Speaker: Prof. Thom Dunning

Speaker: Prof. Sanjay Jha

Title: A decade of Wireless Sensor Network research - Are we there yet?

Abstract: In last decade, there has been a rapid increase in research and commercial activities in multi-hop wireless sensor networks. Wireless Sensor Network is being used in a wide range of applications, such as environmental monitoring, habitat sensing, farming as well as disaster recovery. A brief overview of research work carried out by Prof. Jha's group at UNSW will also be presented. This talk will discuss the progress made by WSN community so far, lessons learnt, and the challenges lying ahead.

Bio: Sanjay Jha is a Professor and Head of the Network Group at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. Prof Jha holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. His research activities cover a wide range of topics in networking including Wireless Sensor Networks, Adhoc/Community wireless networks, Resilience/Quality of Service (QoS) in IP Networks, and Active/Programmable network. Sanjay has published over 150 articles in high quality journals and conferences. He is the principal author of the book Engineering Internet QoS and a co-editor of the book Wireless Sensor Networks: A Systems Perspective. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. He has also participated in the wireless networking project at the Smart Internet CRC as a project leader and was associated with the Network and Pervasive Computing (NPC) program of NICTA as a seconded staff.

He has been working as an industry consultant for major organizations such as Canon Research Lab (CISRA), DSTO, Lucent and Fujitsu. He was a visiting scholar at the Distributed Computing and Communications Laboratory, Computer Science Department, Columbia University, New York and a visiting professor with IIT-Bombay. He has also been a visiting researcher with Fujitsu Australia Ltd, Sydney and CSIRO ICT Center, Australia.

More information can be found from http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~sanjay

Speaker: Prof. Subrakanthi Dey

Title: Estimation of Dynamical Systems via Wireless Sensor Networks: Resource Allocation and Performance Optimization

Abstract: Decentralized detection/estimation via wireless sensor networks has become an active research area over the last decade or so due to the resource constraints faced by sensor networks and the uncertainly of the wireless channels used for sensor transmissions. In this talk we provide a brief background of the current state of the art of this research and outline some of the research activities we are interested in, specifically in the area of decentralized estimation of dynamical systems, the focus being optimization of the performance of such estimation problems under power/bandwidth constraints etc. We then investigate a specific problem: an outage probability minimization problem for state estimation of linear dynamical systems using multiple sensors, where an outage is defined as an event when the state estimation error exceeds a pre-determined threshold. The sensors amplify and forward their measurements (using uncoded analog transmission) to a remote fusion centre over wireless fading channels. For stable systems, the resulting infinite horizon problem can be formulated as a constrained average cost Markov decision process (MDP) control problem. A suboptimal power allocation that is less computationally intensive is proposed, and numerical results demonstrate very close performance to the power allocation obtained from the solution of the MDP based average cost optimality equation. Motivated by practical considerations, assuming that sensors can transmit with only a finite number of power levels, optimization of the values of these levels is also considered using a stochastic approximation technique. In the case of unstable systems, finite horizon and discounted cost formulations of the outage minimization problem are presented and solved. An extension to the problem of minimization of the expected error covariance is also studied.

Bio: Subhrakanti Dey (M'96) was born in Calcutta, India, in 1968. He received the B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, in 1991 and 1993, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Systems Engineering, Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, in 1996.

He has been with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia, since February 2000, where he is currently a full Professor. From September 1995 to September 1997 and September 1998 to February 2000, he was a postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Department of Systems Engineering, Australian National University. From September 1997 to September 1998, he was a post-doctoral Research Associate with the Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park. His current research interests include networked control systems, wireless communications and networks, signal processing for sensor networks, and stochastic and adaptive estimation and control.

Dr. Dey currently serves on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and Elsevier Systems and Control Letters. He was also an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control during 2005-2007. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Speaker: A/Prof. Jim Black

Title: Mobile phones as tools for diagnosis and medical management in remote and under-served communities

Abstract: Mobile phones are so useful that even people on very low incomes in developing countries are prepared to spend money acquiring and using them. Wherever mobile phone coverage exists a large proportion of the adult population have already bought mobile phones. This means that, even in remote and underserved rural areas, many health workers in developing countries own mobile phones and carry them with them during their working day. All but the simplest mobile phones now have operating systems, and some have very sophisticated and powerful processors. It is possible to write applications that will run on a wide range of mobile phones. Bringing these two trends together, we have developed a range of mobile phone applications and low-cost diagnostic devices that will run on mobile phones and make them into useful devices to support health workers in their day-to-day work.

Bio: Dr Jim Black is Associate Professor in the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne. He is a medical graduate with postgraduate qualifications in tropical medicine, epidemiology and public health, and spent 10 years of his early career as a clinician, epidemiologist and researcher in southern Africa - mostly in Mozambique. His research interests are centred around the sub-district health facilities of developing countries, and include the potential of mobile phones as diagnostic and patient management tools in the under resourced and remote settings.

Speaker: Prof. Paul Havinga

Bio: Paul J.M. Havinga is professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and CTO of Ambient Systems B.V., in Enschede, the Netherlands. His research interests are in the area of large-scale, heterogeneous wireless systems, sensor networks, energy-efficient architectures and protocols, ubiquitous computing, and wireless communication networks. Research questions cover architectures, protocols, programming paradigms, algorithms, and applications. This research has resulted in over 200 scientific publications in journals and conferences. He has a significant experience as project manager in several international research projects on wireless sensor networks and ubiquitous computing. In 2001 he initiated the first European project on wireless sensor networks (2001 - 2004). In 2004 he founded the company Ambient Systems B.V., partly based on the results of that project. In May 2007 he received the "ICT Innovation Award" for the successful transfer of knowledge from university to industrial use. In June 2007 he received the "van den Kroonenberg award" for being a successful innovative entrepreneur.

Speaker: Dr. G Radhakrishna Sampigethaya

Title: Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Security: Making Skies Trustworthy, Clean & Enjoyable for Aviation.

Abstract: Cyber-physical system (CPS) is an emerging, bold view of the next-generation mission, safety-critical systems warranted for the growth of economic and military sectors. For instance, modern aviation globally today must rise up to the challenge of managing increasingly crowded skies under growing passenger, business and societal demands. Future airspace systems have ambitious performance targets, such as enhanced safety, security, robustness, capacity, efficiency, environmental benefit, travel comfort and convenience, which heavily depend on networked cyber-physical capabilities of the e-enabled aircraft. This talk will present a background overview of CPS and present the set of security challenges faced by such systems. The talk will identify what challenges are commonly faced as well as those that are unique to such systems. While the space of threats to a distributed system can be large, we will present the need for new approaches and illustrate this with some examples from aviation.

Bio: Krishna Sampigethaya is an advanced technologist at the Boeing Research & Technology, Bellevue, WA, working on performance assurance of cyber-physical systems, NextGen, vehicular networks, and the smart grid. He received MS and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. He is IEEE and AIAA member. He was a program committee member for the 2008 NITRD workshop on Transportation CPS, co-chair of the 2009 Army Research Office CPS security workshop and co-organizer of SAE 2010 Future ATM Technology Symposium. Dr. Sampigethaya is technical area chair for aviation cyber-physical security at the 2009 and 2011 SAE AeroTech, trustworthy aviation information systems area at the 2010-2011 AIAA Infotech@Aerospace, 2011 IEEE Aerospace and 2011 IEEE DASC. He is the founding chair for the SAE aviation cyber security technical committee and co-editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE special issue on cyber-physical systems. He has co-authored a paper recognized with 2010 AIAA/IEEE DASC best paper award for NextGen Surveillance session.

Speaker: Prof Yoshitaka Kimura

Title: New techniques to extract a fetal electrocardiogram from multi-electrodes on the maternal abdominal wall

Abstract: Fetal electrocardiogram (ECG) is an ideal method to detect an abnormal fetal electro-cardio-activity such as fetal arrhythmia and fetal compromise. However, extracting fetal ECG  non-invasively from abdominal ECCG in the clinical situations still remain a major challenge. The challenge is to extract a non-linear, non-stationary 3-D signal from very noisy complex-mixed signals under the condition of SNR less than 1. Recently, we have successfully been able to extract fetal ECG from maternal abdominal wall. Applications of Blind source separation with ultrasound signal as reference (BSSR) and Fast Nonlinear state space projection (FNSSP) to extract fetal ECG will be presented. Results of several clinical applications of the newly developed system at Tohoku University Hospital in Japan will also be presented.

Bio: Dr Kimura is a Professor of Obstetrics in the graduate school of medicine at Tohoku University, Japan. He is leading a large interdisciplinary research team in the areas of fetal medicine and biomedical engineering at Tohoku University. He is one of the pioneers in the application of nonlinear signal processing techniques to investigate fetal cardiac abnormalities and to extract fetal ECG from 12 lead Maternal abdominal ECG signals which is currently being deployed at Tohoku University Hospital's Obstetrics department. He has had over 20 years experience in detection, processing, and interpretation of fetal electrocardiogram for the clinical diagnosis and his interests concern combination of the information theory with the infinite dimensional geometry to analyze the nonlinear and nonstationary signals. Currently he is the director of academy of fetal ECG at Tohoku University in Japan. Professor Kimura successfully completed several industry sponsored projects in Japan. He holds 7 patents in the area of fetal surveillance.

Speaker: Prof. Ian Petersen

Title: Nonlinear Estimation of a Fabry-Perot Optical Cavity for Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscopy

Abstract: This paper considers the application of a discrete-time extended Kalman filter (EKF) to a problem of estimating the ring-down time constant of a Fabry-Perot optical cavity for the purpose of cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS). The ring-down time corresponds to the time taken by the light inside an optical cavity to decay to 1/e of its initial intensity. The online estimation of ring-down time (or decay time) for a cavity is a direct indication of the absorbing species contained in it and can be used to detect improvised explosive devices and concealed explosives. Two cases are considered for EKF design depending on whether the resonant frequency of the optical cavity is perfectly locked to the input laser frequency, or not. In the case of a perfect lock, a three-state EKF is designed to estimate the magnitude and phase quadrature components of the cavity and the ring-down time. In the other case where there is not a perfect lock between the two frequencies, leading to non-zero detuning, a four-state EKF is designed to estimate the detuning parameter in addition to the magnitude and phase quadrature components of the cavity and the ring-down time. The detuning parameter gives an indication of the deviation of laser frequency from the resonant frequency of the cavity, which can then be used by a controller to maintain detuning at zero.

Bio: Ian R. Petersen was born in Victoria, Australia, in 1956. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1984 from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY. From 1983 to 1985, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra. In 1985, he joined the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, where he is currently a Scientia Professor and an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. His main research interests are in robust control theory, quantum control theory, and stochastic control theory. Dr. Petersen has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL, SYSTEMS AND CONTROL LETTERS, Automatica, and the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. Currently, he is an Editor for Automatica.

Speaker: Prof. Peter Corke

Title: 5 years of environmental wireless sensing

Abstract: The talk will cover a large body of work over 5 years in creating large-scale sensing and actuation networks for environmental monitoring. The earliest applications involved measurement of scalar variables such as temperature, humidity, water flow and salinity. Another class of applications involved audio or video sensing which presents real challenges for mote-class hardware and necessitates architectural extensions for the node. A final application class involves mobility. This includes sensing the position of cattle in the landscape to determine individual and social behaviour patterns, and ultimately actuating the animals to stay within defined spatial bounds. Mobility can also be considered in the integration of sensor networks and robots.

Bio: Peter is an electrical engineer by training and his research interests are field robotics, visual perception and wireless sensor networks. He is a professor of robotics and control at Queensland University of Technology, and previously led a pioneering program in mining, aerial and underwater robotics as well as well as sensor networks at CSIRO. He is a fellow of the IEEE, member of the RAS AdCom, editor-in-chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation magazine, member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Robotics Research and the Springer STAR series, founding editor of the Journal of Field Robotics and author of the Robotics Toolbox for Matlab. He has held visiting positions at Oxford University, Carnegie-Mellon University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Pennsylvania.

Speaker: Prof. S. George Djorgovski

Title: Towards the Virtualisation of Science (TBC)

Bio: S. George Djorgovski is a Professor of Astronomy and a Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech, and the Director of the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics. After receiving his PhD from UC Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow, before joining the Caltech faculty in 1987. He was a Presidential Young Investigator, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, among other honors and distinctions, and he is an author or coauthor of several hundred professional publications (http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~george/).

He was one of the founders of the Virtual Observatory concept, and was the Chairman of the US Nat'l Virtual Observatory Science Definition Team. He was or is the PI or a Co-PI of several major digital sky surveys. His e-Scientific interests include definition and development of the universal methodology, tools, and frameworks for data-intensive and computationally-enabled science, various aspects of data mining and virtual scientific organizations. His astrophysical interests include digital sky surveys, exploration of observable parameter spaces, formation and early evolution of quasars, galaxies, and other cosmic structures, time-domain astronomy, and the nature of the dark energy.