Thursday April 28th, 2016 at 2:00 p.m. Dr. Nariman Farsad, Post-doc Fellow, Stanford University, will be presenting “Molecular Communication: Theoretical Limits and Experimental Implementations”. Speaker: Dr. Nariman Farsad Post-doc Fellow, Stanford University Day & Time: Thursday, April 28th, 2016 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Location: Room BA 1190 Bahen Centre for Information Technology University of Toronto, St. George Campus 40 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 2E4 Contact: Eman Hammad Abstract: Molecular communication is a new and bio-inspired field, where chemical signals are used to transfer information instead of electromagnetic or electrical signals. In this paradigm, the transmitter releases chemicals or molecules and encodes information on some property of these signals such as their timing or concentration. The signal then propagates the medium between the transmitter and the receiver through different means such as diffusion, until it arrives at the receiver where the signal is detected and the information decoded. This new multidisciplinary field can be used for in-body communication, secrecy, networking microscale and nanoscale devices, infrastructure monitoring in smart cities and industrial complexes, as well as for underwater communications. Since these systems are fundamentally different from telecommunication systems, most techniques that have been developed over the past few decades to advance radio technology cannot be applied to them directly. In this talk, we first explore some of the fundamental limits of molecular communication channels. In particular, we explore the fundamental capacity limits of the molecular timing channels, where information is encoded in the time of release of chemical signals. We also evaluate how capacity scales with respect to the number of particles released by the transmitter. Then, optimal detection in molecular timing channels is briefly discussed. We conclude the talk by presenting some of the recent experimental implementations of molecular communication systems. Biography: Nariman Farsad received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science and engineering from York University, Toronto, Canada in 2010 and 2015, respectively. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he is a recipient of Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Postdoctoral Fellowship. Nariman has won the second prize in 2014 IEEE ComSoc Student Competition: Communications Technology Changing the World, the best demo award at INFOCOM’2015, and was recognized as a finalist for the 2014 Bell Labs Prize. He has been an Area Associate Editor for IEEE Journal of Selected Areas of Communication–Special Issue on Emerging Technologies in Communications, and a Technical Reviewer for a number of journals including IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He was also a member of the Technical Program Committees for the ICC’2015, BICT’2015, GLOBCOM’2015, and GLOBCOM’2016.

Friday May 6th, 2016 at 3:30 p.m. Prof. Wei Yu, IEEE Fellow, will be presenting an IEEE Distinguished Lecture, “Cloud Radio-Access Networks: Coding Strategies, Capacity Analysis, and Optimization Techniques”. Speaker: Prof. Wei Yu IEEE Fellow IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors (2015-17) IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer (2015-16) Day & Time: Friday, May 6th, 2016 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Location: Room BA 1230 Bahen Centre for Information Technology University of Toronto, St. George Campus 40 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 2E4 Contact: Eman Hammad Abstract: Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is an emerging wireless cellullar architecture in which the base-stations (BSs) take advantage of high-capacity backhaul links to upload signal processing and computation to a cloud-computing based central processor. The C-RAN architecture offers an enabling platform for the centralized joint encoding and joint decoding of user messages and a capability for intercell interference mitigation across the BSs. In this talk, we address the capacity analysis and optimization technique for C-RAN while specifically taking into account the finite capacity constraint on the backhaul links. In the uplink, the C-RAN architecture can be modeled as a multiple-access relay channel. We analyze a compress-and-forward scheme in which the BSs quantize the received signals and send the quantized signals to the central processor using Wyner–Ziv coding. We also propose a successive convex optimization approach for optimizing the quantization noise covariance matrix. In the downlink, the C-RAN architecture can be modeled as a broadcast relay channel. We compare the message-sharing strategy versus compression-based strategy for this setting, and show how compressive sensing and weighted minimum mean-squared error (WMMSE) techniques can be used to solve a network utility maximization problem involving joint user scheduling, BS clustering and beamforming in a user-centric message-sharing C-RAN design. Biography: Wei Yu (S’97-M’02-SM’08-F’14) received the B.A.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1997 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. Since 2002, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he is now Professor and holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Information Theory and Wireless Communications. His main research interests include information theory, optimization, wireless communications and broadband access networks. Prof. Wei Yu currently serves on the IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors (2015-17). He is an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer (2015-16). He served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2010-2013), as an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications (2009-2011), as an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2004-2007), and as a Guest Editor for a number of special issues for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications and the EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing. He was a Technical Program co-chair of the IEEE Communication Theory Workshop in 2014, and a Technical Program Committee co-chair of the Communication Theory Symposium at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) in 2012. He was a member of the Signal Processing for Communications and Networking Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2008-2013). Prof. Wei Yu received a Steacie Memorial Fellowship in 2015, an IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 2015, an IEEE ICC Best Paper Award in 2013, an IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2008, the McCharles Prize for Early Career Research Distinction in 2008, the Early Career Teaching Award from the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto in 2007, and an Early Researcher Award from Ontario in 2006. He is recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters. Prof. Wei Yu is a Fellow of IEEE. He is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario.