Keynote Speakers

March 10


Victor Bahl
Distinguished Scientist & Director, Mobility & Networking Research (MNR) Group
Microsoft Research

Richard Gitlin
Agere Systems Chair, Electrical Engineering
University of South Florida


March 11

Seizo Onoe
CTO, EVP & Member, Board of Directors
NTT DOCOMO

Kevin Jou
CVP & CTO
MediaTek Inc.


March 12

Lajos Hanzo
Faculty, Physical Sciences and Engineering
University of Southampton, UK

Jerry Pi
CTO
Straight Path Communications Inc.


Victor Bahl

Cloud 2020:  The Emergence of Micro Datacenters for Mobile Computing

While there is nothing new about the fact that today resource poverty limits the types of applications we can run on mobile devices, but what is challenging is that this fundamental constraint is not just a temporary limitation of current technology but is intrinsic to mobility.  I will put forth a vision of the cloud that breaks free of this fundamental constraint. In this vision, mobile users seamlessly utilize nearby micro datacenters to obtain the resource benefits of cloud computing without incurring wide area network delays and jitter. Crisp interactive response for immersive applications that augment human cognition are then easier to achieve.  While much engineering and research remains, the concepts and ideas introduced open the door to a new world of disaggregated clouds in which seamless cognitive assistance for wireless users can be delivered anyplace, anytime using the latest and greatest computer science technologies known to us.

Biography: Victor Bahl is a Distinguished Scientist and the Director of the Mobility & Networking Research (MNR) Group in Microsoft Research. MNR's mission is to invent & research technologies that make Microsoft's networks, services, and devices indispensable to the world. In addition to shepherding brilliant researchers, Victor helps shape Microsoft's long-term vision related to networking technologies by advising the CEO and the senior executive team, and by executing on this vision through research, technology transfers, and associated policy engagements with governments and industries around the world.  He and his group have had far-reaching impact on the research community, government policy, and Microsoft products through numerous significant publications and wide-ranging significant technology transfers.

His personal research spans a variety of topics in wireless systems & services, mobile & cloud computing, and datacenter & enterprise networking. Over his career he has built many highly cited seminal systems, published prolifically in top computer science conferences and journals, awarded 115 patents, given over three dozen keynote talks and seventy University seminars, won several prestigious awards and honors including ACM SIGMOBILE’s Lifetime Achievement Award and IEEE Outstanding Leadership and Professional Service Award. Victor received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.

Richard Gitlin

In Vivo Wireless Communications and Networking

In vivo wireless communications and networking of biomedical devices has the potential of being a new research frontier and critical for advancing health care delivery. This technology, while in the embryonic stage, offers the promise of improving the effectiveness of emerging cyberphysical biomedical systems. This presentation provides an overview of research on characterizing the in vivo wireless RF channel and contrasting this channel with the familiar cellular and WLAN channels. The importance of obtaining accurate channel models is essential to the design of efficient communication systems and network protocols to support advanced bio-medical applications. I will highlight some initial work on signal processing matched to the in vivo channel including MIMO in vivo and Cooperative Network Coding systems as well as describe two experimental biomedical systems that focus on minimally invasive surgery and cardiology.

Biography: Dr. Richard D. Gitlin is a State of Florida 21st Century World Class Scholar, a Distinguished University Professor, and the Agere Systems Chair of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Florida. He has more than 45 years of leadership in communications and networking. He was with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies for 32-years performing and leading pioneering research and development in digital communications, broadband networking, and wireless systems. Dr. Gitlin was Senior VP for Communications and Networking Research at Bell Labs and later CTO of Lucent's Data Networking Business Unit. After retiring from Lucent, he was visiting professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, and then Chief Technology Officer of Hammerhead Systems, a venture funded networking company in Silicon Valley. At Bell Labs he conducted and led research and development that has resulted in many innovative products, including: co-invention of DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), invention of multicode CDMA (used in 3G wireless), and pioneering the use of smart antennas (“MIMO”) for wireless systems. Earlier in his career he led the team that created the first duplex, high-speed V.32/V.34 modems that used echo cancellation, fractionally spaced equalization, and multi-dimensional trellis coded modulation.

Dr. Gitlin is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Bell Laboratories Fellow, and a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He is also a co-recipient of the 2005 Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award and the S.O. Rice prize, has co-authored a graduate Data Communications text, published more than 100 papers and holds 51 patents. Dr. Gitlin received a doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University.

Lajos Hanzo

Aircraft Ad-Hoc Networking for the “Internet-Above-The-Clouds”, for “Free-Flight” and All That

Ad hoc networking has been at the forefront of research and numerous innovative solutions have been conceived for their OSI protocol stack. Numerous applications have been found both in the military and civilian fields of communications, as exemplified by Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) and more recently by Aeronautical Ad-hoc Networks (AANET). However, the recent concept of AANETs raises numerous challenging research issues, which are primarily related to the order of magnitude higher aircraft speed, when compared to VANETs. Hence AANETs tend to exhibit a more time-variant global network topology, typically a factor ten higher Doppler frequency and a generally more challenging propagation scenario than VANETs. Following the portrayal of the typical networking scenarios encountered in the vicinity of airports, in populated as well as in unpopulated areas, a range of networking applications are surveyed. The talk will continue with the outline of the associated network specifications in terms of the coverage and propagation requirements, the throughput, latency, transmission integrity and information security demands of the services as well as their ramifications concerning the overall system design.

The talk will conclude with critical appraisal of the applicability of existing ad hoc networking solutions to AANETs and motivate the research community to solve the rich set of open research problems in this radically new field.

Biography: Lajos Hanzo is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), FIEEE, FIET and a EURASIP Fellow. He co-authored 20 IEEE Press - John Wiley books totaling in excess of 10 000 pages on mobile radio communications, published about 1400+ research entries at IEEE Xplore, organized and chaired major IEEE conferences and has been awarded a number of distinctions. Lajos is also an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. During 2008 - 2012 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Press and also a Chaired Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Lajos has an h-index of 55 and 20 000+ citations.  

Kevin Jou

A Look at Trends in Mobile Technologies


The spread of smartphone usage has been phenomenal in the past several years. The capability of these devices have also been growing at a tremendous rate. In this talk, we will look at the direction where mobile computing and communications may take in the next few years. As computing speed and data rate increase at a rate faster than what Moore’s law affords, energy efficiency is becoming a key factor in both system design and implementation. Heterogeneous computing and communication system design are adopted to address both performance and power issues, as well as the need from diverse use cases. A few multimedia applications will be shown to demonstrate the use of stronger capabilities built into a smartphone.

Biography: Dr. Jou is a Corporate Vice President and the Chief Technology Officer at MediaTek Inc., the third largest fabless semiconductor company in the world with leading products in cellular phones, tablets, wireless connectivity, home entertainment, and optical storage. In addition to providing guidance to the company’s technology and business strategies, he oversees its communication system, computing system engineering, and multimedia design teams as well as the corporate technology office.  The communication system design team is responsible for architecture and algorithm design for all modem related projects in the company, including cellular (2G, 3G, and 4G), WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, digital TV, digital FM, Ethernet, and digital RF systems. The computing system engineering team works on computing platform and system software, graphic processors, and low power technologies for smartphones and tablets. The multimedia design team’s scope encompasses audio, image, and video signal processing, display technologies, and computer vision, with applications to the company’s smartphone, tablets, TV, Blu-ray Disc player, and automotive products. The corporate technology office is engaged in advanced research and development in various areas related to smart devices and wearable bioelectric devices. The corporate technology office also oversees sponsored university researches and joint programs with research institutes and government agencies.

Before joining MediaTek in 2011, Dr. Jou spent nearly 22 years at Qualcomm Incorporated. He was involved in the design and development of the original CDMA prototype system, the IS-95 standard, and several early CDMA base station and mobile station modem chips. He was a key contributor to the design and standardization of the third generation (3G) cellular systems, including leading the development of CDMA2000 standards for voice and packet data services. In particular, Dr. Jou was innovative in applying interference cancellation techniques and intelligent signal transmission to wireless voice communications, which resulted in a system with industry-leading voice capacity up to this date. He was also involved in the design of the Globalstar LEO satellite communication system. Dr. Jou played a major role in Qualcomm’s technical and business activities in the Greater China area.  He served as Qualcomm China’s Chief Technology Officer from 2003 to 2005.

Dr. Jou received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University in 1982 and Master of Science and Ph. D. degrees, both in electrical engineering, from the University of Southern California in 1985 and 1989, respectively.

Seizo Onoe

5G and Beyond

Mobile communication systems have the history of evolution from 1G analogue cellular systems launched in 1979 to today’s 4G LTE/LTE-Advanced. LTE was launched around 2010 and is now being deployed rapidly all over the world. LTE has become the mainstream of mobile technologies.

Up to the generation of 4G, a concrete system concept and technology for each generation emerged immediately after the commercial launch of the previous generation’s technology. In fact, there was a 4G technology in the early 2000s while no one called it ‘4G’. In this context, there must be a concrete concept already now for 5G targeting 2020. However, today, while everyone talks about 5G, there is no single technology representing 5G. Although researchers see some saturation in the radio technology evolution, combinations of the technologies continue to create new technologies and solutions. By such combinations, things that are considered impossible today will be achieved in 2020 and beyond. For example, the cellular systems will provide cost-effective solutions with wide coverage even on higher frequency spectrum with broader bandwidth.

In the talk, the current status of LTE and LTE-Advanced are presented first. Then, as a reference for 5G, the history of mobile system evolution is reviewed. And finally, the 5G technologies, spectrum, use cases and technology divergence trends are discussed.

Biography:  Seizo Onoe was named Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President and a Member of the Board of Directors in June 2012. Mr. Onoe became a Senior Vice President and Managing Director of the R&D Strategy Department in June 2008. He was a Vice President and took positions as Managing Director of the Radio Access Network related development departments from July 2002 to June 2008.

He has been responsible for leading initiatives in the research and development of the analog cellular system, the digital cellular system, W-CDMA/ HSPA, LTE, LTE-Advanced and 5G. He is working on the research and development of radio access networks, core networks, consumer devices and cloud services. He has worked for NTT and NTT DoCoMo since 1982, acquiring more than 30 years of experience. Mr. Onoe has a master’s degree in electronics from the Kyoto University Graduate School of Engineering.

Jerry Pi

From Innovation to Transformation: Next Generation Mobile Broadband as the Infrastructure for a Connected World

The rapid technology advancement in the information and communication technology (ICT) industry in the past 40 years has created phenomenal business success and profound economic and social impact. To the current generation of technologists standing on the shoulder of giants and past success, this is both a blessing and a challenge. Where do we go from here? How far can we go further? The rapid improvement and proliferation of computing power and connectivity, and the numerous possibilities of new applications and services, lead to projection of 100 billion connected devices and 1000x increase in mobile broadband capacity in the next decade. This presents a great opportunity for the wireless community to develop innovative technologies to transform the current cellular and Wi-Fi networks into next generation mobile broadband that can serve as the communication infrastructure for a connected world. What are the desired features and characteristics of next generation mobile broadband systems? What are the emerging technologies that can fulfill the potential? This talk tries to answer these questions and shed some light on the future of wireless communication.

Biography: Jerry Pi is the Chief Technology Officer of Straight Path Communications Inc., a leading communication asset company with one of the largest 28 GHz and 39 GHz spectrum portfolios in the United States. He leads the mobile communication technology strategy and R&D that maximize the value of these spectrum assets.

Prior to joining Straight Path, Jerry was a Senior Director at Samsung Research America in Dallas, Texas, where he led system research, standardization, and prototyping activities in 4G and 5G. Jerry pioneered the development of millimeter wave 5G with the world's first invention and first journal article on millimeter wave mobile communication. He also led the development of the world’s first 5G baseband and RF system prototype that successfully demonstrated the feasibility of 5G mobile communication at 28 GHz. During his tenure at Samsung, Jerry has also managed a variety of emerging technology research programs in smart home and IoT solutions, wearable devices, bio-signal processing and computing, mobile health, and medical imaging. Before joining Samsung in 2006, he was with Nokia Research Center in Dallas and San Diego, where he was a leading contributor to Nokia's 3G wireless standardization and modem development efforts for 3GPP2 1xEV-DV, 1xEV-DO, and Ultra Mobile Broadband systems.

He has authored more than 30 technical journal and conference papers and is the inventor of more than 150 patents and applications. He holds a B.E. degree from Tsinghua University (with honor), a M.S. degree from the Ohio State University, and an MBA degree from Cornell University (with distinction). He is a Senior Member of IEEE.