Qualcomm Distinguished Lectures

ICNC 2014 features 6 Distinguished Lectures, which are OPEN to ALL attendees of the conference and workshops. The Distinguished Lecture Program is supported by Qualcomm.


 

John Apostolopoulos  (IEEE Fellow/IEEE Distinguished Lecturer)
CTO and Vice President, Cisco, USA

Title: Current and Future Challenges in Application-Centric Networking


Time: 10:00-12:00, Monday, Feb. 3, 2014


Abstract:
Networking technologies are evolving rapidly with advances in indoor location-based services, software defined networks, ubiquitous video, network-based analytics, and the Internet of Things.  This is enabling compelling applications delivered by application-centric networks. In this talk, we will highlight important trends in networking technologies and applications, the technical challenges that arise, and promising future directions of research.


Biography:
John Apostolopoulos is VP & CTO of the Enterprise Networking Group (ENG) at Cisco.  ENG is a $20B/year business that covers wired and wireless networking, mobility/BYOD, SDN, Internet of Things, and video over enterprise networks.  He is also founder of the Enterprise Networking Labs whose goal is to increase innovation in areas of strategic importance to ENG.  Previously John was Lab Director for the Mobile & Immersive Experience Lab (MIX Lab) at HP Labs.  The MIX Lab’s goal was to create compelling networked media experiences that fundamentally change how people communicate, collaborate, socialize and entertain. The MIX Lab conducted research on novel mobile devices and sensing, mobile client/cloud multimedia computing, immersive environments, video & audio signal processing, computer vision & graphics, multimedia networking, glasses-free 3D, next-generation plastic displays, wireless, and user experience design.  John received a number of honors and awards for his individual technical contributions including IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Fellow, named “one of the world’s top 100 young (under 35) innovators in science and technology” (TR100) by MIT Technology Review, Certificate of Honor for contributing to the US Digital TV standard (Engineering Emmy Award, 1997), and he also helped create the JPEG-2000 Security (JPSEC) standard. He has published over 100 papers, received several paper awards, and has 60 granted US patents. John also has strong ties with the academic community and was a Consulting Associate Professor of EE at Stanford (2000-09) and is a frequent visiting lecturer at MIT. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT.


 

Dennis Goeckel  (IEEE Fellow)
Professor, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA

Title: Everlasting Security and Undetectability in Wireless Communications (Lecture Slides)
Time: 13:30-15:30, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2014


Abstract:
Security and privacy are two of the most prominent concerns of contemporary wireless communication systems, as evidenced by the recent surge in traditional cryptographic and emerging information-theoretic approaches for such.  In this talk, we discuss the application of such approaches when the goal is everlasting secrecy, which we define as preventing the interception of any signal that can be stored and eventually decrypted by an interested and determined eavesdropper.  We focus on a number of network scenarios, ranging from approaches in small networks to secrecy scaling in large networks, and present a number of effective methods and their characterization.  We next turn to an even more restrictive security setting: communication when not only the contents but even the presence of the message must be hidden.  After reviewing traditional spread spectrum approaches to such, we present the emerging theory on undetectable wireless communications and constructions for such.


Biography:
Dennis Goeckel received his BS from Purdue University in 1992, and his MS and PhD from the University of Michigan in 1993 and 1996, respectively.  Since 1996, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he is currently a Professor.  He received the NSF CAREER Award in 1999 for "coded modulation for high-speed wireless communications'' and is an IEEE Fellow for "contributions to wireless communication systems and networks''.  He has been a Lilly Teaching Fellow (2000-2001), and he received the University of Massachusetts Distinguished Teaching Award in 2007.  He has served on the Editorial Board of a number of international journals in communications and networking: IEEE Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transaction on Wireless Communications, and the IEEE Transactions on Communications.  He has been a co-chair of the Technical Program Committee of the Wireless Communications Theory Symposium of the IEEE Global Communications Conference (2008), and the Communication Theory Symposium of the IEEE Global Communications Conference (2004).

 

 

Lina J. Karam  (IEEE Fellow)
Professor, Arizona State University, USA

Title: Attentive Visual Processing - Towards User-Centric Visual Technologies
Time: 10:00-12:00, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2014


Abstract:
We are surrounded by data-rich environments and are inundated with information around us. This is becoming increasingly more pronounced with the growth of advanced communications and networking technologies including social media and mobile devices. However, the human brain has limited resources and thus needs to selectively focus these on what it perceives to be important based on the situation at hand. This process is known as selective attention. In particular, we rely heavily on our visual system for quickly capturing and processing information about our surrounding data-rich environments using the process of selective visual attention. Selective visual attention can be exploited in developing advanced attentive technologies that can efficiently capture and process information while optimizing the usage of available resources and maximizing the user experience. This talk provides an overview of the field of visual attention and its applications including past efforts, current trends, challenges, and future directions.


Biography:
Lina J. Karam is a Professor in the School of Electrical, Computer & Energy Engineering at Arizona State University, where she directs the Image, Video, & Usabilty (IVU) research Laboratory. She is a Fellow of the IEEE for her contributions in the image and video processing, visual communications, and digital filtering areas. She was awarded a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a NASA Technical Innovation Award, and the 2012 Intel Outstanding Researcher Award. She was also awarded the Outstanding Faculty Award by the IEEE Phoenix Section in 2012. She has over 100 technical publications and she is a co-inventor on a number of patents. Dr. Karam has served on several journal editorial boards, several conference organization committees, and several technical committees. She served as the Technical Program Chair of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing and as the lead guest editor of the Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing, Special Issue on Visual Quality Assessment. She has co-founded two international workshops (VPQM and QoMEX). She is currently serving as the lead editor of the Proceedings of the IEEE, Special Issue on Perceptual-based Media Processing and as the General Chair of the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.  Her industrial experience includes image and video compression development at AT&T Bell Labs (Murray Hill), multi-dimensional data processing and visualization at Schlumberger, and collaboration on computer vision, image/video processing, compression, and transmission projects with industries including Intel, NEC, Motorola/Freescale, General Dynamics, and NASA.

 

 

Ayman Naguib  (IEEE Fellow)
Senior Director, Qualcomm, USA

Title: The Great Indoors: The Next Frontier in Mobile Positioning
Time: 16:00-18:00, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2014


Abstract:
Indoor positioning is the next frontier in location technology for mobile devices.  Location-based services (LBS) are an integral part of the mobile ecosystem today, relying on the Global Positioning System (GPS) and other technologies.  However, while these technologies have been highly successful at positioning outdoors, they either fail to obtain a fix or do not provide the necessary accuracy indoors. Therefore a whole new world for LBS indoors, remains unexplored.  A new solution is needed for enabling positioning indoors and several new applications can benefit from the presence of such capability such as indoor navigation and search, aisle level location of retail items, check-ins, gaming etc. This talk will provide an overview of the indoor location landscape, discusses several use cases, challenges and approaches to solve the problem. We will discuss multiple sources of information including radio measurements, sensor data and building maps that can be used for determining indoor position on mobile devices.


Biography:
Dr. Ayman Naguib is a Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm Corporate Research and Development, where he is leading the indoor positioning and navigation research in Qualcomm's CR&D, where he has been since 2002. From 1996 to 2001, Dr. Naguib was a principal member of technical staff at AT&T Shannon Labs, where he was one of the key researchers who pioneered the field of space-time coding. Dr. Naguib has over 17 years of research and development experience that spans several areas in wireless systems including array signal processing and MIMO, space-time coding, OFDMA systems design, wireless LAN, and indoor positioning and navigation. Dr. Naguib received his the B.S. and M.S. in electrical in engineering from Cairo University in 1987 and 1990 resp., and M.S. in Statistics and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1993 and 1995 resp. Dr. Naguib has 56 granted US Patents and over 90 other pending USA patent applications. Dr. Naguib has over 50 peer-reviewed journal and papers publications in international conferences and journals and 3 book chapters. Dr. Naguib won two IEEE best paper awards, his 1998 JSAC paper on space-time coding was selected by the IEEE Communication Society as one of the 50 fundamental papers published by the IEEE Communication Society, and he was named an IEEE fellow in Dec 2006 for his pioneering work on space-time coding and signal processing. Dr. Naguib served as an associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS from 2002 to 2007, and as a guest editor to a number of IEEE transactions.

 

 

Panos Nasiopoulos  (CAE Fellow)
Dolby Professor, University of British Columbia, Canada

Director, Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems, UBC, Canada

Title: 3D Technology Challenges: Capture, Compression, and Display
Time: 13:30-15:30, Monday, Feb. 3, 2014


Abstract:
Although 3D technology has been in existence for some time, there are still many unresolved problems in capturing, transmitting and displaying 3D content. 3D video technology can only be a lasting success if the perceived image quality and viewing comfort are significantly better than those of conventional 2D systems. Understanding the limitations of displaying 3D content on different displays as well as the bandwidth limitations for delivering such content are important challenges, and capturing methods need to be systematically improved to accommodate these restrictions. We will overview the inherent technological challenges in 3D technology including guidelines and tools for capturing high quality life-like immersive video content, objective quality metrics for camera systems, displays and compression/content delivery schemes, compression schemes, and receiver-end post-processing schemes that will offer the best possible 3D quality of experience on a range of 3D devices with different displaying capabilities


Biography:
Dr. Panos Nasiopoulos received a Bachelor degree in Physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and a Bachelor, Master and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is presently the Director of the Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems which covers 7 Faculties and 18 Departments (160 faculty members and more than 1000 graduate students) at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He is also a Professor with the UBC department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Inaugural Holder of the Dolby Professorship in Digital Multimedia, and the current Director of the Master of Software Systems Program at UBC. Before joining UBC, he was the President of Daikin Comtec US (founder of DVD) and Executive Vice President of Sonic Solutions. He has made groundbreaking contributions to industry and academia in the areas of interactive digital video (DVD technology), 3D video, digital video compression, and video communications. Dr. Nasiopoulos is a registered Professional Engineer in British Columbia, a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and has been an active member of the Standards Council of Canada, MPEG, ACM and IEEE.

 

 

Dapeng Oliver Wu  (IEEE Fellow)
Professor, University of Florida, USA

Title: Network Science and Its Application in Wireless Networking (Lecturer Slides)
Time: 16:00-18:00, Monday, Feb. 3, 2014


Abstract:
Network science is a new and emerging scientific discipline that examines the interconnections among diverse physical or engineered networks (such as power grid and transportation networks), information networks, biological networks, cognitive and semantic networks, economic networks (such as stock markets), and social networks. This field of science seeks to discover common principles, algorithms and tools that govern network structures, functionalities, and behaviors.  In this tutorial, I will discuss some major problems and methodologies in network science.  To illustrate the application domains of network science, I will focus on distributed control in wireless networks.  In particular, I will present how to apply the decomposition principle in network science to the problem of joint congestion control and scheduling in multi-hop ad hoc networks with multi-class services.


Biography:
Dapeng Oliver Wu received Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2003. Since 2003, he has been on the faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, where he is currently a Professor.  His research interests are in the areas of networking, communications, video coding, image processing, computer vision, signal processing, and machine learning.  He received University of Florida Research Foundation Professorship Award in 2009, AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award in 2009, ONR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award in 2008, NSF CAREER award in 2007, the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (CSVT) Transactions Best Paper Award for Year 2001, the Best Paper Award in Globecom 2011, and the Best Paper Award in QShine 2006. He is the founder of IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering. Currently, he serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, and International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing.  He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Advances in Multimedia between 2006 and 2008, and an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology between 2004 and 2007.   He has served as Technical Program Committee (TPC) Chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2012, and as TPC Chair for IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2008), Signal Processing for Communications Symposium. He served as Chair for the Award Committee, Technical Committee on Multimedia Communications, IEEE Communications Society.