Keynote Speakers
DATA DRIVEN WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS AND SENSING
Abstract: In recent years, we have witnessed rapid growth in data generation and transmission due to the emergence of mobile, computation, and sensory devices. Advancements in machine learning are enabling techniques to exploit these data to both improve the existing systems, and design new innovative systems (with CHATGPT a notorious example). An interesting question is how this trend will impact future wireless communications and sensing systems, and even what we will teach about how to design these systems. In this talk, we will discuss how AI will future wireless systems, and how classical model driven design and analysis will be replaced by data-driven design and analysis. In particular, I will discuss the need for challenge datasets and my group’s effort in this direction.
Biography: Vahid Tarokh received the PhD degree from the University of Waterloo in 1995. He worked at AT&T Labs-Research until 2000. From 2000-2002, he was an Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2002, he joined Harvard University as a Hammond Vinton Hayes Senior Fellow of Electrical Engineering and Perkins Professor of Applied Mathematics. He joined Duke University in Jan 2018, as the Rhodes Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was also a Gordon Moore Distinguished Research Fellow at CALTECH in 2018. Between Jan 2019-Dec 2021, he was also a Microsoft Data Science Investigator at Duke University.
Democratizng Innovation For Next Generation Cyber Infrastructure
Abstract: Recently, information communications have been increasingly utilized as a social infrastructure for continuity of socio-economic activities and maintaining human life. Also, cyber physical systems are increasingly playing an important role in our society. Thus, we are currently devoting ourselves to developing next generation cyber infrastructure which is a foundation to support our cyber physical systems for 2030s, including telecommunication extended to space and ocean, computation, sensing, artificial intelligence, security, ethics and data governance. In such efforts for defining, developing and deploying next generation cyber infrastructure, we posit that it is significant to take a democratic approach for accelerating innovations, that is, bringing all the stakeholders in the eco-system, especially providing flexible customization to the infrastructure so that general people that can clearly define the social problems may be able to develop innovative solutions and to evaluate the social acceptance of such solutions.To this end, we have been working on softwarization, virtualization and modularization of telecommunication infrastructure components through open interfaces and democratizing the development of cyber infrastructure by privatization such as Private5G/Local 5G. In this presentation, we will introduce overall R&D landscape for next generation cyber infrastructure in Japan as well as specific research activities that our research lab are pursuing, especially focusing on democratization approach.
Biography: Akihiro Nakao received B.S. (1991) in Physics, M.E. (1994) in Information Engineering from the University of Tokyo. He was at IBM Yamato Laboratory, Tokyo Research Laboratory, and IBM Texas Austin from 1994 till 2005. He received M.S. (2001) and Ph.D. (2005) in Computer Science from Princeton University. He taught as an associate professor (2005-2014) and as a professor (2014-2021) in Applied Computer Science, at Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the University of Tokyo. He has served as Vice Dean of the University of Tokyo’s Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies (2019-2021). In April 2021, he has moved to School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo (2021-present). Since April 2023, he has been serving as Head of Department of System Innovations, School of Engineering. He was appointed as an adviser to the President of the University of Tokyo (2019-2020) and has been a special adviser to the President of the University of Tokyo (2020-present). He is serving as Director, Collaborative Research Institute for NGCI,（Next-Generation Cyber Infrastructure）, the University of Tokyo (2021-present).
For social services, he has been playing several important roles in Japanese government and also at research societies. He has also been appointed Chairman of the 5G Mobile Network Promotion Forum (5GMF) Network Architecture Committee by Japanese government. He has been appointed as Chairman of 5G/Beyond 5G committee, Space ICT Promotion Initiative Forum, International Committee, and Beyond 5G Promotion Consortium as well (2020-present). From 2020 to present, he is a chair and advisor of IEICE technical committee on network systems (NS) as well as a chair of IEICE technical committee on cross-field research association of super-intelligent networking (RISING). He has been elected to become the president of Communication Society, IEICE, in 2024.
Neural Feature Learning For Engineering Problems
Abstract: Using deep neural networks as elements of engineering solutions can potentially enhance the overall performance of the system. However, most existing practices that use DNNs as black boxes make integrating DNN modules in engineering systems hard. In this paper, we address one of such difficulties: in engineering solutions, we often look for parameterized solutions that perform well in a collection of scenarios. In most problems, this means the DNN modules are trained and used in different environments. Instead of using a transfer learning or multi-task learning formulation, which are common in the literature, we argue that such problems are intrinsically about the multi-variate dependence between the data, the label, and the environment parameters. Using an example of symbol detection over wireless fading channels with interference, we demonstrate that such problems can generally be solved as a modal decomposition. We develop new metrics to measure the information contents of features and some basic neural network architectures to perform geometric operations in the space of feature functions. With these building blocks, we discuss the steps to build a receiver that does not require any online training but can adapt to different fading scenarios when given the channel state information(CSI). We use the symbol detection problem as an example to discuss some key issues and steps to include DNN modules in complex engineering systems.
Biography: Lizhong Zheng received the B.S and M.S. degrees, in 1994 and 1997 respectively, from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, China, and the Ph.D. degree, in 2002, from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley. Since 2002, he has been working at MIT, where he is currently a professor of Electrical Engineering. His research interests include information theory, statistical inference, communications, and networks theory. He received the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, the NSF CAREER award, and the AFOSR Young Investigator Award.
Security In Internet Of Things (IoT)
Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) are gaining popularity and will be increasing ubiquitous in near future. They will find use in a vast array of applications ranging from sensing, actuating, monitoring, and decision-making efforts. The expansive usage, while facilitating broad range of applications will bring in challenges related to security. The resource limitations of IoT will complexities to these challenges. In this talk, we will overview these challenges and discuss potential solutions that have in developed in our research efforts. We will discuss about continual authentication approaches to ensure security in sensing elements of IoT system. Detection of threats or malicious behavior and protection of some obvious threats will be the topic of the next issue that we will explore. In addition, we will discuss about the vulnerabilities that can be exploited for various attack scenarios in IoTs. The talk will be concluded with a few remarks regarding the future research directions on IoT security.
Biography: Dr. Prasant Mohapatra is the Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs for the University of South Florida.
Prior to joining USF, Dr. Prasant Mohapatra served as the Vice Chancellor for Research at University of California, Davis. He was also a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and served as the Dean and Vice-Provost of Graduate Studies at University of California, Davis during 2016-18. He served as an Associate Chancellor during 2014-16, and the Interim Vice-Provost and CIO of UC Davis during 2013-14. He was the Department Chair of Computer Science during 2007-13, and held the Tim Bucher Family Endowed Chair Professorship during that period.
In the past, Dr. Mohapatra has been on the faculty at Iowa State University and Michigan State University. He has also held Visiting Scientist positions at Intel Corporation, Panasonic Technologies, Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore, and National ICT Australia (NICTA). He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Padova, Italy and Yonsei University, and KAIST, South Korea.
Dr. Mohapatra was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. He has served on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems, ACM WINET, and Ad Hoc Networks. He has served as the Program Chair and the General Chair and has been on the program/organizational committees of several international conferences. He has been a Guest Editor for IEEE Network, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Communications, IEEE Wireless Communications, and the IEEE Computer.
Dr. Mohapatra received his doctoral degree from Penn State University in 1993, and received an Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award in 2008. He is also the recipient of Distinguished Alumnus Award from the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India.
Dr. Mohapatra received an Outstanding Research Faculty Award from the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis. He received the HP Labs Innovation awards in 2011, 2012, and 2013. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of AAAS.
Dr. Mohapatra’s research interests are in the areas of wireless networks, mobile communications, cybersecurity, and Internet protocols. He has published more than 350 papers in reputed conferences and journals on these topics. Dr. Mohapatra’s research has been funded through grants totaling about 15 million US dollars from the National Science Foundation, US Department of Defense, US Army Research Labs, Intel Corporation, Siemens, Panasonic Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Raytheon, ARM Research, and EMC Corporation.
