iCore seminar by Professor Kin K. Leung (Imperial College, UK)
23 March 2016 (Wednesday) - from 11:00 to 12:30
Dennis Gabor Seminar Room, 611, level 6, EEE Dept. @ Imperial College
After working at AT&T/Lucent Bell Labs for 19 years, Kin K. Leung has been the Tanaka Chair Professor in the EEE and Computing
Departments at Imperial College since 2004. He is the Head of Communications and Signal Processing Group in the EEE Department. His research
focuses on networking, protocols, optimization and modeling of wireless broadband, sensor and ad-hoc networks. He also works on multi-antenna
systems and cross-layer optimization of these networks.
He received the Distinguished Member of Technical Staff Award from AT&T Bell Labs in 1994, and was a co-recipient of the 1997 Lanchester
Prize Honorable Mention Award. He is an IEEE Fellow since 2001. He received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merits Award from 2004 to 2009,
and is a member of Academia Europaea since 2012. He has published 260+ papers and received 45+ U.S. patents. Along with his co-authors, he
received a number of best paper awards at major conferences, including the IEEE PIMRC 2012 and ICDCS 2013. He serves as a member (2009-11)
and the chairman (2012-15) of the IEEE Fellow Evaluation Committee for Communications Society. He also actively serves as journal editors
and conference committee members.
Seminar Title: "From Distributed Optimization to In-Network Data Processing in Wireless Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networks"
Abstract: The aim of this iCore seminar is to introduce distribution optimization and its applications to
wireless networks to students and colleagues interested on the subject. In this talk, the speaker will begin with a brief
introduction of distributed optimization theory, including convex optimization problems for which distributed, iterative
solution techniques exist and converge. As for wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks, it is well known that each link capacity
in these networks depends on the transmission power of other links. In addition, the quality of multimedia services supported
by these networks cannot be represented by a concave function of the amount of allocated bandwidth. These factors unfortunately
make the resource allocation problem for the wireless networks become a non-convex optimization problem. New distributed
solution techniques will be presented to solve these problems and numerical examples will also be provided.
As the second part of this talk, the speaker considers the in-network data processing in wireless sensor networks where data
are aggregated (fused) along the way they are transferred toward the end user. It will be shown that finding the optimal solution
for the distributed processing problem is NP-hard, but for specific parameter settings, the problem can lead to a distributed
framework for the global optimal solution. Future work on integrating data or signal processing techniques with the distributed
solution framework will be discussed.
Given the introductory materials to be covered in this seminar, it is expected to run longer than the usual one hour.