The 27th Biennial Queen's Symposium on Communications (QBSC 2014)
will be held June 1-4, 2014, at the Holiday Inn Waterfront Kingston,
in Kingston, Ontario Canada.
QBSC 2014 continues a tradition begun in 1962. Founded to address
the need for developing Canadian expertise in the new field of telecommunications,
the symposium is the first of its kind in Canada and continues to
foster greater understanding in the fields of coding and information
theory as well as telecommunications and signal processing. It connects
Canadian and global leaders in academia and industry as well as
fosters students in their development as the professionals of the
future. For many graduate students attending, it is their first
chance to present their work to their future peers. Since its inception,
papers presented at the symposium have focused on coding, Shannon,
and information theory as well as the mathematical foundations of
communications and signal processing.
The Symposium includes plenary and contributed papers. It is also
the time when we acknowledge an exemplary colleague with the Canadian
Award for Telecommunications Research (CATR). This is a career award
that is traditionally presented at the QBSC banquet. The winner
is chosen by their senior and prominent peers for the contributions
made to the field of telecommunications. The competition for this
award is and has been fierce.
The duration of the symposium will be four days in total. On Sunday,
June 1, there will be two tutorials held; one in the morning and
one in the afternoon with breaks and lunch. Registration and a reception
will be held in the evening. The technical program will be held
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with keynote speakers on Monday and
Tuesday. Two-hour lunches are planned to allow for collaboration
and networking. The banquet will be a 1000 Island dinner/dance cruise
aboard the Island Star with live music on Tuesday evening. The 2014
Canadian Award in Telecommunications Research will be presented
during the cruise.
QBSC 2014 is initiating a number of new features. To increase interest
and participation by students, student travel grants, student paper
competitions, and tutorials are planned. The plenary speakers and
the tutorial presenters will be of the highest international caliber:
engaging, visionary, and highly effective presenters are considered.
For further information, please see the QBSC website http://www.ece.queensu.ca/apps/symposium/
QBSC TUTORIAL DAY
Sunday, June 1, 2014, Sponsored by: The Fields Institute and IEEE
Lara Dolecek, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering Department,, University
of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Coding Methodologies for Emerging Data Storage Systems: Opportunities
and Challenges
Results from information and communication theory have been used
with phenomenal success in data storage systems, and have helped
computer storage become ubiquitous and cheap. However, currently
available solutions have hit a performance wall: existing approaches
are designed for simpler channels, and do not match the needs
of new memory and storage technologies where the data is accessed
in an asymmetric manner and is packed as densely as possible on
increasingly adverse mediums. Such performance provisioning not
only violates fundamental information-theoretic laws but directly
increases the cost of a storage system. This tutorial will succinctly
present recent exciting research developments in theory and practice
of coding and signal processing schemes for emerging green data
storage technologies, including novel asymmetric channel models,
associated error-correcting codes, codes for rewriting data, rank
modulation schemes, coding and communication techniques for cloud
storage and distributed storage, and novel file compression methods.
The purpose of this tutorial is to provide a synthesized source
of recent research results and to serve as a springboard for future
work in this emerging area.
Robert M. Cannistra (Marist)
Software Defined Networking from the ground up using OpenFlow
Within the past two years, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has
grown to establish itself as a promising and emerging technology.
Academia, researchers, vendors, and customers within industry
are all performing research, development and testing around the
area of SDN and the OpenFlow protocol. We are on the cusp of developing
the next generation network and are currently testing the scalability,
resiliency and how adaptive this open standard protocol is. This
tutorial will begin with an introduction to SDN, walk through
the fundamentals of the OpenFlow protocol and move into the strengths
of network programmability using a few open source applications
developed by the Marist SDN Innovation Lab student team. This
tutorial will conclude with a discussion of NFV, and what is on
the horizon in the area of SDN.
PLENARY SESSIONS
Monday, June 2, 2014 
Bhaskar D. Rao, Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department University of California, San Diego
Bayesian Methods for Sparse Signal Recovery
Compressive sensing (CS) as an approach for data acquisition
has recently received much attention. In CS, the signal recovery
problem from the observed data requires the solution of a sparse
vector from an underdetermined system of equations. The underlying
sparse signal recovery problem is quite general with many applications
and is the focus of this talk. The main emphasis will be on
Bayesian approaches for sparse signal recovery. We will examine
sparse priors such as the super-Gaussian and student-t priors
and appropriate MAP estimation methods. In particular, re-weighted
l2 and re-weighted l1 methods developed to solve the optimization
problem will be discussed. The talk will also examine a hierarchical
Bayesian framework and then study in detail an empirical Bayesian
method, the Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL) method. If time permits,
we will also discuss Bayesian methods for sparse recovery problems
with structure; Intra-vector correlation in the context of the
block sparse model and inter-vector correlation in the context
of the multiple measurement vector problem.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Syed
Ali Jafar, Associate Professor
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Henry Samueli School
of Engineering. University of California, Irvine
Topological Interference Management
We will revisit the robust principles of ignoring interference
when it is weak and avoiding it when it is strong, in both cases
exploring information theoretic optimality with very limited
channel knowledge at the transmitters. Optimal interference
avoidance will be shown to be essentially equivalent to the
index coding problem which will be explored from an interference
alignment perspective. Ignoring interference, i.e., treating
interference as noise will be shown to be optimal for the entire
capacity region (within a constant gap) if for each user, desired
signal strength is no weaker than the sum of the strengths of
the strongest interference caused by the user and the strongest
interference suffered by the user, with all signal strengths
measured in dB scale.
INVITED SPEAKERS
Amir H. Banihashemi (Carleton) On Characterization of
Elementary Trapping Sets of Variable-Regular LDPC Codes
Hussein T. Mouftah (Ottawa) Architectures and Models for
Connected Electric Vehicles in the Smart Grid
Sofiène Affes (Montréal) The Wireless Opportunity:
Challenges & Enablers with Focus on Wireless Access Virtualization
Vijay K. Bhargava (Vancouver) Energy Efficient Design
of Fifth Generation Cellular Networks
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