Keynote Lecture I: Recent Progress in Moving Cognitive Radio and Services to Deployment
Preston Marshall (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, USA)

Speaker Bio: Preston F. Marshall has an almost 30 year background in communications systems and software in both research and commercial environments. Currently he is with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office (STO), and serves a Program Manager for many of the DARPA Cognitive Radio programs. These programs include development of dynamic spectrum access technology through the XG Program, Low Cost Wireless networking through the Wireless Networking after Next (WNAN) program and server-less and disrupted wireless applications in the Disruption and Delay Tolerant Networking Program (DTN). These programs collectively provide the technology base for high performance and affordable infrastructureless wireless networking. Mr. Marshall has been Technical Program Chair for all of the IEEE Dynamic Spectrum conferences, and was awarded the Software Defined Radio Forum Industry Achievement Award for 2007. Mr. Marshall holds a B.S.E.E and M.S. Information Science from Lehigh University, and is also a Graduate student at Trinity College, Dublin.

Keynote Lecture II: Wireless Technology in the home and beyond: A perspective from Georgia Tech's Aware Home
Ed Price (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)

Abstract: Wireless technology has permeated consumer's lives and homes perhaps faster than any technology in human history. Yet, much remains to be done to meet the promise of the wireless revolution, however one defines that term. Georgia Tech began looking at how technology could change the home in 2000 with the opening of the Aware Home, a multi-disciplinary research facility (a multi-story house) designed to be a living laboratory to prototype and evaluate domestic technology. The Aware Home has provided us insight at how wireless technology has evolved in the last 8 years. Transitioning outside the walls of the Aware Home to the community of the future we can see how truly pervasive, high-bandwidth wireless communications will drive technology over the next 10 years. A look at specific relevant research projects at Georgia Tech will provide insight into the challenges facing the industry as it transitions more aspects of consumer life to the wireless world.

Speaker Bio: Ed Price is the Research Director and a founder of the Interactive Media Technology Center at Georgia Tech and serves as the Director of the Aware Home Research Initiative at Georgia Tech, having been involved with the Aware Home since its inception as a crazy idea in the late 1990s.
Ed has led many research efforts throughout his career, and has been involved in several successful technology commercialization efforts. Ed holds a number of patents on phonetic audio searching and IP based telemedicine systems. He is past chair of the international Video Development Initiative (ViDe), which is the lead organization behind the ITU H.350 standard for videoconferencing directories. Ed is also a project director in the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Wireless Technologies for Persons with Disabilities, leading the development efforts in universal control and multi-modal interfaces as well as research into emerging wireless technologies. He is Secretary of the INCITS V2 standards committee developing the Alternative Interface Access Protocol, an emerging standard that will ensure that mobile devices will be able to interact with their surrounding environments wirelessly, and is a US representative to ISO/IEC JTC1.

Opportunities and Impediments on the Road to 4G

As the 3rd generation wireless networks face evolution to the 4 th generation (4G), many new additional capabilities, convergence, and impediments are coming the fore. 4G brings together not only high data rates to even the fringes, but also adds a lot of new capabilities such as packet-based voice and multihop relaying to name a few. This panel focuses on (i) to discuss the latest developments in 3GPP-LTE, WiMAX, and UMB and the effort to pave the way towards 4G, (ii) to identify the challenges on the road to 4G including but not limited to the technical, business, and political challenges, (iii) to discuss the most critical impediments on the road to 4G and to identify solutions by which they can be addressed, and (iv) to discuss potential new applications that may make a big impact on the applications community for 4G networks. Panelists will present their observations, derived from their experience, on potential solutions in this direction.

CHAIR: Prof. Ramesh Rao (Director, Calit2 UC San Diego and Professor at UC San Diego)

Ramesh Rao is the Director of the University of California, San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). He also currently serves as the QUALCOMM Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering department of the Jacobs School of Engineering, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1984.

Prior to becoming UCSD division director of Calit2 in 2001, Dr. Rao was Director of the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) at UCSD. He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1984, and also received his M.S. from the university in College Park, MD.

In addition to directing the UCSD division of Calit2, Professor Rao leads several major interdisciplinary and collaborative projects as principal investigator, including the NIH-funded Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD), NSF-funded Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events (RESCUE) and ResponSphere, and Adaptive Systems project co-funded by the UC Discovery Grant program and Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson.

Dr. Rao's research interests include architectures, protocols and performance analysis of computer and communication networks, and he has published extensively on these topics. In 2005-'07 he chaired a National Research Council Committee on Using Information Technology to Enhance Disaster Management, whose findings were published in 2007 by NRC as "Improving Disaster Management: The Role of IT in Mitigation, Preparedness, Response and Recovery." In 2003, he was principal investigator and chair of an NSF Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure Research for Homeland Security. Since 1984, Dr. Rao has authored over 100 technical papers, contributed book chapters, conducted short courses and delivered invited talks and plenary lectures.

He earned his undergraduate BE (Honors) degree in electronics and communications in 1980 from the Regional Engineering College of the University of Madras in Tiruchirapalli, India.

PANELISTS:

Eduardo Esteves (Group Lead, Corporate R&D, Qualcomm, Inc.)

Dr. Eduardo Esteves has over 17 years of experience in design and implementation of wireless communication systems, including both satellite and cellular systems. He joined Qualcomm R&D department in 1997 and worked on the design and implementation of the high data rate (HDR) packet data system, which was the base for the 1xEV-DO system.

Dr. Esteves was the systems lead for the development of Qualcomm's cell-site modem (CSM5500) ASIC that supports the 1xEV-DO standard.

He was also a significant contributor to 1xEV-DO standardization process within 3GPP2 organization. Dr. Esteves graduated with a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Currently, Dr. Esteves leads a group responsible for next generation wireless technologies.

Jim Madsen (Executive Vice President and Chief Business Development Officer, Next Wave Wireless, Inc.)

Jim Madsen is an Executive Vice President and Chief Business Development Officer of Next Wave Wireless. Formerly, Mr. Madsen held several executive management positions at NextWave Telecom which he co-founded in 1995. 

From 1989 to 1995, at QUALCOMM Inc., Mr. Madsen headed the CDMA Business Development where he led the company's PCS business development, marketing and sales initiatives, and also served as Director of Marketing for OmniTRACS' satellite data communications business and was responsible for worldwide VLSI components business development and marketing.

Mr. Madsen earned his S.B. in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his M.B.A. from Stanford University.

Rene L. Cruz (Founder and Chief Science Officer, Mushroom Networks, Inc.)

Rene L. Cruz received the B.S. degree and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois in 1980 and 1987, both in Electrical Engineering. He received the S.M. degree in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T. in 1982. From 1982-1984, he was a senior engineer for Stanford Telecommunications, Inc., developing resource allocation software for satellite communication networks. Dr. Cruz joined the faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD in 1987. His area of research is in the performance analysis of communication networks.

Professor Cruz has developed traffic and service models for communication networks that have been widely adopted within the research community. He is an internationally recognized expert in the area of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in packet switched networks, and was elected to be a Fellow of the IEEE on the basis of these accomplishments.

Prof. Cruz is well known in the academic research community as the inventor of the Network Calculus, a theory that helps design packet based networks with deterministic end-to-end QoS.

Dr. Cruz founded Mushroom Networks in 2004 with Dr. Cahit Akin, and currently serves as Chief Science Officer of the company.

Submission Deadline:
Nov. 25, 2007