high-speed train as it thunders by, not mentioning the 574 km/h French TGV track train (April 2007) or the 581 km/h Japanese JR-Maglev train (December 2003). Recently, there have been growing interests to deliver true broadband wireless internet services to high-speed train passengers. To provide the broadband wireless services in such a high mobility environment, a number of technical challenges should be tackled, such as the severe penetration loss, Doppler shift problem, mobility management, system capacity planning, etc. This talk shall present recent research advances in high mobility wireless communications, including the speaker’s own research progress in anti-Doppler problem techniques, mobility management, etc.
Biography: Pingzhi Fan received his PhD degree in Electronic Engineering from the Hull University, UK. He is currently a professor and director of the institute of mobile communications, Southwest Jiaotong University, China. He is a recipient of the UK ORS Award, the NSFC Outstanding Young Scientist Award, and the chief scientist of a national 973 research project. He served as general chair or TPC chair of a number of international conferences, and is the guest editor-in-chief, guest editor or editorial member of several international journals. He is the founding chair of IEEE VTS BJ Chapter, founding chair of IEEE Chengdu Section. He also served as a board member of IEEE Region 10, IET(IEE) Council and IET Asia-Pacific Region. He has over 200 research papers published in various academic English journals (IEEE/IEE/IEICE, etc), and 8 books (incl. edited) published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd/RSP (1996), IEEE Press (2011, etc), Springer (2004) and Nova Science (2007), and is the inventor of 20 granted PCT and Chinese patents. His current research interests include high mobility wireless communications, 5G technologies, wireless networks for big data, signal design & coding, etc. He is a fellow of IEEE, IET(IEE), CIE and CIC, and IEEE VTS Distinguished Lecturer (2015-2017).
*Co-sponsored by the IEEE Vancouver Joint Communications Chapter