Title : The Drones Are Coming!

Abstract : There are expected to be 20 million unmanned aerial vehicles or drones in the U.S. by 2020. Apart from being used for delivering package, Drones have been used to save lives, monitor animals, protect environment, survey the traffic conditions, and help journalists tell the headline events, etc. As flying robots, drones complete the tasks by remote controllers. Thus, wireless communications for drones is crucial. This talk will discuss research challenges and opportunities for wireless communications for drones, including spectrum sharing, channels, networking, safety and privacy issues.

Biography:Wei Zhang (F’15) received the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2005. He was a Research Fellow at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology in 2006-2007. He joined the UNSW in 2008 and is currently an Associate Professor at School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications. His research interests include cognitive radio, energy harvesting communications, heterogeneous networks and massive MIMO. He is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. He is also the Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications and for IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking. Previously, he served as Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications in 2010-2015 and Editor for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Cognitive Radio Series) in 2012-2014. Dr. Zhang participates actively in committees and conference organization for the IEEE Communications Society and IEEE Signal Processing Society. He is Vice Director of IEEE Communications Society Asia Pacific Board. He has served as Secretary for IEEE Wireless Communications Technical Committee. He is an elected member of SPCOM Technical Committee of IEEE Signal Processing Society. Presently, he is the Workshop Co-chair the IEEE GLOBECOM 2017, Singapore and the TPC Co-Chair of the APCC 2017, Perth, Australia. He has received several awards for his work, including the IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2009, and four best paper awards from international conferences (Globecom2007, WCSP2011, GlobalSIP2014, ICCC 2016). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the IET. He is also an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer.