Most of the seminars have been recorded. If you missed one, just follow its recording link. Recordings are also useful if the audio was breaking up when you listened the first time - if you try again when the Internet isn't as congested, you should get better quality.

W. Michael Arnold received the B.A. degree in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K., in 1974, the M.Sc. degree in marine science and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering Science from the University of Wales, U.K., in 1977 and 1984, respectively, and the Dr.rer.nat.habil. degree (equivalent to the D.Sc. degree) in biotechnology from the University of Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg, Germany, in 1993.

During post-doctoral work in Juelich and as a University Lecturer at the University of Wuerzburg, he developed the electro-rotational method of dielectric spectroscopy and also worked on other methods of cell electromanipulation. In 1994, he joined Industrial Research Ltd., Lower Hutt, New Zealand, to work on impedance spectroscopy and further methods of particle electromanipulation. Dr. Arnold chaired the session on Biological Applications of Electrostatics at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the IEEE Industry Applications Society. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, U.K.

Nov 6, 2008     

Dr. Faisal Beg, Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University

"Computational Anatomy: Quantifying Brain Anatomy via Statistics in Shape Spaces"

Abstract

In this talk, I will present a brief and informal overview of the brain anatomy, and functional specialization of various brain regions. I will then present an overview of the images of internal anatomy and function of the living human brain that can currently be obtained with MR imaging. Different neurodenerative diseases  and neuro-developmental disorders present a space-time specific pattern of evolution of the brain’s anatomical structure, providing the hope that with sensitive measurements of anatomical state, these early deviations from normal development or incipient pathology can be detected earlier than currently possible. I will show an example of performing statistical classification of hippocampal shape, an organ in the brain mediating memory, using techniques to express shape in the Hilbert space framework of velocity vector fields in the chosen population template.

Biography

Faisal Beg got his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1993, his MS in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University in 1997 and his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 2003. Since fall 2003, he is an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University where he conducts research in the emerging field of Computational anatomy, on topics such as image segmentation, registration and statistical shape modeling. He was recently recognized by the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research with their 2008-2014 Career Investigator Award.

October 16, 2008       Recording

Dr. Jiangchuan Liu, Computing Science, Simon Fraser University

"Opportunities and Challenges of Peer-to-Peer Internet Video Broadcast"

Abstract

There have been tremendous efforts and many technical innovations in supporting real-time video streaming in the past two decades, but cost-effective large-scale video broadcast has remained an elusive goal. IP multicast represented the earlier attempt to tackle this problem, but failed largely due to concerns regarding scalability, deployment, and support for higher level functionality. Recently, peer-to-peer based broadcast has emerged as a promising technique, which has been shown to be cost effective and easy to deploy. This new paradigm brings a number of unique advantages such as scalability, resilience and
also effectiveness in coping with dynamics and heterogeneity.

While peer-to-peer applications such as file download and voice over IP have gained exceptional popularity, video broadcast is still in its early stages and its full potential remains to be seen. This talk will review the state-of-the-art of peer-to-peer Internet video broadcast technologies. I will describe the basic taxonomy of peer-to-peer broadcast and summarize the major issues associated with the design of broadcast overlays. I will closely examine two approaches, namely, tree-based and data-driven, and discuss their fundamental trade-off and potential for large-scale deployment. Finally, I will outline serveral key challenges and open problems, particularly on peer-to-peer distribution for social media.

Biography

Jiangchuan Liu received the BEng degree (cum laude) from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1999, and the PhD degree from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2003, both in computer
science. He was a recipient of Microsoft Research Fellowship (2000), a recipient of Hong Kong Young Scientist Award (2003), and a co-inventor of one European patent and two US patents.

He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada, and was an Assistant Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2003 to 2004.

His research interests include multimedia systems and networks, wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, and peer-to-peer and overlay networks. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and an editor of IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials.

He is a co-inventor of CoolStreaming, the first practical large-scale peer-to-peer live streaming system (with about 760,000 Google entries, and about 500 citations by research papers in the past 3 years).

October 2, 2008       Recording

Myo Tun, Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University

"Rate Control Algorithm Based on Quality Factor Optimization for Dirac Video Codec"

Abstract

Rate control plays an essential role in video coding and transmission to provide the best video quality at the receiver-end given the constraint of certain network conditions. In this research, a rate control algorithm for the wavelet-based open-source Dirac video encoder has been proposed. The existing Dirac architecture has a constant quality control mechanism based on rate-distortion optimization (RDO) giving variable bitrate. The proposed algorithm exploits the existing constant quality control that governs by a parameter called Quality Factor (QF) to give a constant bitrate. A mathematical model called Rate-QF (R-QF) is derived to generate optimum QF for the current coding frame using the bitrate resulting from the encoding of the previous frame in order to meet the target bitrate. The proposed algorithm is a complete one pass process and does not require complex mathematical computation. The process of calculating the QF is simple and further calculation is not required for each coded frame. It also provides the rate control solution for both intra frame-only and inter frame coding modes. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can control the bitrate precisely (i.e. within 1% of target bitrate in average for inter frame coding mode and near perfect flat response in generated bits vs. frame number curve in intra frame-only coding mode). Moreover, the variation of bitrate over each Group of Pictures (GOPs) in inter frame coding mode is lower than that of H.264 using JM11. This is an advantage in preventing the buffer overflow and underflow for real-time multimedia data streaming. More importantly, there is no PSNR performance loss because of the application of the proposed rate control algorithm. It gives superior quality over relatively static motion sequences and the fast motion sequences with average quality.

Biography

Myo Tun received his B.Eng. in Electronics from Yangon Institute of Technology, Yangon, Myanmar and M.Eng. in Telecommunication from Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand in 1996 and 2000 respectively. He worked as a telecom lab. supervisor and research associate at Telecommunication Program, Asian Institute of Technology from 2001 to 2005 in the field of wireless and multimedia communication. Currently, he is completing his PhD study at the School of Engineering and Design, Brunel University, UK. He was involved in a joint project between Brunel University and British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) on the Dirac research and development from August 2005 to July 2008. Since Aug. 2008, he has been with Simon Fraser University, as a research scientist on error-resilient transmission of scalable compressed video using H.264/SVC. His research interests include video compression and transmission, error control coding and wireless communication.

September 18, 2008       Recording

"Novax - Transit Priority on Demand (TransPOD)"

Abstract

Technology is taking society through an age where we are witnessing the mutation of communication systems as we know them. As in the physics realm where the reliance of understanding of light fluctuates between wave and particle theories - so does communication where we rely on the analog world of radio/electromagnetic waves to propagate digital bits of data and where we transfer data generated from a very 'analog' world by means of human interface sensors (even keyboards/touch screens etc) into digital forms and back again as 'readable' or even touchable reproductions of the original form. All this is possible by the immense 'invisible' channels of communications (data highways) that have been built to support the traffic loads.

Once upon a time we relied on word of mouth, physical transportation and our simple memory devices to get information and ourselves from place to place. This evolved to the roads, railroads and telegraphs of the past. Today we have access to a great variety of machines to move us physically around at greater and greater speeds - even around the planet and between them too - BUT - the channels of transporting these are getting blocked and as is understood by data compression and higher density data processing systems, so too do our roads and transportation networks need modernized approaches to improve the congestion we experience every day.

Simply fixing the system is not enough to change the ways we have all become used to in getting around.  Imagine if your transport to and from where-ever arrived and departed on time - every time - and delivered you to your destination on time - every time - and what if it was a public service provided FREE.

Novax TransPOD offers a unique approach to capitalize on communication technology to deliver optimum traffic management and effect enormous savings to Transit operators. In the brief presentation I shall touch upon the applications and requirements of such a system and describe the choices made in the selection of suitable wireless communication technologies used to facilitate the systems being deployed by Novax today.

Biography

Mr. Farrell Segall graduated in Electrical & Electronic Engineering in South Africa in 1976. He worked as a Process Engineer in a then 'state of the art' 6micron bipolar/cmos waferfab facility in South Africa and very soon thereafter started the succession of several companies involved in innovative solutions to the technology industry. He has been actively involved in RF communication at a discrete hardware level and also still very occasionally get active as a Radio Amateur.
 
Since moving to Vancouver he has invented and in some cases led the development of several novel award winning systems. He is also one of the founder Trustees of Silbury School for gifted learners and regularly presents enriched extramural maths, science and robotics programs at elementary schools in Vancouver.
 
In 2005, he joined Novax to lead and direct the development of a new range of Transit Signal Priority systems and devices. The project reached the stage of commercial deployment by early 2007 in several major North American cities and has widened the field of expertise to Novax of wireless mesh outdoor networking.

Sept. 4, 2008 

Dr. Hongfei Du   Recording

School of Computing Science, School of Engineering Science, SFU

"Packet Scheduling Optimizations for Satellite Multimedia Broadcasting"

Abstract

In recent years, there has been tremendous growth in digital multimedia technologies and growing demand of supporting diverse quality of service (QoS) guarantees. It places new challenges for future wireless networks in utilising the available radio resource in a more efficient and effective way. The key to this demand is the involvement of efficient radio resource management (RRM), especially packet scheduling function, to provide various QoS supports for multimedia service delivery. Due to the unique broadcast nature and ubiquitous coverage of satellite communication system, the synergy between satellite networks and terrestrial networks provides new opportunities for delivering point-to-multipoint (or one-to-many) multimedia content to a large number of audience over extensive geographical area. It is expected that the satellite component will play a complementary, but essential, role in delivering multimedia data to those areas where the terrestrial high-bandwidth communication infrastructures are, either economically or technically, unreachable.

The emphasis of this seminar is on the potential optimization techniques pertinent to the packet scheduling over the satellite digital multimedia broadcasting (SDMB) system. Firstly, we investigate the optimizations via the various adaptations of a proportional differentiation (PD) model, taking account of multiple performance measures, e.g., buffer occupancy, queuing delay and data rate. Furthermore, we optimize the packet scheduling schemes by using cross-layer design (CLD) and adaptive optimization mechanisms. Finally, to cope with the interactive service provisioning, we study the scheduling optimization over the satellite broadcasting with a return channel via terrestrial. We propose a novel hierarchical packet scheduling (HPS) scheme, which allocates the resources in an adaptive and QoS-aware manner at different parts of the network, in response to traffic dynamics in the networks as well as link variations of each user. It is shown that these proposals can significantly improve the QoS performance amongst heterogeneous competing flows in terms of both scheduling efficiency and fairness, enhance the end-to-end performance and resource utilization, whilst offering better flexibility and scalability features.
 
Biosketch

Dr. Hongfei Du received the B.Eng degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics, Beijing, China, in 2003. He received the M.Sc, M.Phil, and Ph.D degrees in mobile and satellite communications, from the School of Electronic and Physical Science, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom, in 2004, 2005 and 2007, respectively. From Aug 2007, he joint the BROADWAYS group at CREATE-NET international research institute, Trento, Italy, as research consultant, coordinating and conducting EU research project on middleware design for mobile multimedia broadcasting.

Since Aug. 2008, he has been working with Dr. J Liu and Dr. J. Liang at Simon Fraser University, as a postdoctoral research fellow on efficient video compression/transmission over wireless mesh networks. Dr. Du has been involved in numerous research projects in the area of mobile and satellite communications systems. His main research interests include multimedia broadcasting, scalable video coding, radio resource management, packet scheduling, quality of service and cross-layer design.

Aug. 7, 2008   Recording

Dr. Kozaburo Hachimura

Department of Media Technology, Ritsumeikan University, Japan

"Digital Archiving of Intangible Cultural Properties
-- Storage, Analysis, and Use of Body Motion Data --"

July 10, 2008   Recording

Dr. Mehrdad Dianati, University of Surrey, UK

"Co-operative ARQ for Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks"

May 29, 2008   Part A Recording   Part B Recording

Prof. Paul Ho, Simon Fraser University

"Design Issues for Fast Fading Wireless Channels"

June 12, 2008  

Shirin Karimifar, PhD Student, SFU    Recording

"On Maximizing the Received Data Volume in a Wireless Sensor Network"

May 29, 2008   Recording

Dr. Thomas Johnson, PulseWave Inc.

"RF Switch Mode Power Amplifiers and Bandpass Sigma Delta Modulation"

May 15, 2008 Recording

Dr. Sanjit Mitra, University of Southern California

"Digital Signal Processing: Road to the Future"

May 1, 2008 Recording

Dr. Sami Muhaidat, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University

"Distributed Space-Time Transmission Schemes for Broadband Cooperative Communication"

April 17, 2008 Recording

Dr. Iickho Song, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

"On a Class of Decoding Schemes for MIMO Signals"

Abstract

In this talk, a class of decoding schemes for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems is discussed. Based on the combination of depth- and breadth-first search methods on a partitioned tree, a class of decoding schemes for MIMO systems is proposed. To maximally exploit the advantages of both the depth- and breadth-first search methods, the proposed scheme first partitions the searching tree into several stages, each of which is then searched by a depth- or breadth-first search method. Simulation results indicate that, when the depth- and breadth-first search algorithms are adopted appropriately, the proposed class shows noticeably lower computational complexity than conventional schemes while maintaining optimal bit error performance.

Biography

Dr. Song received his BSE (1982) and MSE (1984) degrees from Seoul National Univ, the MSE (1985) and PhD (1987) degrees from Univ. of Pennsylvania. In 1987, he was a Member of Tehcnical Staff at Bell Comm. Research, Morristown, NJ, USA. He has been with the Korea Advanced Inst. Science and Technology since 1988, where he is currently a Professor. His research interests include Communications and Signal Processing (Communication Theory, Parameter Estimation, Signal Detection, Statistical Signal Processing, Wireless Communications).

April 3, 2008 Recording

Sohail Bahmani, Simon Fraser University

"Joint source-channel decoding of JPEG2000 images with unequal loss protection"

Abstract

Unequal Loss Protection (ULP) is a technique developed for more reliable transmission of bit streams composed of bits with unequal importance over packet erasure channels. It works especially well when applied to scalable bit streams, such as JPEG2000 and H.264/SVC. Although ULP can usually enable
image/video delivery with sufficiently low average distortion, it performs poorly when excessive packet erasures occur. This talk describes a Joint Source Channel Decoding (JSCD) procedure that can retrieve the transmitted information which would possibly remain unrecoverable by standard decoding.

Biography

Sohail Bahmani joined the MASc degree program of the School of Engineering Science at SFU, in 2007, after receiving BSc degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 2006. His ongoing research is pursued under supervision of Dr. Ivan Bajic and Dr. Atousa Hajshirmoahammadi.

March 20, 2008 Recording

Dr. Jim Cavers, Simon Fraser University

"Cooperative Base Station System Design"

Abstract:

Biography

Jim Cavers received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 1970. From 1970 to 1979 he was an Assistant, then Associate, Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa. He spent 1979 to 1982 as a program manager at MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates, in Vancouver, followed by a year as senior engineer at Glenayre Electronics, also in Vancouver. In 1983 he joined the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, where he holds the rank of Professor. From 1990 to 1994, he was Director of the School. His principal research interests are in modulation and detection for mobile communications. Jim is a Fellow of the IEEE.

March 6, 2008 Recording

Dr. Dongning Guo, Northwestern University, USA

"Nonlinear precoding for MIMO channels: analysis and convex design"

Abstract:

We study a nonlinear vector precoding scheme which inverts the wireless MIMO channel at the transmitter so that simple symbol-by-symbol detection can be used at the receiver. In particular, the transmit energy is minimized by relaxing the transmitted symbols to a larger alphabet for precoding, which preserves the minimum signaling distance. First, the average energy savings with random MIMO channels is studied in the large-system limit using the replica method, a technique invented in statistical physics. Secondly, we introduce low-complexity precoding schemes for BPSK and QPSK by using convex rather than discrete relaxed alphabets. The new scheme, despite its polynomial complexity, can asymptotically outperform NP-hard precoding using the popular Tomlinson-Harashima signaling.

Biography

Dongning Guo joined the EECS department at Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor in 2004. He received the Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees from Princeton University, the M.Eng. degree from the National University of Singapore and the B.Eng. degree from University of Science & Technology of China. He was a Visiting Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in summer 2006. He received the Huber and Suhner Best Student Paper Award in the International Zurich Seminar on Broadband Communications in 2000 and the NSF CAREER Award in 2007.

February 28, 2008 Recording

Dr. Ivan Bajic, SFU

"Predictive decoding for delay reduction in video communications"

Abstract:

Low delay is critically important for interactive video communication. This talk describes several predictive decoding techniques for delay reduction. Video frames are predicted from past video data, and displayed before they arrive at the decoder. This enables the user to choose the proper trade-off
between quality and delay. In this way, it is possible to reduce the perceived end-to-end communication delay by about 100 ms while maintaining reasonable video quality.

Biography

Ivan Bajic is an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering Science at SFU. He received the PhD degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2003. Prior to joining SFU, he was on the faculty of the University of Miami from 2003 to 2005.

February 7, 2008 Recording

Dr. Philip Bones, University of Canterbury, NZ

"Motion detection and correction in magnetic resonance imaging"

Abstract:

The data collection for magnetic resonance (MR) imaging lasts for periods up to several minutes, a considerable time for a patient to remain perfectly still and especially difficult for the very young or patients with tremors. Motion while MR data is being acquired can result in significant artefacts in a reconstructed image. Since data collection occurs in spatial frequency space ("k-space"), rigid-body translational motion results in phase errors in the data samples, while rigid-body rotation results in a rotational displacement of the sampling. We have developed a new algorithm to detect and correct these errors via a modified sampling strategy and thereby to achieve a more accurate reconstruction. The algorithm, termed 'TRELLIS' is demonstrated with computational and physical phantom studies as well as on human brain studies.

Biography

Philip Bones received the B.E. (Hons), M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand in 1973, 1975 and 1981, respectively. He worked for a total of 11 years as biomedical engineer in the Department of Cardiology, Christchurch, and a further 2 years as postdoctoral fellow with cardiac groups in Europe (including one year as Alexander von Humboldt fellow in Heidelberg, Germany). He has been on the faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Canterbury since 1988. His research interests include medical imaging, the application of signal processing techniques to physiological signals, and problems in image recovery.

January 24, 2008 Recording

Dr. Nima Mahanfar, Nokia Products Ltd.
Andrew Lea, Simon Fraser University

"Wireless System Design for Implanted Devices

There is an emerging interest in using implantable electronic devices monitor internal signals from human body and control micro-scale systems to treat a variety of problems. The only viable approach for communication with the implanted devices is to use wireless technology since the cost, complexity, and infection risk of an invasive wired communication makes it an impractical alternative. Design of wireless communication devices for implanted devices comprises different elements compared to conventional mobile communication design. This is due to fundamental differences in the environment immediately surrounding the mobile terminals (the implant), size and biocompatibility constraints and reliability requirements.

In the first part of this talk, the generalities of implantable devices will be introduced and different design aspects of implantable antenna design are discussed. In the second part of this talk, an actual implantable device (with the application of wildlife telemetry) will be presented.

Part I: Design Considerations for the Implanted Antennas

by Nima Mahanfar

Antenna design is one of challenging aspects of medical implantable device design, since the optimal antenna dimensions cannot be scaled without compromising the efficiency (operating range). Since the implant site (human or animal body) are fundamentally different from typical propagation and radiation media, the classical efficiency improvement techniques do not apply in the case of implanted antenna design.

In the first part of this presentation, recent advances in different aspects of the implanted antenna design are discussed, including:
- Defining the figure of merit
- The effect of antenna topology and material composition
- The effect of buffer layer
- Potential power scavenging techniques
- Available technologies, chipsets, and commercial products


Part II: A Prototype Implanted Tracking Tag for Wildlife Telemetry

by Andrew Lea

A prototype implanted wireless tag is designed at Wireless Communication Laboratory in Simon Fraser University for monitoring Steller sea lions. This presentation outlines the system level RF design aspects, and estimates for the RF link range. The goal of this project was to achieve a communications range of one kilometer, under line-of-sight conditions, at very low data-rates (1kbps to 15kbps), and have an active lifespan of at least three years. These requirements exceed the performance of any commercially available tracking system, and present a challenging design process.

Biography

Nima Mahanfar received his BS (Honors) and MS degrees from Tehran Polytechnic, Tehran, IRAN, and Ph.D. from IRCOM, Limoges, France all in Electrical Engineering in 1997, 1999 and 2005, respectively. From 1999 to 2001, he was a researcher at Electromagnetics Research Lab., Tehran Polytechnic. From 2006, to 2007 he was a Research Associate at School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University. He has recently joined Nokia Products Ltd, Burnaby, BC.

Dr. Mahanfar is the recipient of CNRS Doctoral Fellowship (France: 2001-2004), NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2005), and 2007 URSI Young Scientist Award (Electromagnetic Theory) and a number of best paper awards and travel grants.

Andrew Lea was born in Charlottetown, PEI. He attained the Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree from Dalhousie University in 2001, and the Master of Applied Science degree from Simon Fraser University in the spring of 2007. He has also worked as a hardware engineer at Nortel Networks and as an RF engineer at Futurecom Systems. He is currently enrolled in the PhD program at SFU, and is conducting research on on-body antennas.

December 13, 2007 Recording

Robert Sobot, Asst. Professor, University of Western Ontario

"Fractional Sigma-Delta Modulator in SiGe"

This talk presents a fourth-order tunable continuous time (CT) bandpass (BP) sigma-delta modulator with fractional delays (f-SDM) fabricated in 0.5um / f_t = 47GHz SiGe technology. The modulator is a fully differential gm-C based circuit powered from a 3.3V supply and occupies 2.3mm x 2.3mm. At sampling rates f_s=600MHz to 1.2GHz and a single-tone input signal, within a bandwidth of BW=20kHz, the modulator demonstrates maximal SNR=50dB and maximal dynamic range DR=47dB. The center frequency notch of the noise transfer function (NTF) is tunable from 185MHz to 289MHz, while the resonator itself can achieve 60MHz to 295MHz. This prototype design experimentally confirms validity of the sugested analytical models and design methodology."

Robert Sobot received the B.Sc. degree in engineering physics from the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1989, and his M.A.Sc. from Simon Fraser University in 1996. From 1996 to 2001 he was with PMC-Sierra Inc., Canada, developing mixed-signal integrated circuits for digital communications. He received his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University in 2005, in the area of radio-frequency integrated circuit design. His current research interests include biologically inspired ICs, biomedical IC applications, RF ICs for wireless communications, Sigma-Delta modulation and analog adaptive equalization.

November 29, 2007 Recording

Lesley Shannon, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University

“FPGAs: Applications for the Future"

Modern day FPGAs allow designers to implement complex Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), even Multiprocessor SoCSs (MPSoCs) and Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). This talk will provide an overview of the current state of FPGA technology and Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools. The context for this discussion will be the usage of FPGAs in communications and digital signal processing applications by non-hardware experts.

Dr. Lesley Shannon attended the University of Toronto for both her Masters and Doctoral studies in Computer Engineering. She joined Simon Fraser University's School of Engineering Science in the fall of 2006 as an Assistant Professor. Her research interests include alternative computing architectures such as reconfigurable computing, SoCs, MPSoCs, NoCs, embedded computing, and meta-computing.

November 15, 2007 Recording

Upul Samarwickrama, PhD Student, Simon Fraser University

"M-Channel Multiple Description Coding with Two Rates Predictive Coding and Staggered Quantization"

Multiple description coding (MDC) is a source coding scheme that achieves robustness over erasure channels by generating and sending two or more different coarse versions of the message called descriptions over separate channels. Each description can reconstruct the message with an acceptable fidelity and when more than one description is available at the receiver they are combined to enhance the fidelity. Communication systems with channel erasures such as data networks with packet losses and wireless channels with deep fades find MDC an attractive alternative for traditional source coding specially when there are delay constraints.

Most of the MDC methods developed so far are limited to the two channel case. In this talk we present a new low complexity MDC method that can generate any number of descriptions. The design of the new scheme is based on coding with two rates, prediction and staggered quantization. The system design will be presented followed by a performance analysis and a comparison with some of the existing methods. We will also discuss the application of this new technique for image coding. From the experimental results we will show that this method is competent with the state of the art MD image coders in the literature.

Upul Samarawickrama received his BSc degree in electronics and Telecommunications engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, in 2002, and MSc degree from the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 2005. He is currently pursuing his PhD studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada, under the supervision of Dr. J. Liang.

November 1, 2007 Recording

Wilf LeBlanc, Technical Director for VoIP, Broadcom Corp.

“Voice Enhancement Devices for Digital Telephony"

This seminar provides a tutorial overview of voice enhancement devices in telecommunication products such as cellular telephones, bluetooth headsets, car kits, PNDs, and voice over IP (VoIP) telephones. Voice enhancement devices include items such as acoustic echo cancellation, noise and echo suppression, beamforming, automatic gain and level control, and spectral shaping for intelligibility enhancements. As part of the seminar there will be some audio demonstrations.

Wilf LeBlanc is a Technical Director for VoIP in Broadcom's Wireless Connectivity Group and is responsible for ensuring the audio quality of the company's VoIP products such as IP phone, cable, DSL and terminal adapters. He is also responsible for development of echo cancellation and voice enhancement technology for VoIP, Bluetooth, and cellular devices. He has over 50 patents filed and/or granted. In 1999, Wilf was a consultant developing an advanced packet voice system for HotHaus Technologies, when that company was acquired by Broadcom. Wilf decided to close his consulting business and join Broadcom in December 2000. He came to Broadcom with a B.A. Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia and advanced degrees of an M. Eng. and Ph.D. in Systems and Computer Engineering from Carleton University. Wilf has published more than 18 papers (several of these presented at IEEE conferences) and has received recognition throughout his career for his research contributions.

October 18, 2007 Recording

Lee Pucker, Pres., ForwardLink Consulting Inc.

“Introduction to the SDR Technology and the Software Defined Radio Forum"

Software defined radio (SDR) is viewed by many as a key enabling technology for addressing the problems inherent in many commercial and military communications systems. This technology allows radio systems to be dynamically reprogrammed to support new air interface standards or to provide new features and capabilities to the radio while in service. The benefit of software defined radio lies in its ability to support interoperation of a single radio device on multiple radio networks. It also "future proofs" the radio architecture, allowing support for new waveform standards as they emerge.

This talk will provide an overview of software defined radio technology, including discussing SDR architectures and regulatory issues, and will introduce the SDR Forum as a central focal point for SDR activities worldwide. The SDR Forum is a non-profit international industry association dedicated to supporting the development and deployment of software defined radio technologies that enable flexible and adaptable architectures in advanced wireless systems. Currently numbering some 100 organizations, the Forum's membership spans commercial, defense and civil government organizations, including wireless service providers, network operators, component and equipment manufacturers, hardware and software developers, regulatory agencies, and academia from Asia, Europe, and North America.

Lee Pucker is the President of ForwardLink Consulting Inc., based in Surrey, British Columbia and has been contracted by the SDR Forum to provide CEO services. Mr. Pucker has more than 25 years experience in the development and management of wireless products and technologies, with over 10 years of experience in driving product and business strategy in collaboration with marketing, sales and engineering. Mr. Pucker holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, and a Masters of Science degree at The Johns Hopkins University.

October 4, 2007 Recording

Xiaodai Dong, Asst. Prof., University of Victoria

“Transmitted reference pulse cluster systems for low data rate UWB communication"

To meet the implementation constraint posed by practical ultra-wideband (UWB) delay lines, a new transmitted reference (TR) pulse cluster structure is proposed, where a group of reference and data pulses are closely and uniformly placed to form a cluster. This structure enables a simple, robust and practical auto-correlation detector to be implemented in the receiver. It is compatible with the signal format proposed by the IEEE 802.15.4a Working Group for coherent and non-coherent systems. The performance of the proposed receiver and non-coherent PPM energy detector with similar implementation complexity are analyzed and compared. Simulation results show that this new TR pulse cluster system outperforms the non-coherent system by about 1.3-1.9 dB for IEEE 802.15.4a channel model 1 (CM1) and 1.3-2.3 dB for channel model 8 (CM8). Further performance improvement to the system can be realized by adaptively changing the decision threshold, leading to additional SNR savings around 1.7 dB for CM1 and 0.6 dB for CM8 channels. In this talk, we will also discuss multiple access schemes and integration interval determination for the proposed TR pulse cluster system.

Xiaodai Dong received her B.Sc. degree in Information and Control Engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China in 1992, her M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from National University of Singapore in 1995 and her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada in 2000. She is presently an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Ultra-wideband Communications at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada. Between 2002-2004, she was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada. From 1999 to 2002, she was with Nortel Networks, Ottawa, ON, Canada and involved in the base transceiver design of the third-generation (3G) mobile communication systems.

Dr. Dong is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications and an Editor for the Journal of Communications and Networks. Her research interests include communication theory, modulation and coding, and ultra-wideband radio.

September 20, 2007 Recording

Daniel Lee, Assoc. Professor, Simon Fraser University

“An Uplink Packet Relay Protocol for CDMA TDD Cellular Systems"

Multihop cellular networks can provably provide several advantages over conventional cellular networks. However, designing a specific protocol in which user mobile stations can relay messages for one another in a cellular system necessitates close consideration of many aspects of the system. This paper presents a simple example of a packet relay protocol design that can be used for reverse channel data traffic in CDMA TDD cellular systems. We call it the synchronous Location-Dependent Packet Relay (synchronous-LDPR) protocol. Mobile users in this scheme can relay its data packets via several mobile stations to the base station. The synchronous-LDPR scheme utilizes a mobile's unused uplink time slot to transmit its own traffic. To reduce signaling overhead and routing setup delay, this scheme uses several minislots within each uplink slot to signal messages between mobiles relaying a packet. Moreover, this scheme can be superimposed on CDMA TDD systems.

Daniel Lee is an associate professor in the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University. He received his Ph.D. (1992) and S.M. (1987) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, B.S. (1985) in Electrical Engineering with Honors, and B.S. (1985) in Mathematics from the University of Maryland. Daniel Lee was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California and an electronics engineer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He has diverse research interests and experiences in communication systems and networks.

September 6, 2007 For Recording, See November 29

Lesley Shannon, Asst. Professor, Simon Fraser University

“FPGAs: Applications for the Future"

Modern day FPGAs allow designers to implement complex Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), even Multiprocessor SoCSs (MPSoCs) and Networks-on-Chip (NoCs). This talk will provide an overview of the current state of FPGA technology and Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools. The context for this discussion will be the usage of FPGAs in communications and digital signal processing applications by non-hardware experts.

Dr. Lesley Shannon attended the University of Toronto for both her Masters and Doctoral studies in Computer Engineering. She joined Simon Fraser University's School of Engineering Science in the fall of 2006 as an Assistant Professor. Her research interests include alternative computing architectures such as reconfigurable computing, SoCs, MPSoCs, NoCs, embedded computing, and meta-computing.

August 16, 2007 Recording

Chintha Tellambura, Professor, Simon Fraser University

“Precoder design and power control using convex and non-convex optimization techniques”

Global optimization has provided both an insightful modeling language and a powerful solution tool to the analysis and design of communication systems over the last decade. In this talk, I will present two specific global optimization formulations.
The first part of this talk provides a convex optimization approach to the precoder design problem in MIMO systems employing Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (OSTBCs). A general precoder design framework is developed for OSTBC-based MIMO wireless systems to exploit the partial channel state information (CSI) on both transmits and receive correlations. The precoder is designed for minimizing the exact symbol error rate (SER) and is formulated as a convex optimization problem that can be efficiently solved using modern optimization techniques. Our proposed design is applicable for various antennas configurations and modulation constellations. Moreover, we show that for some particular correlation models, computationally simple closed-form precoders can be developed.
Convex optimization in communications systems has long been an active research area. However, nonconvex optimization problems usually arise naturally when formulating real-world problems. The second part of this talk presents a new approach to nonconvex optimization problems. One of such problems is the power control problem in wireless networks in order to optimize the transmission subject to quality of service (QoS) constraints. It has been shown earlier that the power control problem in the wireless cellular network framework can be efficiently solved using the so-called geometric programming. However, in order to enable the application of geometric programming the signal to interference ratio (SIR) has been considered instead of SINR. Such change of the original problem formulation is obviously imprecise and might be very loose because it does not take into account the noise component, especially for low SNR operation. In this work, we show that the power control problem for wireless cellular systems can be efficiently solved via the so-called difference of two convex functions (D.C.) programming.

Chintha Tellambura received his PhD in Electronics Engineering in 1993 from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. From 2002, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, where he is a Professor. His research interests include MIMO, OFDM, and wireless communication theory, and he has published about 100 refereed journal papers.

July 29, 2007 Recording available later this year

Jie Liang, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University

“Prediction Compensated Multiple Description Coding”

In conventional multimedia compression, an input source is compressed into one bit stream. Although this approach enjoys the highest coding efficiency, it is extremely sensitive to transmission errors. This motivates the development of Multiple Description Coding (MDC), where several compressed bit streams (known as descriptions) are generated, which can be transmitted to the receiver via different network paths. Judiciously designed redundancies are introduced in these descriptions such that the reconstruction quality degrades gracefully when some of them are lost.
Although most of the information-theoretical frameworks of MDC were laid out almost 30 years ago, the practical design of MDC did not receive much attentions before 1993, but the research in this topic has gained great momentum in the last few years. In this talk, we will summarize a prediction compensated MDC paradigm that we developed recently. After presenting the overall framework, we will analyze its asymptotic performance for the coding of stationary sources with an arbitrary number of descriptions, followed by the optimal designs of lapped transforms and wavelets in this framework. Image coding results with both lapped transform and JPEG 2000 wavelet codecs will be provided, which show that this method can outperform the latest algorithms in the literature by a large margin.

Jie Liang received the B.E. and M.E. degrees from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, in 1992 and 1995, the M.E. degree from National University of Singapore, in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, in 2003, respectively. Since May 2004, he has been an Assistant Professor at the School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University. He was with the Microsoft Windows Media Video Codec Group from 2003 to 2004. Jie Liang's current research interests include multirate signal processing, multimedia communications, and information theory.

July 12, 2007 Recording

Serhat Erkucuk, Post-doctoral student, Simon Fraser University

“UWB Communications: its status, and related work at SFU”

In the last five years, ultra wideband (UWB) communications has been considered to support very high data rates in the order of hundreds of Mbps and to provide high precision ranging/location capability better than 1 m accuracy in Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). These considerations have led to WPAN standardization activities IEEE 802.15.3a and IEEE 802.15.4a, respectively. The first part of the seminar will summarize the last five years of UWB communications and the related standards activities. The second part of the talk will give an overview of UWB communications research at SFU.

Serhat Erkucuk received the B.Sc. and M.A.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Middle East Techical University, Turkey, and Ryerson University in 2001 and 2003, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in engineering science from Simon Fraser University in 2007. His doctoral research focused on the physical layer design of UWB impulse radios. During his doctoral studies, he closely followed the standardization process of the low-rate WPAN standard IEEE 802.15.4a, and presented several proposals for this standard on behalf of his research group. In September 2007, he will join the University of British Columbia as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow to further his research on physical layer wireless communications.

June 28, 2007 Recording

Robert Sobot , Assistant Professor, University of Western Ontario

"Brain to brain communication: are we there yet?"

At the beginning of the 21st century, we are heading into a new technological revolution. This time, convergence of nanotechnologies and neuroscience is set to lead the next wave of technology, which is expected to influence our lives more than any of the previous ones. As it already has happened several times throughout the history, the new technology is enabling a quantum leap in our scientific advance.

A full century was needed for all important bits and pieces required for the information technology to come together. In this talk some of the most important technological milestones in the microchip development are summarized. Looking ahead, the current research opportunities in the field of neuroscience, more specifically biochip and brain to machine interface, are reviewed in respect to nanotechnology. Direct brain to brain communication seems to be out of the science fiction domain, the only question remaining is: do we have the technology already?

Robert Sobot received the B.Sc. degree in engineering physics from the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1989, and his M.A.Sc. from Simon Fraser University in 1996. >From 1996 to 2001 he was with PMC-Sierra Inc., Canada, developing mixed-signal integrated circuits for digital communications. He received his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University in 2005, in the area of radio-frequency integrated circuit design. His current research interests include biologically inspired ICs, biomedical IC applications, RF ICs for wireless communications, Sigma-Delta modulation and analog adaptive equalization.

June 14, 2007 Recording

Dr Choi Look LAW , Assoc. Prof., Nanyang Technological University

“Ranging detection algorithm for indoor UWB channels and research activities relating to a UWB-RFID localization system”

This seminar concerns the optimal search window size and threshold setting for first path detection to minimize the ranging error in indoor UWB channels. A UWB

measurement campaign with over 1,300 points was conducted in a typical indoor office environment covering an area size of 25m by 25m to assess the sensitivity of ranging errors to parameter settings. The empirical result shows that there is a simple yet effective strategy for ranging parameter setting in line-of-sight (LOS) scenario. The statistical models of the ranging parameters for non-line-of-sight (NLOS) case were established based on the measurement results. With the statistical models, an analytical frame work was developed to evaluate the UWB ranging performance for NLOS case. Using the identified channel parameters, the optimum settings of ranging parameters were found by numerical search using the analytical equation for large ranging error probability. The analytical results suggest that the largest path detection strategy is the optimum detection strategy when signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the received signal is low. As SNR increases, the optimum setting of normalized threshold decreases while the optimum setting of search period increases. In the case that the channel parameters can not be identified, a two-state threshold setting technique is developed.

This is followed by an overview on the research activities in a scalable UWB-RFID localization system by the Positioning and Wireless Technology Centre, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. This project has attracted over a million dollars funding from Singapore Government funding agency. The activities include UWB antennas, pulse generation, low noise amplifier, ranging measurements and modeling, direction of arrival, and UWB-RFID localization.

Prof. Law obtained his BSc (1983) and PhD (1987) from London University, UK. Since then, he has been with Nanyang Technological University. Through his research and consultancies, he has contributed to UWB motion detectors, digital satellite receivers, RFIDs, distributed amplifiers and other topics. His current research interests include mobile ad hoc networks, wireless LAN and PAN, ID and positioning methods, digital receiver and antenna arrays, UWB circuits and device modeling.

May 31, 2007 Recording (some audio problems)

Raymond Kwan , Post-Doctoral Fellow, SFU

“Scheduling for the Downlink in a CDMA Network with Imperfect Channel Estimation”

The problem of scheduling for a single user on the downlink of a WCDMA network is addressed. Expressions are derived for the optimal effective bit rates when adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and multicode transmission are employed. Since the selection of the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) and the number of multicodes requires an estimation of the downlink SIR, it is important to assess the performance degradation due to estimation errors. It is shown that the effective bit rate is quite sensitive to SIR estimation errors. The sensitivity can be reduced by using a conservative estimate of the SIR.

Raymond Kwan obtained his B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics and M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at UBC in 1996 and 1998 respectively. In 1999, he joined the voice browsing project at Nokia Research Center in Tampere, Finland as a research engineer. Between 2000 and 2003, he worked in the area of Radio Resource Management for WCDMA networks in Helsinki, Finland. He obtained his Ph.D in 2006 at UBC in the area of wireless communications, and is currently a Post-Doc at SFU.

Brad Zarikoff , PhD Student, SFU

"EXIT Analysis of an Iterative Multiuser Detector"

Convolutional codes can be used to decrease the data bit error rate in a multiuser MIMO uplink system. Given a second source of memory, such as inter-symbol interference or an iterative multiuser detector, a turbo-like decoder can further improve performance. This paper applies extrinsic information (EXIT) analysis to an internally iterative multiuser detector (IMUD) in serial concatenation with convolutional codes. The focus is overloaded conditions, in which the number of transmitters exceeds the number of receiver antennas. The study seeks to verify if EXIT charts can be used as a design tool under these circumstances. The use of non-Gaussian LLR distributions in performance estimation is discussed. The mutual information of the extrinsic information from IMUD is characterized under a variety of situations. It is shown that the EXIT charts do provide a means to determine both the minimum SNR and necessary number of iterations for convergence. However, estimating the bit error rate from the EXIT chart does not seem to be possible except in special circumstances.

Brad Zarikoff received his B.Eng. from the University of Victoria, Victoria, BC (2002), and his M.A.Sc. from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC (2004). He is currently in his 3rd year of the PhD program at Simon Fraser University. In 2002, he was a student engineer at WaveCom (now Vecima Networks) in Victoria, BC, where he was involved in the RF design and layout of a 2.4GHz wireless base station; in 2003/2004, he spent a semester as a visiting researcher at Tait Electronics, Christchurch, NZ, where he gave a series of seminars and tutorials to the research staff while completing his thesis work. His research interests include signal processing and MIMO techniques for wireless applications, with a focus on low complexity algorithms for signal detection and synchronization.

May 17, 2007 Recording

Wan-Jong Kim , Post-Doctoral Fellow, Simon Fraser University

“Digital Predistortion Linearization With Crest Factor Reduction for Wideband Applications”

The nonlinearity of radio power amplifiers (PAs) produces interference in adjacent channels, due to spectral regrowth beyond the signal bandwidth. WCDMA and OFDM signals are particularly vulnerable, due to their high peak-to-average power ratios (PAPRs). They need stringent linearity, but backing off the input signal to achieve linearity also reduces the PA power efficiency. This seminar shows how to achieve high linearity and high efficiency together by means of a predistorter based on piecewise pre-equalizers and a lookup table; together they compensate for both nonlinearities and memory effects in the PA. Compared to memory polynomials, the structure offers less computation and better performance. The talk also demonstrates a unique structure for predistortion that combines the narrowband benefit of envelope predistortion with the accuracy of baseband predistortion. The talk also presents a novel crest factor reduction technique to reduce the PAPR of the input signal with fewer iterations than conventional iterative peak cancellation. Finally, a direct performance comparison between a digitally predistorted and a feed-forward linearized Doherty amplifier is provided, under various crest factor reduction levels.

Wan-Jong Kim received the B.S and M.S. degrees in radio science and engineering from Kwangwoon University (KWU), Seoul, Korea, in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and Ph.D. degree from Simon Fraser University (SFU), Burnaby, BC, Canada, in 2006. In 2001, he was a RF researcher in Mission Telecomm, Seoul, Korea, where he was involved with development of a high power amplifier for PCS base-stations. Since 2003, he has been a research assistant conducting research in the field of wideband digital linearization, peak-to-average power ratio reduction techniques, and integrated RF/DSP systems applications. His research also involves the hardware implementation of the RF/DSP systems using FPGA and DSP. He has authored and co-authored 11 international journal papers, filed 3 US provisional patents, and he holds 2 Korean patents.

May 3, 2007 Recording

Sarah Kate Wilson , Asst. Prof. and David Packard Fellow, Santa Clara University

“Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, Packet Data Networks and Scheduling”

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation used in many of today's standards including Digital Audio Radio, Wireless Local Area Networks, Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks and Digital Subscriber Lines. Packet data networks assign users slots only when they need it. This is more efficient than circuit-switched networks where a user has a channel whether it needs it or not. As network resources are sparse and shared, how to schedule a user so that the network is used efficiently is important. In wireless networks, user's signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) can vary over time. Multi-user diversity schedules users when their SNR is high. However, OFDM with its multiple subcarriers,each with different SNR's presents an extra level of complexity in scheduling. Rather than simply relying on a single SNR that varies over time, OFDM symbols have a time-frequency grid that contains different SNR values. This talk focuses on methods for scheduling users in an OFDM-based packet network as well as ways to evaluate the success of the scheduling technique.

Sarah Kate Wilson received the AB degree in mathematics from Bryn Mawr College in 1979 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1987 and 1994 respectively. Since 1994, she has worked in both industry and academia as a researcher, project manager and professor. She is an Assistant Professor and a David Packard fellow in the Electrical Engineering Department at Santa Clara. Her research focuses on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and multi-user scheduling issues in wireless networks.

April 19, 2007 Recording

Nima Mahanfar , Research Associate, Simon Fraser University

“Particle Swarm Optimization in Electrical Engineering”

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a population-based stochastic optimization technique inspired by social behavior of bird flocking or fish schooling. PSO shares many similarities with evolutionary computation techniques such as Genetic Algorithms (GA). The system is initialized with a population of random solutions and searches for optima by updating generations. However, unlike GA, PSO has no evolution operators such as crossover and mutation. In PSO, the potential solutions, called particles, fly through the problem space by following the current optimum particles. In past several years, PSO has been successfully applied in many research and application areas. It is demonstrated that PSO gets better results in a faster, less expensive way compared with other stochastic global optimization techniques.

In this tutorial, the foundations, theory, and recent developments of PSO will be reviewed and its applications in different areas of electrical engineering will be presented.

Nima Mahanfar received his BS (Honors) and MS from Tehran Polytechnic, Tehran, IRAN, and Ph.D. from IRCOM, Limoges, France all in Electrical Engineering in 1997, 1999 and 2005, respectively. From 1999 to 2001 he was a researcher at Electromagnetics Research Lab, Tehran Polytechnic, where he was involved in research on measurement of extremely weak electromagnetic fields. During this period he served as a signal integrity consultant to automotive companies. From 2005 to 2006 he was with Wireless2000, Burnaby, BC, helping to develop different UWB radar and telecommunication sub-systems. Since 2006, he is an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University. His research interests are numerical modeling, design, and optimization of antennas and active and passive microwave and RF circuits.

April 5, 2007 Recording

Ivan Bajic , Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University

“Efficient error control for wireless video multicast”

In this talk we will discuss two error control schemes for wireless multicast of scalable video; namely, type 2 hybrid ARQ/FEC (T2HA/F) and non-causal error control (NCEC). T2HA/F is based on incremental redundancy chosen to recover losses and provide the required level of video quality for all users. On the other hand, NCEC relies on error concealment from future video data whose quality is adaptively adjusted to bring the video quality up to the desired level for all users. Experimental results indicate that NCEC can be significantly more efficient than T2HA/F.

Ivan Bajic is an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering Science at SFU. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2003 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. His research interests revolve around signal processing, especially image and video coding and multimedia communications.

Ali Yazdan Panah and Behrang Nosrat-Makouei , Graduate Students, Simon Fraser University

“OFDM With Cyclic-Pilot Time Diversity”

We present a novel transceiver design for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) wireless systems employing pilot symbol aided channel estimation (PSACE). The design is based on the insertion of known pilots into the time-frequency OFDM grid in a controlled cyclic fashion to exploit time diversity in the pilot tones without consuming additional bandwidth resource. Semi-blind iterative detection based on the expectation-maximization algorithm along with optimum combining is employed at the receiver. Despite moderately increased transceiver complexity, simulations show that the proposed design has superior error rate performance compared to conventional PSACE methods for the same pilot overhead.

Ali Yazdan Panah received his BASc from Sharif University in Tehran in 2004, and expects to complete his MASc at SFU this year. His research interests include signal processing for wireless, OFDM and MIMO. Behrang Nosrat-Makouei also received his BASc from Sharif University in 2004 and is completing his MASc at SFU in the medical image processing area. His interests range from digital image processing to wireless communication, including OFDM, MIMO and mobile ad hoc networks.

March 8, 2007 Recording

Ivan Bajic, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University

“Scalable video coding”

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is a set of techniques for representing video at multiple resolutions, frame rates, and qualities, in a single compressed bitstream. This bitstream structure enables very efficient video delivery across heterogeneous networks to heterogeneous clients. In this talk we will introduce the basics of SVC and review some of the recent work on SVC standardization by the Joint Video team of ISO and ITU-T.

Ivan Bajic is an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering Science at SFU. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2003 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. His research interests revolve around signal processing, especially image and video coding and multimedia communications.

Patrick Pun, Broadcom Corp.

“Fano Space-Time Multiple-Symbol Differential Detectors”

We present in this talk a class of suboptimal multiple-symbol differential detectors (MSDD) for differential space-time (ST) codes in time-selective Rayleigh flat fading channel. These noncoherent detectors, termed Fano ST-MSDDs, use the Fano algorithm as their decoding engine and are capable of delivering excellent error performance at moderate implementation complexity over a wide range of fading rates. Compared to the sphere decoder, which is optimal, our best detector, termed an On-Demand Bi-Fano ST-MSDD, suffers only a 0.3 dB degradation in power efficiency while its computational complexity is a very stable function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Simulation results indicate that the On-Demand Bi-Fano ST-MSDD has a complexity that is consistently lower than that of the sphere decoder and all of our Fano ST-MSDDs do not experience the exponential growth in complexity when SNR decreases.

Patrick Pun received his B.A.Sc and M.A.Sc degrees in electrical engineering from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada, in 2003 and 2005, respectively. He is currently a software engineer in the Packet Telephony deparment of Broadcom Corporation, Richmond, Canada.

March 1, 2007 Recording not available; for slides, contact Rodney Vaughan

Rodney Vaughan , Professor, Simon Fraser University

“Design and Evaluation of Compact Antennas for Diversity/MIMO”

The gain of an antenna has a direct impact on the link performance, including the spectral efficiency. The critical role of the antenna in the link efficiency is presented, and classical directive gain and its measurement are reviewed with the natural progression to the distributed gain and the diversity gain for antennas designed for multipath situations. With most wireless links operating in multipath, multi-element antennas with high distributed gain and good diversity performance are required. Developing compact multi-element antennas with statistical performance measures requires convenient experimental evaluation techniques.

Rodney Vaughan completed his Bachelors and Masters of Electrical Engineering at Canterbury University, New Zealand, in 1975 and 1976, and the PhD at Aalborg University, Denmark, in 1985. For many years, he worked at Industrial Research Ltd in New Zealand. In 2003, he joined the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University, where he is Professor of Electrical Engineering and the Sierra Wireless Chair in Communications. His research interests run from antennas and propagation, through signal processing, to topics in biomedical work and electronic music. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and an URSI Correspondent.