Communications

Tuesday September 26, 2017 at 3:00 p.m. Professor Robert Schober, Institute for Digital Communications, will be presenting “Molecular Communication in Mobile Systems”. Day & Time: Tuesday September 26, 2017 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Speaker: Professor Robert Schober Institute for Digital Communications Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany Location: Room BA 2165 Bahen Centre for Information Technology 40 St George St, Toronto, ON M5S 2E4 Contact: Arin Minasian Organizers: IEEE Communications Society Event Link: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/47028 Abstract: Molecular communication (MC) is an emerging research area offering many interesting and challenging new research problems for communication engineers, biologists, chemists, and physicists. MC is widely considered to be an attractive option for communication between nanodevices such as (possibly artificial) cells and nanosensors. Possible applications of the resulting nanonetworks include targeted drug delivery, health monitoring, environmental monitoring, and “bottom-up” manufacturing. In this talk, we give first a brief introduction to MC and nanonetworking. The main focus of the talk is on stochastic channel modelling for mobile MC systems where the transmitter and/or receiver are not fixed but move subject to diffusion and flow. Metrics such as the mean, autocorrelation function, and probability density function of the channel impulse response will be investigated and the notion of coherence time in MC is introduced. Subsequently, the implications of time-variant channels for MC system design are studied, and corresponding channel estimation and non-coherent detection schemes are developed. The talk concludes with a summary of potential topics for future work. Biography: Robert Schober (S’98, M’01, SM’08, F’10) was born in Neuendettelsau, Germany, in 1971. He received the Diplom (Univ.) and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Friedrich-AlexanderUniversity of Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU), Germany, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. From May 2001 to April 2002 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada, sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). From 2002-2011, he was a Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. Since January 2012 he is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor and the Chair for Digital Communication at FAU. His research interests fall into the broad areas of Communication Theory, Wireless Communications, and Statistical Signal Processing. Dr. Schober received several awards for his work including the 2002 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Award of the German Science Foundation (DFG), the 2004 Innovations Award of the Vodafone Foundation for Research in Mobile Communications, the 2006 UBC Killam Research Prize, the 2007 Wilhelm Friedrich Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the 2008 Charles McDowell Award for Excellence in Research from UBC, a 2011 Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, and a 2012 NSERC E.W.R. Stacie Fellowship. In addition, he received several best paper awards. Dr. Schober is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada. From 2012-2015 he served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He is currently the Chair of the Steering Committee of the new Communication Society (ComSoc) journal IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multiscale Communication and serves on the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the IEEE. Furthermore, he is a Member-at-Large of the Board of Governors and a Distinguished Lecturer of ComSoc.

Tuesday June 13, 2017 at 3:00 p.m. Prof. Anura Jayasumana, Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society, will be presenting a distinguished lecture “Topology Preserving Maps: A Localization-Free Approach for 2-D and 3-D IoT Subnets”. Note refreshments begin at 2:00 p.m. Day & Time: Tuesday June 13, 2017 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Refreshments 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Lecture Speaker: Prof. Anura Jayasumana Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, CO 80523 USA Location: Room BA 2135 40 St. George Street Toronto, ON M5S 2E4 Contact: Eman Hammad Event Link: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/45777 Abstract: Driven by higher potency and lower cost/size of devices capable of sensing, actuating, processing and communicating, the Internet of Things and of Everything promises to dramatically increase our ability to embed intelligence in the surroundings. Subnets of simple devices such as RFIDs and tiny sensors/actuators deployed in massive numbers in 2D and complex 3D spaces will be a key aspect of this emerging infrastructure. Most techniques for self-organization, routing and tracking in such networks rely on distances and localization in the physical domain. While geographic coordinates fit well with our intuitions into physical spaces, their use is not feasible in complex environments. Protocols based on geographical coordinates do not scale well to 3D either. We present a novel localization-free coordinate system, the Topology Coordinates (TC). Interestingly, geographic features such as voids and shapes are preserved in the resulting Topology-Preserving Maps (TPMs) of 2-D and 3-D networks. Ability to specify virtual cardinal directions and angles in networks is a radical change from the traditional approaches. A novel self-learning algorithm is presented to provide network awareness to individual nodes, a step toward large-scale evolving sensor networks. Application of TCs to social networking will be illustrated. Biography: Anura Jayasumana is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University, where he also holds a joint appointment in Computer Science. He is the Associate Director of Information Sciences & Technology Center at Colorado State. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society. His research interests span high-speed networking to wireless sensor networking, and anomaly detection to DDoS defense. He has served extensively as a consultant to industry ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies. He received the B.Sc. degree from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Michigan State University. Prof. Jayasumana has supervised 20+ Ph.D. and 50+ M.S. students, holds two patents, and is the co-author over 250 papers. He is the recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Mountain States Council of the American Electronics Association.

Wednesday June 7, 2017 at 2:00 p.m. Mostafa Medra, PhD. Candidate, will be presenting “Robust Beamforming Design: A New Approach”. Day & Time: Wednesday June 7, 2017 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Speaker: Mostafa Medra, PhD. Candidate Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering McMaster University Location: Room BA 2145 40 St. George Street Toronto, ON M5S 2E4 Contact: Eman Hammad Event Link: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/45778 Abstract: Due to the increasing demand for higher data rates, spatial multiplexing received a lot of attention. The ability of a base station to do beamforming so that it can serve multiple users at the same time slot and frequency can provide significantly higher rates. When the channel state information is assumed to be perfectly known at the transmitter, designs as the zeroforcing, regularized zero-forcing and maximum ratio transmission can be applied. Those conventional methods are typically of low complexity. In reality the channel state information is estimated and estimation errors are inevitable. Many beamforming designs tried to incorporate the channel uncertainty model into the design problem. While those robust designs normally work better than the conventional designs, their computational complexity is usually much higher. Today we will provide a new approach to dealing with robust beamforming design that is of low- complexity and performs significantly better than both conventional and current robust methods. Biography: Mostafa Medra (S’06-M’16) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt in 2009 and 2013, respectively. Since the fall of 2013, he has been working towards his Ph.D. degree at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He held a research position with the Spirtonic research team in 2012-2013, working on digital signal processing for non-destructive testing using ultrasonic waves. His current research interests include MIMO communications, optimization, wireless communications and signal processing.