Dr Victor Bahl

Principal Researcher

Group Manager
Networking Research Group
Microsoft Research

Victor Bahl is a Principal Researcher and founding manager of the Networking Research Group in Microsoft Research. His research interests span a variety of topics in networking including low-power RF
communications; ubiquitous wireless Internet access and services; location determination techniques and services; self-organizing, self-managing networks; Spectrum agile networks, and real-time audio-visual wireless communications.

Some of his seminal research includes: WiLIB (1997-1998), a general purpose programming interface for wireless network cards; RADAR (1998-1999), the world's first signal strength based indoor user-location determination system; CHOICE (1999-2001), the world's first public area wireless LAN hot-spot network, and UCOM (2001-2003), the world's first multi-radio single network wireless system. For the last four years, he is leading Mesh, a multi-hop wireless networking technology for neighborhood and city-wide broadband access, and NetHealth, an end-to-end enterprise network management system. In addition to building systems, he has authored over 75 scientific papers and 62 international patent applications (28 of which have issued). He
participates and contributes to standards bodies including the IEEE, Bluetooth, HomeRF, and spectrum regulatory bodies such as the FCC. Dr. Bahl's research has been incorporated into Microsoft's core products,
industry standards, and numerous non-Microsoft commercial products. His research has been covered by popular press including, The New York Times, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, Information Week, EE Times,
Technology Review, DataQuest, Wired News, etc. 

Dr. Bahl is the founder and past Chairman of the ACM SIGMOBILE (1996-2005); the founder and past Editor-in-Chief of ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review (1996-2001), and the founder and Steering Committee Chair of ACM/USENIX Mobile Systems Conference (2003-); In addition to ACM MobiSys, Dr. Bahl serves and has served on the Steering Committee of IEEE DySpan, ACM SenSys, ACM MobiCom, IEEE
ISWC, IEEE COMSWARE and on the Technical Program Committee of over 60 international conferences and workshops. He is served on the board of six IEEE and ACM journals. He has given several keynote talks and
tutorials. He received Digital's Doctoral Engineering Award (1995-1997) and ACM SIGMOBILE's Distinguished Service Award (2001). He is a Fellow of the ACM (2003), and a past president of the electrical engineering
honor society Eta Kappa Nu-Zeta Pi.

Abstract

For over a decade we have been pursuing research on optimizing the performance of IEEE 802.11 networks. Its been a stimulating ride. However, its time for the research community to think deeply about problems related to maintaining and managing these networks. IT departments of major corporations spend millions of dollars to keep their networks operating reliably and securely. Yet when you talk to the operation staff they are still unhappy. User complaints about the performance and connectivity go unsolved because the IT staff does not have the tools to perform root cause analysis. Even after years of effort building security protocols corporate wireless networks remain vulnerable. All of this results in user frustration and productivity loss.

On a different front, researchers have long touted wireless meshes as a way to bridge the digital divide. They are the solution of choice for providing low-cost connectivity in remote areas in the developing regions of the world, however these networks are not self-sustaining. Someone still has to keep these networks up and going after they are deployed. Here again there is a serious lack of tools and techniques that allow non-technical users to maintain these networks.

In this talk, I will describe the problem space, enumerate the challenges and offer some technical suggestions on managing IEEE 802.11 networks. My goal is to stimulate discussions by challenging the audience to think about solutions that could eventually lead us to self-managing networks.

Professor Kaveh Pahlavan

Director
Center for Wireless Information Network Studies
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Kaveh Pahlavan, is a Professor of ECE, a Professor of CS, and Director of the Center for Wireless Information Network Studies, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester , MA . He is also a visiting Professor of Telecommunication Laboratory and Center for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu , Finland .

His area of research is location aware broadband sensor and adhoc networks. He has contributed to numerous seminal technical and visionary publications in wireless office information networks, home networking, and indoor geolocation science and technology. He is the principal author of the Wireless Information Networks (with Allen Levesque), John Wiley and Sons, 1995, second edition 2005 and Principles of Wireless Networks A Unified Approach (with P. Krishnamurthy), Prentice Hall, 2002. Before joining WPI, he was the director of advanced development at Infinite Inc., Andover , Mass. working on data communications. He started his career as an assistant Professor at Northeastern University , Boston , MA . He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Wireless Information Networks , the first journal in modern wireless networks established in 1994 and a member of the advisory board of the IEEE Wireless Magazine. He was the founder, the program chairman and organizer of the IEEE Wireless LAN Workshop, Worcester, in 1991, 1996, and 2001; organizer and technical program chairman of the IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications, Boston, MA, in 1992 and 1998; co-chair of the International Workshop on Utra Wideband Systems, Oulu, Finland, 2003; co-chair of the International Workshop on Wireless Adhoc Network, Oulu, Finland, 2004; and the chairman of the IEEE International Conference on Mobile Adhoc Sensor Systems, 2005 . He has also been selected as a member of the Committee on Evolution of Untethered Communication, US National Research Council, 1997 and has lead the US review team for the Finnish R&D Programs in Electronic and Telecommunication in 1999 and NETs project in 2003. For his contributions to the wireless networks he was the Westin Hadden Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at WPI during 1993-1996, was elected as a fellow of the IEEE in 1996 and become a fellow of Nokia in 1999. From May to December of 2000 he was the first Fulbright-Nokia scholar at the University of Oulu, Finland. He has been a consultant to a number companies including CNR Inc, GTE Laboratories, Steinbrecher Corp., Simplex, Mercurry Computers, WINDATA , SieraComm, 3COM, and Codex/Motorola in Massachusetts; JPL, Savi Technologies, RadioLAN in California, Aironet in Ohio, United Technology Research Center in Connecticut, Honeywell in Arizona; Nokia, LK-Products, Elektrobit, TEKES, and Finnish Academy in Finland, and NTT in Japan. Because of his inspiring visionary publications and his international conference activities for the growth of the wireless LAN industry he is referred to as one of the founding fathers of the wireless LAN industry. Details of his contributions to this field are available at www.cwins.wpi.edu .

Abstract

The next generation of Internet is The Internet of Things. To support implement of this emerging world we need to know, Where these Things are? and What is the accuracy of the location reported for these Things? Based on the precision of the estimate for the location of Things it is expected that a myriad of new Internet applications will emerge to stimulate the US economy for another round of industrial growth. The main question to get started is, How can we locate these Things? There are tens of millions of IEEE 802.11 WLAN access point, billions of RFID tags and a growing number of IEEE 802.15 WPANs using Bluetooth, UWB and ZigBee technologies which are somehow connected to the Internet and can be exploited to locate these Things. The bandwidth of these RFID tags range from close to 100KHz in traditional RFIDs to several GHz for emerging UWB localization tags which provide for a diversified technical opportunities to implement localization systems with a variety of precision. The required accuracy of the localization also depends on the application and it varies from a few millimeters, for locating surgery equipments in an operation room, up to a few meters, to locate a person or an equipment indoors and a few tens of meters in outdoors. This keynote provides an insight into the growing market forces in RF localization, technical challenges for precision localization, and research needs to overcome these challenges in the future.

Professor  Sajal K. Das

Director, Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN)
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
The University of Texas at Arlington, USA

Dr. Sajal K. Das is a University Distinguished Scholar Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN) at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He is also a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and an Invited Concurrent Professor of Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

His current research interests include mobile and pervasive computing, sensor networks, smart environments, resource and mobility management in wireless networks, grid computing, and biological networking. Dr. Das coauthored the book "Smart Environments: Technology, Protocols, and Applications" (John Wiley, 2005). He has published over 400 research articles in international conferences and journals, and holds five US patents. He received 5 Best Paper Awards in IEEE PerCom'06, ACM MobiCom'99, ICOIN'02, ACM MSwiM'00 and ACM/IEEE PADS'97. He is also a recipient of the UTA Academy of Distinguished Scholars Award (2006), University Award for Distinguished Record of Research (2005), College of Engineering Research Excellence Award (2003), and Outstanding Computer Science Faculty Award (2001, 2003). He is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at international conferences and symposia.

Dr. Das serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal, and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM/Springer Wireless Networks, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He has served as General or TPC Chair and TPC member of numerous IEEE and ACM conferences. He is the Vice Chair of IEEE TCCC and TCPP Executive Committees.

Abstract

We live in an increasingly connected and automated society. Smart environments embody this trend by linking computers and other devices to everyday tasks and settings. Important features of such environments are that they possess a degree of autonomy, adapt themselves to changing conditions and user preferences, and communicate with humans in a natural way. Smart environment technologies can be embedded in homes, offices, airports, hospitals, classrooms, and other settings in which we conduct our daily activities. Interest in smart environments has existed for decades, however, recent advances in smart devices, wireless and sensor networks, mobile and pervasive computing, machine learning, and middleware technologies are now making this dream a reality.

In this talk, we will examine techniques for inhabitant context(e.g., activity, location) modeling, prediction, and action automation that are critical components of a smart environment. In particular, based on information theory, we will propose a learning and prediction paradigm that manages uncertainty due to inhabitants' contexts in daily lives. The basic idea is to build compressed dictionary of context profiles collected from sensors and other monitoring devices, efficiently learn from such profiles, and optimally track and predict future contexts. Successful predictions not only helps automate tasks and adaptive control of device operations, but also leads to context-aware resource management schemes. We will illustrate the proposed concepts with the help of MavHome project at UT Arlington. Finally, we will discuss how game theory plays an important role in resolving conflicts among multiple inhabitants' context, and conclude with open research challenges.