Current interest in 60 GHz millimetre-wave (mmW) systems is motivated by both old and new factors. Over the past decade, regulators have allocated up to 9 GHz of spectrum near 60 GHz for license-exempt world-wide use. The emergence of numerous high-speed applications, including uncompressed HDTV, uncompressed multi-video streaming, conference ad hoc and very-high-speed file downloading, has provided the motivation for developing the technologies required to exploit this bandwidth. Moreover, recent gains in realizing low-cost CMOS technology suitable for use at such high frequencies, improved algorithms for adaptively steering directive antenna beams; protocols for media access control (MAC) using directive antennas, and implementations of LDPC coding to improve link margins have made such exploitation a commercially viable prospect. In June 2011, the Wireless Gigabit Alliance released a 60 GHz standard that will deliver data transfer rates up to 7 Gbit/s, more than 10 times faster than the highest 802.11n rate while maintaining compatibility with existing Wi-Fi devices. 

In this talk, we consider the technical challenges and opportunities for mmW indoor communications, with an emphasis on the PHY and MAC layers. Starting with an accurate and tractable characterization of indoor mmW channels that captures both temporal and angular dispersion due to reflections from walls, floors and ceilings as well as signal fading induced by human mobility, we introduce the coding, modulation and beam forming techniques tailored for this band. While established OFDM signaling and adaptive antenna techniques can be employed at the PHY layer, the profound differences in the mmW channel relative to the familiar WiFi bands will dictate fresh designs for network neighbour discovery and directional MAC protocols.

Vijay Bhargava, an IEEE volunteer for three decades, is Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he served as Department Head during 2003-2008. He served as the Founder and President of "Binary Communications Inc." (1983-2000) and has provided consulting services to several companies and government agencies. 
Vijay Bhargava is a co-author (with D. Haccoun, R. Matyas and P. Nuspl) of Digital Communications by Satellite (New York: Wiley: 1981) which was translated in Chinese and Japanese. He is a co-editor (with S. Wicker) of Reed Solomon Codes and their Applications (IEEE Press: 1994), a co-editor (with V. Poor, V. Tarokh and S. Yoon) of Communications, Information and Network Security (Kluwer: 2003), a co-editor (with E. Hossain) of Cognitive Wireless Communication Networks (Springer: 2007), a co-editor (with E. Hossain and D.I Kim) of Cooperative Wireless Communications Networks, (Cambridge University Press: 2011) and a co-editor (with E. Hossain and G. Fettweis) of Green Radio Communication Networks to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. 
Vijay Bhargava has served on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society and the IEEE Communications Society. He has served as an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He played a major role in the creation of the IEEE Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, for which he served as the editor-in-chief during 2007, 2008 and 2009. During 2010, he served as IEEE Communications Society Director of Journals. He is a past President of the IEEE Information Theory Society. 
Vijay Bhargava has been elected to serve as IEEE Communications Society President- Elect during 2011 and will serve as its President during 2012 and 2013.

Zhen Zhang received the B.S. and M.S. degree in mathematics from Nankai University, Tianjin, China in 1969 and 1980, respectively, the Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 1984, and the Habilitation in mathematics from Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany, in 1988. He served as a lecturer in Department of Mathematics, Nankai University, from 1981 to 1982. He was a post-doctoral research associate with the School of Electrical Engineering, Cornell University, from 1984 to 1985 and with the Information Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, in the Fall of 1985. From 1986 to 1988, he was with the Mathematics Department, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany. He joined the faculty of University of Southern California in 1988, where he is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering with the Department of Electrical Engineering-systems. He has been a visiting professor with, Chinese university of Hong Kong in 1995, Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2002, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada in 2008, Nankai University, Tianjin, China in 2009 and 2011. He also visited many universities for short terms such as Bielefeld university, Germany in 1992 and 1996, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 1989 and 1994, Xidian University, Xian, China in 2009, and University of Electronic Technology and Sciences, Chengdu, China in 2009. He holds an adjunct professor position with Shanghai Jiaotong University. He served as TPC member, chair for numerous academic conferences and performed some other professional services. His research interests include information theory, coding theory, data compression, network theory, communication theory and applied mathematics. He is a Fellow of IEEE. His current research is focused on network coding theory and the theory of entropy functions.

Space-time coding plays a critical role in separation of signal transmissions via different transmitter and receiver pairs, and thus it lays a foundation for implementation of MIMO technology, which is capable to offer powerful spatial diversity gain and/or multiplex capability without consuming precious bandwidth resources. Unfortunately, all currently available space-time coding schemes were proposed based mainly on bit-level block coding or trellis coding schemes, and their performances are extremely sensitive to multi-user interference and multipath interference. This talk presents a tutorial on chip-level space-time coding, which works based on three-dimensional spreading coding. Different from the traditional bit-level space-time coding, the chip-level space-time coding is very robust due to its superior interference-resistant performance, and it is in particular suitable for its applications in futuristic wireless communications where both multi-user interference and multipath interference are present. In addition, the chip-level space-time coding offers a unique paradigm, in which space-time coding can be designed jointly with the user signature codes in a code division multiple access system as an effort to optimize the system performance as a whole.

Hsiao-Hwa Chen currently is a Distinguished Professor in Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, and he was the founding Director of the Institute of Communications Engineering of the National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan. He received BSc and MSc degrees from Zhejiang University, China, and a PhD degree from University of Oulu, Finland, in 1982, 1985 and 1990, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. He has authored or co-authored over 400 technical papers in major international journals and conferences, six books and more than ten book chapters in the areas of communications, including the books titled "Next Generation Wireless Systems and Networks" (512 pages) and "The Next Generation CDMA Technologies" (468 pages), both published by John Wiley and Sons in 2005 and 2007, respectively. He has been an active volunteer for IEEE various technical activities for over 22 years. Currently, he is serving as the Chair for IEEE ComSoc Communications and Information Security Technical Committee. He served as the Chair for IEEE ComSoc Radio Communications Committee from 2007 to 2008. He served or is serving as conferences/symposia/workshops chair/co-chair of many IEEE conferences, including VTC, ICC, Globecom and WCNC, etc. He served or is serving as Associate Editor or/and Guest Editor of numerous important technical journals. He is serving as the Editor (Asia and Pacific) for Wiley's Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (WCMC) Journal and Wiley's International Journal of Communication Systems. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Wiley' Security and Communication Networks journal (www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/security). He is also an adjunct Professor of Zhejiang University, China, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Professor Chen is a recipient of the Best Paper Award in IEEE WCNC 2008, and a recipient of IEEE Radio Communications Committee Outstanding Service Award in 2008. He is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of IET and a Fellow of BCS. 

This work investigates the use of Time Reversal (TR) applied to UWB systems for communication applications. Potential performance boosts, that are achievable over a single UWB communication link by the sole adoption of TR, are investigated. In the case of multiuser UWB communications, it is shown that TR modifies the distribution of Multi User Interference (MUI) and that further performance improvement can be obtained by adapting the receiver to the specific MUI distribution characteristics.

Maria-Gabriella Di Benedetto obtained her Ph.D. in Telecommunications in 1987 from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. In 1991, she joined the Faculty of Engineering of Sapienza University of Rome, where currently she is a Full Professor of Telecommunications. She has held visiting positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Paris XI, France. In 1994, she received the Mac Kay Professorship award from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include wireless communication systems and speech. From 1995 to 2000, she directed four European ACTS projects for the design of UMTS. Since 2000, she has been active in fostering the development of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radio communications in Europe, and participated in several pioneering EU projects on UWB communications. More recently, participation in the European Network of Excellence HYCON (Hybrid Control: Taming Heterogeneity and Complexity of Networked Embedded Systems) offered the framework that led to increased activity in the field of cognitive networks. 
Professor Di Benedetto currently coordinates COST Action IC0902 'Cognitive Radio and Networking for Cooperative Coexistence of Heterogeneous Wireless Networks' and her research group participates in the European Network of Excellence ACROPOLIS (Advanced coexistence technologies for radio optimisation in licensed and unlicensed spectrum). In October 2009, Dr. Di Benedetto received the Excellence in Research award 'Sapienza Ricerca', under the auspices of President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano.

In wireless networks, interference among transmitters is usually viewed as an impediment to reliable communication. Relying on the observation that decoding interferers might be more beneficial than suppressing them, we introduce the notion of Unconstrained Group Decoding for K-user interference. Deploying Unconstrained Group Decoders allows each receiver to decode any arbitrary subset of the interfering transmitters jointly with its desired transmitter, when doing so is deemed beneficial for recovering the message intended to it. As immediate applications of such decoders we look into several rate allocation/adaptation problems in interference channels. Motivated by the premise that the rate regions sustained in a multiuser network varies with channel fluctuations, we offer channel-dependent rate allocation/adaptation procedures. These procedures while being consisted of greedy or myopic subroutines exhibit four main features: 1) achieve global pareto-optimality, 2) sustain fairness in rate adjustments, 3) have computationally efficient complexity in implementation and 4) are amenable to distributed processing.

Xiaodong Wang received the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. He is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in New York. Dr. Wang's research interests fall in the general areas of computing, signal processing and communications, and has published extensively in these areas. Among his publications is a recent book entitled ''Wireless Communication Systems: Advanced Techniques for Signal Reception'', published by Prentice Hall in 2003. His current research interests include wireless communications, statistical signal processing, and genomic signal processing. Dr. Wang received the 1999 NSF CAREER Award, the 2001 IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, and the 2011 IEEE Communications Society's Paper Award on New Communication Topics. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and listed as an ISI Highly-cited Author.

In this talk I will describe our work to set up a large scale wireless visual sensor network in a Swedish zoo. It is located close to the Arctic Circle making the environment very hard for this type of deployment. The goal is to make the zoo digitally enhanced, leading to a more attractive and interactive zoo. To reach this goal the sensed data will be processed and semantic information will be used to support interaction design, which is a key component to provide a new type of experience for the visitors. In this talk I will describe research challenges related to the design of such a digital zoo.

Haibo Li is a full Professor in Signal Processing in the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics (TFE), Umeå University, Sweden. He received the Technical Doctor degree in Information Theory from Linköping University, Sweden, in 1993. His doctoral thesis dealt with advanced facial image analysis and synthesis techniques for low bitrate video. Dr Li got the “Nordic Best PhD Thesis Award” in 1994. In 1997 Dr. Li was awarded the title of “Docent in Image Coding”. From 1990 to 1993 he was a teaching assistant of digital video at Linköping University. After graduation Dr. Li joined the technical faculty of Linköping University first as an Assistant Professor and then promoted to an Associate Professor in 1998. During his period at Linköping University he developed advanced image and video compression algorithms, including extremely low bitrate video compression, 3D video transmission, and tele-operation and telepresence. After joining Umeå University as a full professor in 1999, he is now directing the Digital Media Lab, Umeå Center for Interaction Technology (UCIT), Umeå University, and working on advanced Human, Thing and Information interaction techniques.
Prof. Li has been chairing sections at relevant international conferences and was actively involving in MPEG activities in low bitrate video compression. He has contributed to several EU projects, like VIDAS, SCALAR, INTERFACE and MUCHI. He has published more than 100 technical papers including chapters in books and holds six international patents as the first inventor in multimedia area.