Keynote Speakers

Ying-Chang Liang

Principal Scientist,
Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R),
Singapore

 

 

Biography: Dr Ying-Chang Liang is a Principal Scientist in the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology & Research (A*STAR), Singapore. He was a visiting scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, CA, USA, from Dec 2002 to Dec 2003, and taught graduate courses in National University of Singapore from 2004 – 2009. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2011 for contributions to cognitive radio communications, and received Best Paper Awards from IEEE VTC-Fall in 1999, IEEE PIMRC in 2005, IEEE VTC-Spring in 2011, and EURASIP Journal of Wireless Communications and Networking in 2010. He also received the Institute of Engineers Singapore (IES)’s Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award in 2007, I2R’s Achiever of the Year Award in 2008, and the IEEE Standards Association’s Outstanding Contribution Appreciation Award in 2011, for his contributions to the development of IEEE 802.22, the first worldwide standard based on cognitive radio technology. Dr Liang currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications – Cognitive Radio Series, and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications from 2002 to 2005, and served as a Guest Editor of five special issues on emerging topics published in IEEE, EURASIP and Elsevier journals in the past five years. Dr Liang is currently a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, and has been a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Asia-Pacific Wireless Communications Symposium since 2009.  He is a Wireless Communication Symposium Chair of 2012 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC’12).

 

Title: Cognitive Radio Networks: Challenges and New Opportunities

 

Abstract: Cognitive radio has been proposed as a promising solution to improve the spectrum utilization efficiency in wireless communications. Over the past decade, there have been a lot of research and development activities in this promising area. This presentation will first provide an overview of the state-of-art in the development of cognitive radio networking and communications, then highlight the key cognitive radio concepts which are now actively developed in various wireless systems, such as femtocell networks, and TD-LTE in TV white spaces, and carrier aggregation in LTE-advanced.

 

 

 

 

Nirwan Ansari

New Jersey Institute of Technology,
University Heights Newark,
New Jersey, USA

 

 

Biography:Prof. Nirwan Ansari received the B.S.E.E. (summa cum laude with a perfect gpa) from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark, the M.S.E.E. degree from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. He joined NJIT's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as Assistant Professor in 1988, tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 1993, and has been Full Professor since 1997. He has also assumed various administrative positions at NJIT. He has visited several universities as Visiting (Chair) Professor. He authored Computational Intelligence for Optimization (Springer, 1997) with E.S.H. Hou, and edited Neural Networks in Telecommunications (Springer, 1994) with B. Yuhas. His current research focuses on various aspects of broadband networks and multimedia communications. He has contributed over 400 technical papers, over one third of which were published in widely cited journals. He has also guest edited a number of special issues, covering various emerging topics in communications and networking.
Professor Ansari has served on the Editorial Board and Advisory Board of eight journals, including as a Senior Technical Editor of IEEE Communications Magazine (2006-2009). He has been serving the IEEE in various capacities such as Chair of IEEE North Jersey COMSOC Chapter, Chair of IEEE North Jersey Section, Member of IEEE Region 1 Board of Governors, Chair of IEEE COMSOC Networking TC Cluster, Chair of IEEE COMSOC Technical Committee on Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, and Chair/TPC Chair of numerous conferences/symposia. He is an IEEE Fellow, and some of his recent recognitions include IEEE Leadership Award (2007, from Central Jersey/Princeton Section), the NJIT Excellence in Teaching in Outstanding Professional Development (2008), IEEE MGA Leadership Award (2008), the NCE Excellence in Teaching Award (2009), a couple of best paper awards, a Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award (2010), and designation as an IEEE COMSOC Distinguished Lecturer (2006-2009). He has also been granted over fifteen US patents.
 

Title: On Wide Area Network Optimization

Abstract: Applications, deployed over a wide area network (WAN) which may connect across metropolitan, regional or national boundaries, suffer performance degradation owing to the intrinsic characteristics of WANs such as high latency and high packet loss rate. WAN optimization, also known as WAN acceleration, aims to accelerate a broad range of applications and protocols over a WAN. This talk will present an overview of WAN optimization, and describe how various proposed techniques can improve application performance, mitigate the impact of latency and loss, and minimize bandwidth consumption. It will begin by reviewing the obstacles to efficiently delivering applications over a WAN, and then illustrate the recently proposed content delivery acceleration techniques in WANs from the networking and optimization point of view. It will hopefully elicit interest from the audience to tackle emerging challenges on WAN optimization.

 

Vincent Lau
FIEEE,
Dept of ECE,
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Biography: Prof. Vincent obtained B.Eng (Distinction 1st Hons) from the University of Hong Kong (1989-1992) and Ph.D. from the Cambridge University (1995-1997). He joined the Bell Labs from 1997-2004 and the Department of ECE, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) as Associate Professor in 2004. He is currently a Professor and the Founding Director of Huawei-HKUST Joint Innovation Lab at HKUST. Vincent has published more than 200 IEEE journal and conference papers and has contributed to 28 US patents on various wireless systems. In addition, he is also the key contributor of four IEEE standard contributions to IEEE 802.22 (WRAN / Cognitive Radio). His current research focus includes robust cross layer optimization for MIMO/OFDM wireless systems with imperfect channel state information, interference mitigation techniques for wireless networks, delay-optimal cross layer optimizations as well as stochastic network optimization. He has obtained three IEEE best paper awards and is currently an area editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, area editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters, EUARSIP Wireless Communications and Networking as well as guest editor of JSAC.

Title: Using Control Theory in Wireless Communications:
Convergence Analysis and Optimization of Iterative Algorithms in Stochastic Wireless Networks

 

Abstract: Distributive and Iterative Algorithms play a very important role in wireless resource optimizations or game problems in wireless networks. One important issue associated with distributed algorithm is on the convergence analysis. Traditional convergence analysis is all based on an important assumption that the wireless channels are static during the iterations. However, this assumption is quite unrealistic in practice if the algorithms involve over-the-air iterations. In this case, the channel fading will change well before the algorithm iteration converges and the analysis of convergence behavior under such dynamic environment is very challenging. In this talk, we shall try to address the convergence behavior of iterative algorithms under time-varying channels. We shall first propose a systematic framework to analyze the “algorithm trajectory” and the “time varying target” using non-linear control theory. We found that the time-varying channels act like an "external force" in a virtual dynamic system. Based on the framework, we can sometimes improve the convergence of distributed algorithms using compensation method.