CELLULAR NETWORKS OF THE FUTURE

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Sundar Subramanian

Title: Millimeter-wave in 5G New Radio (NR)

Bio:Sundar Subramanian is currently a principal engineer and manager atQualcomm. Sundar joined Qualcomm in 2008 and has contributed to the design, standardization, development and commercialization of various communication systems including peer-to-peer, vehicular and millimeter-wave systems. Sundar has represented Qualcomm in ETSI-ITS and 3GPP-RAN1 and currently leads the systems team in Qualcomm working on 5G millimeter-wave related areas. He holds over 150 granted patents.

 

Zukang Shen

Title: Non-orthogonal multiple access for 5G new radio

Bio: Zukang Shen has been working on 3GPP standards and industrial wireless research for more than 10 years. He is currently a senior expert with Huawei, and was previously with Texas Instruments and Datang Mobile. Dr. Shen serves as the editor for 3GPP NR specification “TS38.212: Multiplexing and channel coding”. He has published more than 20 journal and conference papers, and is a co-inventor on more than 100 granted patents.

 

Salam Akoum

Title: Integrated Access and Backhaul for 5G

Bio: Salam Akoum is a principal member of technical staff at AT&T labs, in the advanced radio technology group. She is an active contributor to 3GPP 5G standardization, and responsible for specifications of the physical layer of the radio interface. Prior to joining AT&T labs, Dr. Akoum worked at the center for Social Innovation at Hitachi America R&D, where she investigated connectivity solutions, analytics and traffic optimization for IT and OT convergence, and received the Hitachi above and beyond award in 2014.

 

Harpreet Dhillon

Title: Role of Mathematical Analysis in the Simulation-driven Cellular Industry
Bio: Harpreet S. Dhillon joined Virginia Tech as an Assistant Professor in August 2014after spending one year at USCa s a Viterbi Postdoctoral Fellow. He was named Outstanding New Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech in 2017. Dr. Dhillon's research interests revolve around the mathematical analysis of wireless systems, on which he has received awards from the IEEE Communications Society including the IEEE Heinrich Hertz Award, the IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize, and the IEEE Young Author Best Paper Award.

 

Sarabjot Singh

Title: Realizing a Software Defined Control Plane for Cellular Networks

Bio: Sarabjot Singh is a Principal Engineer at Uhana, a venture-backed startup in Palo Alto, California focused on software defined mobile networks.His past affiliations include Intel, Nokia Technologies, Bell Labs, and Qualcomm, where he has worked on protocol and algorithm design for both cellular and WiFi networks. Dr. Singh is a co-author of more than 40 patent applications, and was the recipient of the President of India Gold Medal in 2010, the ICC Best Paper Award in 2013, and was recognized for being a prolific inventor at Intel.

 

Xingqin Lin

Title: LTE for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Bio: Xingqin Lin is a researcher and standards delegate with Ericsson Research Silicon Valley, where he is currently leading air-ground broadband communications research and standardization. Dr. Lin received special recognition from Ericsson Research for outstanding contributions to Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) research and standardization in 2015, and was nominated by Ericsson Business Innovation as one of the 15 Ericsson Business Innovation Leaders in 2017.

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VISUAL PROCESSING & NAVIGATION

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Gautam S. Muralidhar

Gautam S. Muralidhar is currently a Principal Data Scientist at NIO where he leads their efforts in developing algorithms for product features spanning intelligent navigation and autonomous driving. Previously, he was at Pivotal, where he worked on data science R&D and consulting engagements with large automotive companies. Gautam obtained his Ph.D. Degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied Image Processing under the supervision of Prof. Al Bovik and Prof. Mia Markey.

 

Anush Moorthy

Anush Moorthyis a Sr. Software Engineer in Video Algorithms and Research at Netflix Inc., USA, where he devotes his time to advancing research and development in the areas of video compression @ scale, perceptual video quality and video source artifact inspection. He was previously with Qualcomm Inc., and Texas Instruments Inc., where he developed algorithms for perceptual video compression and perceptual image processing, applying his background in perceptual quality assessment from his graduate work at the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering.

 

Kalpana Seshadrinathan

Kalpana Seshadrinathan received the B.Tech. degree from the University of Kerala, India, in 2002, and the M.S.  and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, in2004 and 2008, respectively. She is currently a Senior Research Scientist and Research Manager with Intel Labs in Santa Clara, CA, USA. Her research interests include multi-camera and mobile imaging, mobile computer vision, computational photography, real-time image processing, video quality assessment and human visual perception. She is a recipient of the 2013 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper award, the 2003 Texas Telecommunications Engineering Consortium Graduate Fellowship Award and the 1996 National Talent Search (NTS) award from the Govt. of India. She is a two-time recipient of the Intel High Five award (five filed patents in a year) with 11 granted patents and several pending. She has been serving as an Associate Editor (AE) of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing since 2015 and has served in the Technical Program Committee of several conferences. She was the Assistant Director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering with the University of Texas at Austin from 2005 to 2008.

 

Kyle Wesson

Kyle Wesson is the 2016-2017 Institute of Navigation Congressional Fellow, where he served in the U.S. Senate as a science and technology adviser to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). His policy portfolio included the topics of navigation, spectrum, autonomous vehicles, and aviation. Prior to the fellowship, Kyle consulted with the Federal Aviation Administration on improving the security and reliability of navigation systems for civil aviation.

 

Zak Kassas

Zak Kassasis an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of California, Riverside (UCR) and the Director of the Autonomous Systems Perception, Intelligence, and Navigation (ASPIN) Lab. He received a B.S. with Honors in ElectricalEngineering from the Lebanese American University, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University, and an M.S.E. in Aerospace Engineering and a Ph.D. in Electrical and 
Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. Prof. Kassas’ research in navigation in GPS-challenged environments has been featured in dozens of national and international media outlets and received several awards. Since joining UCR in Fall 2014, his research in collaborative opportunistic navigation in GPS-challenged environments has attracted nearly $2M in federal grants from ONR, NSF, and NIST.

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STARTUPS & ENTREPRENEURSHIPS

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Antonio Forenza

Bio: Antonio Forenza is Co-founder and CTO of Artemis Networks, a startup based in San Francisco developing pCell wireless technology to deliver 5G performance to standard 4G LTE devices. He has 20 years of R&D and product engineering experience in the wireless industry and academia. Antonio is an inventor of over 40 issued and 170 pending patents worldwide, has made standards contributions and authored several international IEEE publications.

 

Sandeep Bhadra

Talk: How Venture Capital math works –risk, reward and fundraising strategy for high-tech businesses

Bio: Sandeep joined Vertex in 2017 and focuses primarily on cloud infrastructure, data-driven business applications and cybersecurity.  Prior to his work at Vertex, Sandeep was a Principal at Menlo Ventures, and before that at Cisco’s Corporate Development team.  Sandeep started his career at Texas Instruments’ R&D Center, where he learned to apply his PhD research in network information theory and algorithms towards designing protocols for 4G/LTE wireless networks and later led a small team to spec out the first software-defined network switch-chip.

 

Chris Slaughter

Talk: Incubating a Tech Business

Bio:Chris Slaughter is an Austin-based entrepreneur. In 2013 Chris founded Lynx Laboratories based on research he did at UT Austin. Lynx Laboratories was acquired by Occipital, where Chris led deep learning research and business development. Chris is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at Capital Factory focusing on AI and Computer Vision companies.

 

Ayan Acharya

Talk:  Challenges and Thrills of Enterprise Artifical Intelligence

Bio: Ayan Acharya is working as a technical leader of the Machine Learning team in a cognitive cloud based start-up named Cognitive Scale. He graduated from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Texas at Austin, USA in July 2015, where he was associated with the Intelligent Data Exploration and Analysis Laboratory (IDEAL) led by Dr. Joydeep Ghosh. His research focus is on developing generative models and efficient inference algorithms for solving transfer learning problems prevalent in text document analysis, social network study, recommender systems and object recognition from images. Over the years, he has published more than 30 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers. He regularly reviews papers from top-tier conferences and journals that include MUCMD, NIPS, WWW, ACML, AAAI, ICDM, IEEE TKDE, Machine Learning Journal, JMLR, IEEE TBD, ACM TKDE, Elsevier PRL, IEEE TNLS and few others.

 

Bob Daniels

Talk:  Starting a Business after Getting Your PhD in Wireless: Lessons Learned and Skills Acquired
Bio: Dr. Bob Daniels is a co-founder and Vice President of Technology at Phazr Inc., a 5G startup offering products in Q4 2017 for millimeter-wave gigabit-per-second fixed and mobile wireless access systems. Prior to Phazr Bob was a co-founder and CEO of Kuma Signals, LLC (formed in 2009 in Austin, TX), a business focused on transitioning state of the art wireless communications technology to military and aerospace systems.  He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.

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MACHINE LEARNING & APPLICATIONS

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Yudong Chen

Title: Exponential error rates of semidefinite programming for block models

Bio: YudongChen is an assistant professor at the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE), Cornell University. In 2013-2015he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013, and his M.S. and B.S. from Tsinghua University. His research interests include machine learning, high-dimensional and robust statistics, convex and non-convex optimization, and applications in networks and financial systems.

 

Ioannis Mitliagkas

Title: Studying momentum dynamics to scale and tune deep learning system

Bio:  Ioannis Mitliagkas is an assistant professor in the department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at the University of Montreal, and member of MILA (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms). Before that, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the departments of Statistics and Computer Science at Stanford university. He obtained his Ph.D. from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on large-scale statistical learning and inference problems, focusing on efficient large-scale and distributed algorithms, tight theoretical and data-dependent guarantees and tuning complex systems. His recent work includes understanding and optimizing the scan order used in Gibbs sampling for inference, as well as understanding the interaction between optimization and the dynamics of large-scale learning systems. In the past he has worked on high-dimensional streaming problems and fast algorithms and computation for large graph problems.

 

Sid Banerjee

Title: Personalization, for everyone

Bio: Sid Banerjee is an assistant professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) at Cornell. His research is on stochastic modeling, and the design of algorithms and incentives for large-scale systems. He got his PhD from the ECE Department at UT Austin (with Sanjay Shakkottai and Sujay Sanghavi), and was a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Algorithms Lab at Stanford, during which time, he was also a technical consultant at Lyft.

 

Dimitris Papailiopoulos

Title: Overcoming the Challenges of Learning in Parallel

Bio: Dimitris Papailiopoulos is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Faculty Fellow of the Grainger Institute for Engineering. Between 2014 and 2016, Dimitris was a postdoctoral researcher in EECS at UC Berkeley and a member of the AMPLab. His research interests span machine learning, coding theory, and distributed algorithms, with a current focus on coordination-avoiding distributed machine learning and the use of erasure codes to speed up distributed computation. Dimitris earned his Ph.D. in ECE from UT Austin in 2014, under the supervision of Alex Dimakis. In 2015, he received the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Young Author Best Paper Award.

 

Aditya Gopalan

Title: Online learning in complex environments

Bio: Aditya Gopalan is an Assistant Professor and INSPIRE Faculty Fellow at the Indian Institute of Science, Electrical Communication Engineering. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2011, and the B.Tech. and M.Tech.  degrees in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2006. He was an Andrew and Erna Viterbi Post-doctoral Fellow at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. His research interests include learning, control, communication networks, performance analysis and modeling.

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EMERGING DIRECTIONS IN COMMUNICATIONS

V2X Connectivity: What's hype, what's useful, what's essential?

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Chan-Byoung Chae

Chan-Byoung Chae received his Ph.D. in Electrical &Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008. Prior to joining UT, he was a research engineer with Telecommunications R&D Center, Samsung Electronics from 2001 to 2005. He was with Harvard University, Cambridge, MA as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in 2009. He was also with Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Murray Hill, NJ until he joined Yonsei University in 2011. He is currently the Underwood Distinguished Professor at Yonsei University, Korea and a Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University in 2017. Dr. Chae is a co-recipient of the IEEE INFOCOM Best Demo Award (2015) and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award with Prof. Robert W. Heath, Jr. (2013).

 

Song Chong

Song Chong is a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and is the Head of Computing, Networking and Security Division of the school. His current research interests include wireless networks, mobile systems, performance evaluation, and distributed algorithms. He received the 2013 and 2016 IEEE Communication Society William R. Bennett Prize Paper Awards and the 2013 IEEE SECON Best Paper Award. He has been on the editorial boards of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Seoul National University and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin, all in electrical engineering. Prior to joining KAIST, he was with the Performance Analysis Department, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, New Jersey, USA, as a Member of Technical Staff.

 

Eric Rozner

Eric Rozner is currently a Research Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM Research in Austin, TX. Eric obtained his BS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. After graduation, Eric worked as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff -Research at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, NJ. Eric’s interests are broadly defined in the areas of systems and networking, but he has specific interests in wireless networking, network management, software-defined networking, datacenter networking, and mobile computing. He has published over 20 technical documents in esteemed international conferences, workshops and journals. He has also filed over 65 patents. Finally, he regularly serves on technical program committees.

 

Sharayu Moharir

Sharayu Moharir is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay. Prior to joining IIT Bombay, she was a visiting fellow in the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. Sharayu obtained her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. She is the recipient of the best poster award at ACM MobiHoc 2017 and the best paper award at COMSNETS 2017.

 

Kapil Dandekar

Kapil R. Dandekar (S’95,M’01,SM’07) received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1997 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998 and 2001, respectively. In 1992, he worked at the U.S. Naval Observatory and from 1993-1997, he worked at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. In 2001, Dandekar joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is currently a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Drexel University; the Director of the Drexel Wireless Systems Laboratory (DWSL); Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Drexel University College of Engineering. Dandekar’s current research interests and publications involve wireless, ultrasonic, and optical communications, reconfigurable antennas, and smart textiles. Intellectual property from DWSL has been licensed by external companies for commercialization.   Dandekar is also a past member of the IEEE Educational Activities Board and co-founder of the EPICS-in-IEEE program.

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