The following list contains details of talks to be given by tentative invited speakers who would be giving plenary talks, keynote talks and invited session talks.

In the past decade, we have seen tremendous progress in the world of wireless networking. On the one side, wireless LANs are making it possible to transmit multimedia data at unprecedented levels of fidelity and quality. Concepts such as 802.11n will soon allow data rates of over 100 Mbits/sec, which is far more than sufficient for most home multimedia applications. On the other hand, wireless sensor networks have emerged as a premier way of establishing distributed environment management and control. Yet, both areas are suffering from challenges in deployability, maintenance, scalability and most of all, user-friendliness. In this presentation, we will argue that the combination of the two is what is needed for the establishment of a truly user-aware and user-centric smart home environment (most often called ambient intelligence). We will outline the key requirements of what it would take and propose a set of service abstractions that encompass these requirements. A number of case examples will be used to demonstrate the concepts.

Professor JAN M. RABAEY received the EE and Ph.D degrees in applied sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, respectively in 1978 and 1983. From 1983 till 1985, he was connected to the University of California, Berkeley as a Visiting Research Engineer. From 1985 till 1987, he was a research manager at IMEC, Belgium, and in 1987, he joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the University of California, Berkeley, where he is now holds the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Pavia (Italy), Waseda University (Japan), Technical University Delft (Netherlands), Victoria Technical University and the University of New South Wales (Australia). He was the Associate Chair (EE) of the EECS Dept. at Berkeley from 1999 till 2002, and is currently the Scientific co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC, as well as the director of the GigaScale Systems Research Center (GSRC). Jan Rabaey authored or co-authored a wide range of papers in the area of signal processing and design automation. He received numerous scientific awards, including the 1985 IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design Best Paper Award (Circuits and Systems Society), the 1989 Presidential Young Investigator award, and the 1994 Signal Processing Society Senior Award, and the 2002 ISSCC Jack Raper Award.  In 1995, he became an IEEE Fellow  He is past chair of the VLSI Signal Processing Technical Committee of the Signal Processing Society and chaired the executive committee of the Design Automation Conference.  He is serving on the Technical Advisory Board of a wide range of companies. His current research interests include the conception and implementation of next-generation integrated wireless systems. This includes the analysis and optimization of communication algorithms and networking protocols, the study of low-energy implementation architectures and circuits, and the supporting design automation environments.

The U.S. Army is in the process of transforming into a force that will be knowledge-based and network centric. It will field a family of network-enabled manned and unmanned ground and air platforms called the Future Combat Systems (FCS).  Future forces are expected to integrate command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities to an unprecedented degree, leveraging advanced technologies and concepts to create a force that is lighter, more responsive, and far more lethal than present-day forces.  Comprehensive situational awareness, and the network that will enable this transformational capability, will empower Soldiers to conduct complex operations with great speed and precision to devastate any adversary.

John Parmentola has built a career as a pioneer, entrepreneur and innovator. His extensive background in science and technology spans three decades of fundamental research, technology development and acquisition, and manufacturing technology.  He has broad experience in the private sector, academia and has held many positions in the Federal government and Defense Community. Born in the Bronx, New York, Dr. Parmentola received his BS degree in Physics cum laude from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1971 and his PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977. He currently serves as Director for Research and Laboratory Management for the US Army, directing laboratory management policy for all Army laboratories, research, development and engineering centers­—including the Army’s Basic and Applied Research programs spanning 12 basic research disciplines and 14 technology areas at the Army Research Laboratory, Army Research Institute, Army Corps of Engineers, and Simulation and Training Technology Center.  He also oversees Environmental Quality technology, Manufacturing Technology, Small Business Innovative Research, and Army High Performance Computing programs—with a combined annual budget of roughly $750M.  His responsibility encompasses policy for personnel systems, laboratory infrastructure, laboratory security, and Base Realignment and Closure. Before coming to the Army, Dr. Parmentola was Science and Technology Advisor to the Chief Financial Officer of the Department of Energy, where he provided technical, budgetary, and programmatic advice to DOE leaders for more than $7B in science and technology investments—including Defense, Non-proliferation, Science, Fossil Energy, Energy Efficiency, Nuclear Energy and Environmental programs. Prior to joining the US Department of Energy, he was co-founder of the Advanced Systems and Concepts Office of the newly formed Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), where he led a diverse group of 20 scientists and engineers in addressing major national challenges concerning the threat of weapons of mass destruction.  Dr. Parmentola has been Principal Scientist at the MITRE Corporation, where he worked in applying advanced technology in the areas of arms control verification, strategic offense/defense integration, and strategic command, control, and communications associated with the $1.8B Cheyenne Mountain Upgrade Program. Earlier in his career, he was Executive Director for the Panel on Public Affairs of the American Physical Society, a postdoctoral fellow with the Program of Science and Technology for International Security at MIT, conducting pioneering research on directed energy technology, and a postdoctoral fellow with the Laboratory for Nuclear Science of MIT, where he made fundamental research contributions to nuclear physics.  In the field of science, technology, and public policy, he was a Fellow at the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies and a Research Fellow at the Center for Science and International Affairs with the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Dr. Parmentola is also co-founder of a successful publishing company, Travel Media Corporation, where he has served as Chief Financial Officer and Chief Technology Officer for over 15 years.  Travel Media Corporation (TMC) specializes in cross-selling premier hotel properties for leading hotel chains throughout the Caribbean, Latin America and Hawaii through the production and distribution of in-room magazines.  TMC also publishes a Spanish version of Departures Magazine for American Express Gold Card members in Latin America.  TMC’s clients have included Marriott, American Express, Hyatt, Hilton, Westin, Radisson, Ramada, Air Aruba Airlines, Copa Airlines of Panama, Destination Hotels and Resorts and Insignia. Dr. Parmentola was Air Intelligence Agency nominee for the R. V. Jones Central Intelligence Agency Award and recipient of the Outstanding Civilian Service Award for his many contributions to the US Army.  He is a recipient of the Alfred Raymond Prize, Sigma XI Research Award, was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  He has presented and published over 150 speeches, papers, and articles in science and technology policy and is the author of an authoritative book on space defense. 

Insects perform remarkably well at seeing and perceiving the world and navigating effectively in it, despite possessing a brain that weighs less than a milligram and carries fewer than 0.01% as many neurons as ours does. Our laboratory has been trying to unravel the secrets of their success, and incorporate some of the insights into the design of sensors for the guidance of autonomous aerial vehicles. Although most insects lack stereo vision, they use a number of ingenious strategies for perceiving their world in three dimensions and navigating successfully in it. For example, distances to objects are gauged in terms of the apparent speeds of motion of the objects' images, rather than by using complex stereo mechanisms. Objects are distinguished from backgrounds by sensing the apparent relative motion at the boundary. Narrow gaps are negotiated by balancing the apparent speeds of the images in the two eyes. Flight speed is regulated by holding constant the average image velocity as seen by both eyes. Smooth landings on a horizontal surface are orchestrated by holding constant the image velocity of the surface as during approach, thus automatically ensuring that flight speed is close to zero at touchdown. This talk will outline the visually guided behaviours described above, as well as the design of vision sensors tailored to achieve some of these behaviours in autonomous aerial vehicles.

Srinivasan holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University, a Master's degree in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Science, a Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University, a D.Sc. in Neuroethology from the Australian National University, and an Honorary Doctorate (Doctor honoris causa) from the University of Zürich. He is presently Professor of Visual Sciences at the Australian National University's Research School of Biological Sciences and Director of the University’s Centre for Visual Science. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and an Inaugural Australian Research Council Federation Fellow. Srinivasan's research focuses on the principles of visual processing in simple natural systems, and on the application of these principles to machine vision and robotics.

This presentation describes research, development and challenges in autonomously configurable, hybrid, directional wireless sensor networks. The networks use free space optics (FSO) and high performance radio frequency (RF) wireless communications media, and data transmission rates range from 100Mb/s to more than 1Gb/s, using agile transceivers that can intelligently direct or redirect their narrow beams. This redirection process is dynamic and integrated with Internet protocols. Autonomous hardware and software control of network topologies is used to set up (deployed) links, or redirect/configure them in response to performance degradation. This paradigm for dynamic network operation and self-organization is referred to as “topology control.”Hardware and software subsystem scalability (complexity and performance) and their interactions with the physical and network layers will be discussed. Network performance enhancement through topology control will be discussed, including: autonomous reconfiguration; pointing, acquisition and tracking; and adaptive techniques in response to link degradation.

Professor  STUART D. MILNER  received his B.S. from the University of Maryland in 1968, his M.S. from the University of Georgia, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1972. He is a Research Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Director of the Center for Networking of Infrastructure  Sensors, and Associate Director, Maryland Optics Group in the A.J. Clark School of Engineering,  the University of Maryland.    He has been conducting research in the scalability of dynamic wireless networks and topology control in hybrid free space optical/RF directional, wireless networks. Professor Milner continues to direct projects funded by the Department of Defense in the areas of scalable wireless networks, hybrid wireless networks and testbeds.  He also directs National Science Foundation projects in  optical wireless sensor networks for critical infrastructure surveillance and broadband optical/RF wireless networks. Professor Milner directed a joint University of Maryland and commercial research and development project on advanced transceiver acquisition and tracking for optical wireless communications. He has an extensive project experience with the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.   He directed next generation mobile, wireless networking programs, developed the communications infrastructure to support the Synthetic Theater of War Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration, and directed the Defense Simulation Internet (DSI), a worldwide real-time network. He is the author of  recent papers entitled:  "Scalability of Dynamic Wireless Tactical Networks,” "Routing and Mobility Performance in Wireless Base-Station Networks," “ Self-Organizing Broadband Hybrid Wireless Networks,” and “Autonomous Reconfiguration in Free-Space Optical Sensor Networks.”

The Cyberengineering systems focus on design, integration and implementation of multi-scale and multi-level complex systems. Research activities in Cyberengineering will integrate physical devices with distributed sensing and actuation, communications, storage and computation for control of complex systems and information networks. In order to monitor and control the massively distributed systems we need to integrate the cyberinfrastructure with physical world using densely distributed sensors/actuators and sensor networks. The confluence of technological advances in microsensors, on-board and collaborative signal processing, wired or wireless networking has enabled a new generation of sensor systems. A large number of remotely located unattended microsensors with energy efficient computational and communication capabilities will be used to monitor the physical systems. These wide-area array sensors will be providing real time, comprehensive, and high-resolution measurements of physical phenomena. Some of the research issues in the design, fabrication of sensors and sensor networks are design of smart MEMS/Nanotechnology-based low power sensors, self-configurable, self-healing network architecture, collaborative and adaptive signal processing, domain specific algorithms for extracting the salient information from local sensors, trade-off between computation and communications, information fusion and scalability issues for extending algorithms to millions of sensors. The sensor networks are useful in environmental and ecological monitoring, biomedical, structural health monitoring, manufacturing and process control, and security-related applications. A number of applications are included in this presentation. In summary the sensor networks will enable the cyberinfrastructure to interact with the physical world.

Dr. Vittal S Rao received his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, in 1975. Dr. Rao holds the position of William Rutledge Emerson Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMR. He served as the Director of Intelligent Systems Center for 12 years and coordinated the research projects in a number of multidisciplinary research areas. Dr. Rao was successful in obtaining grants for the integration of research and education. His research interests are in the areas of wireless sensor networks, control of smart structural systems, structural health monitoring, networks of Microsystems for monitoring of critical infrastructure. He was awarded a number of ‘Faculty Excellence Awards’ and an ‘Outstanding Teaching Award’ at UMR. He is the author or co-author of more than 190 technical papers and has published in prestigious journals and national/international conferences. He has advised more than 50 students on their MS/ Ph.D. thesis. Dr. Rao gained valuable industrial experience by working at IBM, Allison Gas Turbines, Delco Remy, US Army and Air Force Laboratories during the summer months. Dr. Rao is a Senior Member of the IEEE, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and winner of the 1984 IEEE Centennial Medal. Dr. Rao served as a Chair of Conference on Modeling, Signal Processing, and Control in Smart Structures for SPIE Symposium. He has also served on the organizing committee for IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. At NSF Dr. Rao has core responsibility for general proposals in the Integrative, Hybrid and Complex Systems (IHCS) Program of ECS. He is also the Technical Coordinator for CELEST, the Center of Excellence for Learning in Education, Science and Technology, the NSF Science of Learning Center at Boston University. Dr. Rao is the coordinator for NIRT proposals within ECS Division. He is one of the two ECS representatives on the Cyberinfrastructure Working Group (CIWG) of the Engineering Directorate of NSF. Dr. Rao received the NSF Director’s Award for Collaborative Integration during 2004.

This talk will explore various emerging views of modern wireless sensor network systems and relate these to existing wired and wireless SCADA systems which have been in widespread use for several decades. The talk will also describe and discuss key research challenges facing modern low data-rate wireless sensor network systems. Recent developments taking place in the NICTA sensor networks research program will be outlined.

Rob Evans was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1947. After completing a BE degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Melbourne in 1969, he spent 5 years as an engineering officer with the Royal Australian Airforce, working in the area of radar systems. He then completed a PhD in 1975 at the University of Newcastle followed by postdoctoral studies at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT, USA, and the Control and Management Department, Cambridge University, UK. In 1977 he took up an academic position at the University of Newcastle, where he was Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1986 - 1991, and Co-director of an ARC Special Research Centre on Industrial Control Systems between 1988 - 1991. In 1992 he moved to the University of Melbourne, where he was Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering until 1996, and is Research Leader for the Cooperative Centre for Sensor Signal and Information Processing and Director of the Centre for Networked decision Systems. His research has ranged across many areas including control theory, radar systems, signal processing, and computer systems. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and Fellow of The Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (USA).

Over the last decade, the Unmanned Airborne Vehicle (UAV) industry has experienced unprecedented growth.  This growth has primarily been fuelled by military demand and the maturing of a range of ICT technologies.  Whilst UAVs have been demonstrated to be useful for military applications, several hurdles must be overcome before their utility will be realised in civilian environments.  This is despite the fact that there are compelling civilian applications for UAVs such as: powerline monitoring, bushfire tracking, search and support, and anti-terrorism surveillance roles.  This presentation will discuss the impediments that must be overcome before routine civil operations of UAVs will occur.  It will focus on the next-generation sensing and information processing requirements that will make the UAVs safer, more reliable and autonomous.  The presentation will show how technologies such as machine vision, GNSS, Geographical Information Systems and MEMs can be used to meet these requirements.  Finally the presentation will provide an overview of novel uses for UAVs as sensing platforms in civilian roles.

Dr Rod Walker leads the Airborne Avionics Research Group at QUT.    This group comprises 15 full-time researchers investigating various aspects of civil UAV autonomy.  The work of this group has been strongly supported by DSTO, CASA, AirServices Australia and DITR.  In addition to these activities, since 1997 he has been the FedSat GPS Program Manager within the CRC for Satellite Systems.  In this role he has been responsible for the: joint GPS payload development with NASA JPL; the payload integration to the spacecraft; and delivery to Tanegashima in Japan.  His team has been successfully operating the payload for two years and distributing this data to international collaborators through their ground-station at QUT.   FedSat was the first Australian Satellite launched in 32 years.  In conjunction with the CSIRO ICT Centre, he recently received $3.53M from the Queensland State Govt. to establish the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA).  This centre will focus on research to enable routine operation of UAVs for civil applications.  He has worked in the aerospace avionics area for over 10 years with expertise in the areas of Global Navigation Satellite Systems, Aircraft Flight Control Systems, Aerospace Systems Engineering and the area of automation of aerospace vehicles.  He is an active private pilot having received his pilot’s licence (with several endorsements) several years ago.  This skill greatly facilitates his UAV research.  He is the author of over 50 scientific papers and book chapters and his research is supported through a range of national and international organisations with active collaborations in the USA and the UK.

Distributed Real-Time Applications on SensorGrids

Integrating sensor networks and grid computing in a SensorGrid is like giving ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’ to the computational grid.  Real-time information about phenomena in the physical world can be processed, modelled, correlated and mined to permit on-the-fly decisions and actions to be taken on a large scale.  SensorGrids can make an impact in mission-critical areas such as large-scale environment monitoring with prediction and early warning of natural disasters, defence and surveillance, target tracking and real-time supply chain management. Unlike conventional approaches which merely seek to connect sensors to the Grid, or sensor networks to one another, our approach is unique in that we exploit the in-network processing capability in sensor networks and the distributed processing capability of the Grid to execute distributed computational algorithms such as distributed information fusion, distributed machine learning and distributed autonomous decision-making. We investigate factors such as coordinated quality of service (QoS) which affect the correctness and timeliness of these distributed algorithms when they are deployed on a SensorGrid architecture, and account for the computation, storage, communication and energy costs. Finally, we take a broader view and discuss several challenges which need to be overcome before the SensorGrid concept can achieve its full potential, such as networking and topology, QoS, web services and service discovery, robust and scalable distributed algorithms and efficient querying, data aggregation and distributed databases.

Chen-Khong Tham is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the National University of Singapore (NUS).  He holds a joint appointment as a Lead Scientist at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) Singapore.  His research interests are in coordinated quality of service (QoS) management in wired and wireless computer networks and distributed systems, and distributed decision-making and machine learning.  He lectures courses in computer networks, sensor networks and real-time systems, and is the supervisor of the Computer Networks and Distributed Systems (CNDS) Laboratory at the Department of ECE, NUS.  Chen-Khong obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Information Sciences Engineering from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.  He held a 2004/05 Edward Clarence Dyason Universitas21 Fellowship at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Estimation deals with the extraction of unknown parameters from noisy measurements. For any estimator one can formulate a theoretical lower bound of  a second-order error performance. This bound, stated by Fisher [1922], and proved by Dugue [1937], came to be known as the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB). The key role in making the engineering comunity aware of this bound played  the famous book by H. Van Trees [1968]. Today, the CRB is used extesively in statistical signal and information processing fields. One of the most exciting developments of the CRB was in target tracking, where the goal is to estimate the state of a stochastic dynamic system (hence the CRB varies with time). Several key developments have been reported recently in this context, such the the CRB for nonlinear filtering, the CRB for tracking in the presence of false and missed detections, the CRB for multipla target tracking, and the the CRB for linear jump Markov processes. The uses of the CRB are manifold: for example, it has been used to automate the spatial deployment and operation of limited sensor resources, to optimise sensing geometries of cooperative UAVs, to determine mobile observer trajectories, etc. This talk will cover the major theoretical developments and applications of CRBs in tracking and information processing context.

Branko Ristic received a BEng from the University of Novi Sad  (Serbia) in 1984,  MSc from Belgrade University (Serbia) in 1991, both in Electrical Engineering. He received a PhD in Signal Processing from  QUT in Brisbane, Australia in 1995. Between 1984 and 1994 he held various  reserach/engineering positions at IBK Institute Vinca (Belgrade), Queensland University,  and QUT in Brisbane. During 1995 he was  a Senior DSP engineer in GEC Marconi Systems (Sydney) and since 1996 he is with DSTO, Edinburgh, Australia.   During 2003/2004 he was on a study leave at Universite libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). His main research interests include target tracking, sensor fusion, belief function theory, non-linear filtering. He published over 80 technical papers and co-authored the book "Beyond the Kalman filter", Artech House, 2004.

Hearing is an aspect of life that we sometimes take for granted. It is the loss of hearing that helps us to understand the important role that it plays in our interactions with society and the world.  This talk will describe the complexity and intricacy of the ear and the aspects of our hearing that enables us to perceive and understand sounds in conditions of poor signal-to-noise ratios, to localize the sources of sounds to less than 2 degrees, and to achieve an input dynamic range of over 100 dB.  It is by better understanding the biological system that we may be able to develop artificial systems that can match this level of performance.  In addition, the different input and output systems of the Bionic Ear (cochlear implant) will be presented.  These include audio input, which is received by a microphone and then transformed into electrical current pulses for stimulation of the auditory nerve, and Neural Response Telemetry, which is the ability of the electrodes of the cochlear implant to record neural responses in the brain.

Dr David Grayden's research interests are in developing models of the auditory system and developing signal processing techniques to improve the representation of
sound by electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve and auditory brain. His interests also include automatic speech recognition (ASR) in noise using models of the auditory system to develop improved feature extraction and speech recognition algorithms. In particular, the use of spiking neuron networks and models of the cochlear nucleus for improving the front-end of ASR systems.  Dr Grayden obtained his Engineering and
Computer Science degrees at the University of Melbourne in 1991.  He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne in 1999. He is currently Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical Bionics and Hearing Research at The Bionic Ear Institute.