INFOCOM 2007 TUTORIALS

(SCHEDULE: THE TWO TUTORIALS WILL BE OFFERED CONCURRENTLY, FROM 13:30 TO 17:00 ON SUNDAY, MAY 6^TH. THERE WILL BE A COFFEE BREAK FROM 15:00 TO 15:30.)

1. Network Coding

Dr. Yunnan Wu and Dr. Philip Chou, Microsoft Research

This tutorial will provide an overview of the theory, practice, and applications of network coding, and  is intended for researchers and practitioners who are interested in learning the latest developments in network coding. The tutorial will be self-contained, and requires only some understanding of basic networking concepts and basic linear algebra.  Topics covered include: Introduction to network coding, Single and multi-session network coding, with applications to P2P systems (File download, Video on demand) and distributed storage, Optimized resource allocation for a network coding based system (e.g., minimum energy multicasting in mobile ad hoc networks, Local mixing in wireless mesh networks), and topics related to network coding and security, joint network coding and distributed source coding, with applications to broadcasting. Researchers who want to identify open research problems in the area of network coding will also find this tutorial useful.

Speaker Bios: Yunnan Wu received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in Nov. 2002 and Jan. 2006, respectively. Since Aug. 2005, he has been a researcher in the Communication and Collaboration Systems group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. He was with Microsoft Research, Asia, from 1999–2001 as a research assistant, with Bell Laboratory, Lucent Technologies, as a summer intern in 2002, and with Microsoft Research, Redmond, as a summer intern in 2003. He also did a summer internship in the Mobile and Embedded Devices division, Microsoft Corporation. Some of his code is being used in Windows Mobile powered smart phones and pocket PCs.

Dr. Wu’s most recent research interests include networking, graph theory, information theory, and wireless communications. He received the Best Student Paper Award in the 2000 SPIE and IS&T Visual Communication and Image Processing Conference, and the Student Paper Award in the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. He was a recipient of Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship for 2003-2005.

Since 2003, he has been working actively in the area of network coding. He has written more than 10 research papers on network coding and his Ph.D. dissertation is on network coding. He has given invited talks on the topic of network coding at IEEE San Diego chapter meeting, Univ. of California, Davis, Univ. of Washington, Texas A&M University, and Bell Labs. He co-organized a special session on network coding in the 40th Annual Conference of Information Sciences and Systems, together with Philip Chou and Kamal Jain at MSR.

Philip A. Chou received the BSE degree from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 1980, and the MS degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983, both in electrical engineering and computer science, and the PhD degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1988. From 1988 to 1990, he was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. From 1990 to 1996, he was a Member of Research Staff at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, CA. In 1997 he was manager of the compression group at VXtreme, in Mountain View, CA, before it was acquired by Microsoft in 1997. From 1998 to the present, he has been a Principal Researcher with Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, where he currently manages the Communication and Collaboration Systems research group. Dr. Chou also served as Consulting Associate Professor at Stanford University in 1994-95, Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington since 1998, and Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 2006.

Dr. Chou’s research interests are data compression, information theory, communications, and pattern recognition, with applications to video, images, audio, speech, and documents. Dr. Chou served as an Associate Editor in source coding for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 1998 to 2001, and served as a Guest Associate Editor for special issues in the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia in 1996 and 2004 respectively. From 1998 to 2004 he was a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Societys Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing technical committee (IMDSP TC). He served as program committee chair for the inaugural NetCod

2005 workshop, and currently serves on the organizing committee for ICASSP 2007. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, and the IEEE Computer, Information Theory, Signal Processing, and Communications societies, and was an active member of the MPEG committee. He is the recipient, with Anshul Seghal, of the 2002 ICME Best Paper award, and is the recipient, with Tom Lookabaugh, of the 1993 Signal Processing Society Paper award. Currently he is co-editing a book on multimedia networking and communication with Mihaela van der Schaar, due in April 2007 from Elsevier.

2. Wireless Mesh Networks

Dr. Victor Bahl, Microsoft Research

This is a tutorial covering several important topics that focus on real-world deployed systems. Topics that will be covered include: Application and usage scenarios, Practical system architecture for enterprise-wide office meshes, city-wide broadband meshes, and neighborhood community meshes, Industry players and commercial technologies, Techniques and algorithms for increasing capacity and scalability, Multi-radio, multi-channel, multi-spectral systems, Design, implementation and performance of routing protocols and link selection metrics, Network security and management including threat analysis, fault diagnosis, what-if analysis, Information theoretic tools for predicting network viability and performance, Eleven different case studies of deployed testbeds – discoveries and innovations, Emerging standards: IEEE 802.11s, IEEE 802.16 mesh.

Speaker Bio: Victor Bahl is a Principal Researcher and founding manager of the Networking Research Group in Microsoft Research. His research interests span a variety of topics in networking including low power RF communications; ubiquitous wireless Internet access and services; location determination techniques and services; self-organizing, self-managing networks; and real-time audio-visual wireless communications.

Some of his seminal research includes: WiLIB (1997-1998), a general purpose programming interface for wireless network cards; RADAR (1998-1999), the world’s first signal strength based indoor user-location determination system; CHOICE (1999-2001), the world’s first public area wireless LAN hot-spot network, and UCOM (2001-2003), the world’s first multi-radio single network wireless system. For the last four years, he has been leading MSR’s Mesh Networking project and NetHealth, an end-to-end enterprise network management system. In addition to building systems, he has authored over 75 scientific papers and 64 patent applications, 31 of which have issued. He participates and contributes to standards bodies including the IEEE, Bluetooth, HomeRF, and spectrum regulatory bodies. Dr. Bahl's research has been incorporated into Microsoft's core products, industry standards, and numerous non-Microsoft commercial products.

Dr. Bahl is the founder and past Chairman of the ACM SIGMOBILE (1996-2005); the founder and past Editor-in-Chief of ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review (1996-2001), and the founder and Steering Committee Chair of ACM/USENIX Mobile Systems Conference (2003-); In addition to ACM MobiSys, Dr. Bahl serves and has served on the Steering Committee of IEEE DySpan, ACM SenSys, ACM MobiCom, IEEE ISWC, IEEE COMSWARE and on the Technical Program Committee of over 60 international conferences and workshops. He is been on the board of six IEEE and ACM journals. He has given several keynote talks and has received Digital's Doctoral Engineering Award (1995-1997) and ACM SIGMOBILE's Distinguished Service Award (2001). He is a Fellow of the ACM (2003), and a past president of the electrical engineering honor society Eta Kappa Nu-Zeta Pi.