Keynote Speakers

 

Khaled Ben Letaief, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

Professor Letaief received the Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, USA in 1990. From 1990 to 1993, he was a faculty member at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Since 1993, he has been with HKUST where he is a Chair Professor and Head of the Electronic and Computer Engineering Department and the Director of the Hong Kong Telecom Institute of Information Technology.

Dr. Letaief is an acknowledged authority in the area of wireless and mobile communications. He served as consultants for different organizations and is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He has served on the editorial board of other prestigious journals including the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications - Wireless Series (as Editor-in-Chief). He has been involved in organizing a number of major international conferences and events. These include serving as the Co-Technical Program Chair of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Circuits and Systems, ICCCS’04; General Chair of the 2007 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, WCNC’07; as well as the Technical Program Co-Chair of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Communication, ICC’08.

In addition to his active research and professional activities, Professor Letaief has been a dedicated teacher committed to excellence in teaching and scholarship. He received the Mangoon Teaching Award from Purdue University in 1990; the Teaching Excellence Appreciation Award by the School of Engineering at HKUST (4 times); and the Michael G. Gale Medal for Distinguished Teaching (Highest university-wide teaching award and only one recipient/year is honored for his/her contributions).

He is a Fellow of IEEE and is currently serving as an elected member of the IEEE Communications Society Board of Governors, and an IEEE Distinguished lecturer. He also served as the Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Personal Communications, Chair of the 2008 IEEE TAB/MGA Visit Program, and is currently serving as the Chair of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He is the recipient of the 2007 IEEE Communications Society Publications Exemplary Award.

Keynote Speech: Pathways towards Next Generation Cognitive Ubiquitous Networks

ABSTRACT: Over the past decade, wireless communications has seen an exponential growth and will certainly continue to witness spectacular developments due to the emergence of new interactive multimedia applications and highly integrated systems driven by the rapid growth in information services and microelectronic devices. So far, most of the current mobile systems are mainly targeted to voice communications with low transmission rates. In the near future, however, broadband data access at high transmission rates will be needed to provide users packet-based connectivity to a plethora of services. It is also almost certain that the neXt Generation (XG) wireless systems will consist of complementary systems with a set of different standards and technologies along with different requirements and complementary capabilities that will offer users ubiquitous wireless connectivity between mobile and desktop computers, machines, game systems, cellular phones, consumer electronic products, and other hand-held devices. A key requirement in future wireless systems is their ability to provide broadband connectivity with end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS), a high network capacity, and throughput at a low cost.

This talk will present an overview of the most recent trends along with the evolution of wireless systems. It will also describe and discuss the challenges facing the XG broadband systems with a special interest on cognitive ubiquitous communications networks, cooperative communications, dynamic resource allocation, along with cross-layer design and optimization.

Ivan Andonovic, University of Strathclyde, UK

 

staff image

I. Andonovic, ITI Techmedia Professor of Broadband Networks, graduated with a BSc (Hons.) in Electronic and Electrical Engineering in 1978 from the University of Strathclyde. He received a PhD in ‘Lithium Niobate Waveguide Devices’ in conjunction with neighbouring Glasgow University in 1982. He is presently the Head of the Centre for Intelligent Dynamic Communications Systems (CIDCOM) at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Strathclyde University.

He joined Strathclyde in 1985 following several years at Barr and Stroud where he was responsible for the design, manufacture and test of optical guided wave devices. He has held a two year Royal Society Industrial Fellowship, in collaboration with British Telecommunications (BT) Labs during which he investigated novel approaches to broadband networking. Professor Andonovic’s research interests centre on the development of broadband networks, access and home networking and wireless sensor systems. He has edited two books and authored/co-authored six chapters in books and over 230 journal and conference papers. He has been chairman on the IET Professional Group E13, held a BT Short Term Fellowship, Visiting Scientist status at the Communications Research Laboratories of Japan, Visiting Professor at the City University of Hong Kong and Princeton University, USA. He is Topical Editor for the ‘IEEE Transactions on Communications’ and was Technical Programme Co-Chair for the recent ‘IEEE International Conference in Communications (ICC07)’. Prof. Andonovic is a Fellow of the IET, holds Senior Member status within the IEEE and is member of the Optical Society of America.

He was co-founder, Director and Chief Technology Officer of Kamelian Ltd., a high growth technology start-up focussing on the design and manufacture of advanced semi-conductor devices. He was also a member of flagship Scottish Enterprise (government agency for economic growth) establishment team of the Intermediary Technology Institutes (ITIs), aimed at bridging the gap between basic research and company growth. Presently he holds the ITI Techmedia Sponsored Chair in Broadband Networks facilitating the interaction between fundamental research in communications technologies and digital media and pre-competitive development of technologies that will form the input to commercialisation activities in Scotland.

Keynote Speech: Evolution and Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks

ABSTRACT: Advances in low cost wireless and processing hardware have stimulated a range of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) research and their subsequent deployment in a number of applications. Since cost is an essential factor in any development, their designs are driven according to issues such as restricted memory size, limited computation power and low power consumption. However advanced applications such as those demanded by the medical/health care, military and surveillance sectors require higher levels of network performance supporting time sensitive, guaranteed and secure high quality data delivery. These demanding applications drive the need to enhance first generation WSN concepts.

The presentation will address the basic characteristics of WSN solutions and highlight some of the applications that have been addressed. It will then go on to consider some of the near term enhancements such as network management, mobility support, secure and high quality data delivery. Utilising ‘cognitive’ techniques will aid in the management of complex network environments through observing, providing feedback, learning, and making decisions that optimize performance; mobility support is important for the applications characetrised by frequent topological change. This approach not only facilitates the establishment of robust routing paths for mobile nodes but also provides a time-varying topological view to a manager that has beneficial effects on data collection tasks. The transport layer, the lowest layer that secures the end-to-end communication and is responsible for congestion avoidance, can be addressed to yield secure data delivery at a pre-defined quality of service level. There are obvious ramifications of implementing these features placing severe demands on the existing hardware platforms; therefore, a new hardware designs are required. Taking into consideration the demand for these applications, it is reasonable to expect that the cost of deploying these enhancements will be higher than that of traditional WSN based solutions.
 

Plenary Speaker

 

Ping Shum, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

 

P. Shum received the B. Eng. and PhD degrees in electronic and electrical engineering from of the University of Birmingham, UK, in 1991 and 1995, respectively. After PhD graduation, he stay in the same university as an honorary postdoctoral research fellow. In 1996, he carried out research in semiconductor laser and high speed optical laser communication in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hong Kong University, as a visiting research fellow. Since July 1997, Dr. P. Shum joined the Department of Electronic Engineering, Optoelectronics Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong. In 1998, he has received the IEEE EDS/MTTS India Chapter best paper award for his paper in Photonics-98. In 2002, he received the best paper award at the 3rd International Conference on Microwave and Millimeter Wave Technology. In 1999, Dr. Shum joined the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University. He is the chair and founding member of IEEE LEOS chapter in Singapore. Since 2002, he has been appointed as the Director of Network Technology Research Centre. He received the Singapore National Academy of Science Young Scientist Award in 2002 for his contributions on next generation optical communication technology. Dr. Shum has published more than 350 international journal and conference papers. He is the chair, committee member and international advisor of many international conferences (e.g. COIN, ICOCN, OECC, APOC, ICMAT, ICICS, WOCN, ICCCAS, AOE, PIERS, PhotonicsGlobal etc). His research interests are concerned with optical communications, nonlinear waveguide modelling, fibre gratings and WDM communication systems.
 

Plenary Speech: Microstructured Optical Fibers and Their Use in Communications and Sensing Applications

Perry Ping SHUM and Yehuda LEVIATAN

ABSTRACT: Specialty fibers have been widely investigated over the past few years worldwide. In the past decade, they have moved from being an intriguing laboratory curiosity to become a new frontier in the development of optical fibers. These new fibers have micron-scale – or even nanoscale – air-holes running down their length, which influence or define their waveguiding characteristics. The inclusion of such air holes in an optical fiber has resulted in a wide range of novel waveguiding designs and effects, greatly extending the possibilities of some fields while making others possible for the first time. Generalized models such as FDM, FDTD, and SMT for modal analysis of PCF have been developed. Photonic bandgap fibers, record-breaking low-loss all solid fibers, multicore structures, and even nanostructure core fibers have been proposed and fabricated. Novel fiber based devices, ranging from gratings, couplers, and sensors have been explored for application of optical communication systems as well as sensing technologies.