Welcome to NCC 2017

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission:
31 October 2016
15 November 2016 (HARD DEADLINE)
Decision notification:
16 January 2017
22 January 2017
Camera-ready submission:
31 January 2017

TECHNICAL CO-SPONSORS

IEEE
IEEE Signal Processing Society

SPONSORS-DIAMOND

National Instruments

SPONSORS-PLATINUM

Qualcomm

SPONSORS-SILVER



Mathworks

Primeasure

INVITED TALKS

Invited SpeakerTalk titleTime & Venue
Liam Barry
Dublin City University
All-optical wavelength conversion for fast reconfigurable optical networks Friday, March 3, 9:50 am - 10:20 am
IC&SR Auditorium
Parimal Parag
IISc Bangalore
Latency Analysis for Distributed Storage Friday, March 3, 9:50 am - 10:20 am
IC&SR Hall 1
Sri Garimella
Amazon
Overview of Amazon Echo’s Speech Recognition System Friday, March 3, 9:50 am - 10:20 am
IC&SR Hall 2
Ashok Veeraraghavan
Rice University, USA
Computational Imaging: Beyond the limits imposed by lenses Friday, March 3, 9:50 am - 10:20 am
IC&SR Hall 3
Jishnu
Tejas Networks
Rethinking Communication Network Architecture Friday, March 3, 2:20 pm - 2:50 pm
IC&SR Auditorium
Ezra Ip
NEC Labs
Recent Advances in Mode-Division Multiplexed Transmission using Few-Mode Fibers Friday, March 3, 2:20 pm - 2:50 pm
IC&SR Hall 1
Mrityunjoy Chakraborty
IIT Kharagpur
Sparse Adaptive Filters - an Overview and Some Emerging Trends Friday, March 3, 2:20 pm - 2:50 pm
IC&SR Hall 2
Aswin Sankaranarayanan
CMU
Unconstrained 3D Imaging Friday, March 3, 2:20 pm - 2:50 pm
IC&SR Hall 3
Klutto Milleth
CEWiT
Flexi-OFDMA waveform for 5G Friday, March 3, 4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
IC&SR Auditorium
K. P. Naveen
IIT Madras
Coverage Properties of One-Dimensional Infrastructure-Based Wireless Networks Friday, March 3, 4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
IC&SR Hall 1
Thas Nirmalathas
University of Melbourne
Integration of Optical–Wireless Networks for Broadband Mobile Networks Friday, March 3, 4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
IC&SR Hall 2
Praneeth Netrapalli
Microsoft Research
Parallelizing Stochastic Approximation Through Mini-Batching and Tail-Averaging Friday, March 3, 4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
IC&SR Hall 3
Harish Krishnaswamy
Columbia University
Full Duplex Wireless: From Fundamental Physics and Integrated Circuits to Complex Systems and Networking Saturday, March 4, 9:50 am - 10:20 am
IC&SR Auditorium
Sharayu Moharir
IIT Bombay
Revenue Maximization in Two-Sided Markets Saturday, March 4, 9:50 am - 10:20 am
IC&SR Hall 1
Arvind Mishra
Sterlite
Development of Next Generation Broadband Access Technologies Saturday, March 4, 9:50 am - 10:20 am
IC&SR Hall 2
Srikanth R
Microsoft India
Speech recognition in the Indian Context Saturday, March 4, 9:50 am - 10:20 am
IC&SR Hall 3
Zhang Ping, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Load Balancing in Small Cell Networks Using User Equipment Transfer Saturday, March 4, 2:20 pm - 2:50 pm
IC&SR Auditorium
Saurabh Saxena
IIT Madras
Wireline communication: The backbone of data transfer Saturday, March 4, 2:20 pm - 2:50 pm
IC&SR Hall 1
Shajith Ikbal Mohamed
IBM-IRL
Document Extraction and Understanding Saturday, March 4, 2:20 pm - 2:50 pm
IC&SR Hall 2
Oliver Cossairt
Northwestern University
SAVI: Synthetic Apertures for long-range, sub-diffraction Visible Imaging Using Fourier Ptychography Saturday, March 4, 2:20 pm - 2:50 pm
IC&SR Hall 3
Rohit Budhiraja
IIT Kanpur
Joint Transceiver Design for QoS-Constrained MIMO Two-Way Non-Regenerative Relaying Using Geometric Programming Saturday, March 4, 4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
IC&SR Auditorium
Puduru Viswanadha Reddy
IIT Madras
Strategic and computational trade-offs in endogenous coalition formation Saturday, March 4, 4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
IC&SR Hall 1



Liam Barry

Liam Barry
Dublin City University

Title: All-optical wavelength conversion for fast reconfigurable optical networks

Abstract: Optical networks are becoming more flexible and agile, driven by the increasing demand for bandwidth at lower cost and energy per bit. Networks now support polarization-multiplexed (pol-mux) modulation formats, flex- grids and optical layer switching and routing of signals. However, optical layer wavelength switching technologies have to mature for field deployment. This work outlines the use of four-wave mixing (FWM) in semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) to enable all-optical wavelength conversion of pol-mux coherent signals. The use of SOA as the nonlinear medium reduces the pump and signal power requirements compared to the nonlinear fibres. In addition the use of fast wavelength tuneable lasers as the pump sources in the FWM based systems can ensure fast reconfigurable wavelength converters.

Bio: Liam Barry received his BE (Electronic Engineering) and MEngSc (Optical Communications) degrees from University College Dublin in 1991 and 1993 respectively. From 1993 until 1996 he was employed as a Research Engineer in the Optical Systems Department of France Telecom's Research Laboratories (now known as Orange Labs) in Lannion, France. As a result of his work there into the development of high capacity optical networks he obtained his PhD Degree from the University of Rennes in France. In 1996 he joined the Applied Optics Centre in Auckland University, New Zealand, as a Research Fellow and in 1998 he took up a lecturing position in the School of Electronic Engineering at Dublin City University, and established the Radio and Optical Communications Laboratory. He is currently a Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering and a Principal Investigator for Science Foundation Ireland. His main research interests are; all-optical signal processing, optical pulse generation and characterization,hybrid radio/fibre communication systems, wavelength tuneable lasers for reconfigurable optical networks, and optical performance monitoring. He has published over 500 articles in international peer reviewed journals and conferences, and holds 10 patents in the area of optoelectronics. He has been a TPC member for the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) since 2004, and a TPC member for the Optical Fibre Communication Conference (OFC) from 2007 to 2010, serving as Chair of the Optoelectronic Devices sub-committee for OFC 2010.

Parimal Parag

Parimal Parag
IISc Bangalore

Title: Latency Analysis for Distributed Storage

Abstract: Modern communication and computation systems consist of large networks of unreliable nodes. Yet, it is well known that such systems can provide aggregate reliability via information redundancy, duplicating paths, or replicating computations. While redundancy may increase the load on a system, it can also lead to major performance improvements through the judicious management of additional system resources. Two important examples of this abstract paradigm are content access from multiple caches in content delivery networks and master/slave computations on compute clusters. Many recent works in the area have proposed bounds on the latency performance of redundant systems, characterizing the latency-redundancy trade-off under specific load profiles. Following a similar line of research, this work introduces new analytical bounds and approximation techniques for the latency-redundancy trade-off for a range of system loads and two popular redundancy schemes. The proposed framework allows for approximating the equilibrium latency distribution, from which various metrics can be derived including mean, variance, and the tail decay of stationary distributions.

Bio: Parimal Parag is currently an assistant professor in department of electrical communication engineering at Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore. He was working as senior systems engineer in R&D at ASSIA Inc. from October 2011 to November 2014. He received his B. Tech. and M. Tech. degrees from Indian Institute of Technology Madras in fall 2004; and the PhD degree from Texas A&M University in fall 2011. He was at Stanford University and Los Alamos National Laboratory, in autumn of 2010 and summer of 2007, respectively.
He conducts research in network theory, applied probability, optimization methods, and in their applications to distributed systems. His previous work includes performance evaluation, monitoring, and control of large broadband communication systems and networks.

Sri Garimella

Sri Garimella
Amazon

Title: Overview of Amazon Echo’s Speech Recognition System

Abstract: Echo's high accuracy speech recognition system uses the standard deep neural network (DNN) acoustic model, which is trained using in-house distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) framework. This talk provides an overview of speech recognition technology focusing on acoustic modeling and our distributed DNN training framework.

Bio: Sri Garimella is a senior machine learning scientist and manager of Amazon speech recognition group in Bangalore. He has obtained PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Baltimore in 2012, and Master of Engineering in Signal Processing from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2006. His research interests include deep learning, statistical machine learning, and speech & speaker recognition. He has several patents and publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.


Ashok Veeraraghavan

Ashok Veeraraghavan
Rice University

Title: Computational Imaging: Beyond the limits imposed by lenses

Abstract: The lens has long been a central element of cameras, since its early use in the mid-nineteenth century by Niepce, Talbot, and Daguerre. The role of the lens, from the Daguerrotype to modern digital cameras, is to refract light to achieve a one-to- one mapping between a point in the scene and a point on the sensor. This effect enables the sensor to compute a particular two-dimensional (2D) integral of the incident 4D light-field. We propose a radical departure from this practice and the many limitations it imposes. In the talk we focus on two inter- related research projects that attempt to go beyond lens-based imaging.

First, we discuss our lab’s recent efforts to build flat, extremely thin imaging devices by replacing the lens in a conventional camera with an amplitude mask and computational reconstruction algorithms. These lensless cameras, called FlatCams can be less than a millimeter in thickness and enable applications where size, weight, thickness or cost are the driving factors. Second, we discuss high-resolution, long-distance imaging using Fourier Ptychography, where the need for a large aperture aberration corrected lens is replaced by a camera array and associated phase retrieval algorithms resulting again in order of magnitude reductions in size, weight and cost.

Bio: Ashok Veeraraghavan is currently an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, TX, USA. Before joining Rice University, he spent three wonderful and fun-filled years as a Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge, MA. He received his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2002 and M.S and PhD. degrees from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2004 and 2008 respectively. His thesis received the Doctoral Dissertation award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland. He loves playing, talking, and pretty much anything to do with the slow and boring but enthralling game of cricket.

Jishnu A.

Jishnu A.
Tejas Networks

Title: Rethinking Communication Network Architecture

Abstract: Communication networks were built with specialized hardware and software catering to a specific application like firewall, BRAS, ePC etc. With the advent of 5G and the requirement for a flexible communication and compute architecture, there is a need to rethink the communication network hardware much like your phone or laptop which can be procured from any vendor and shall be able to operate with an OS like your android OS/ iOS providing standard north bound Interface/APIs (NBI). This can then be enabled with specific software application(s) so as to provide specialized applications mentioned earlier. In this talk we will look in detail how this re-architecture can be done and will cover concepts under discussion in standards body like CORD (Central Office Re-architected as Data-center), NFV MANO (Management and Orchestration), etc. We will then analyse the technical challenges in implementing this architecture in general and specifically with regards to the disaggregation of 3GPP LTE layers.

Bio: He obtained his BTech in electronics and communication from NIT, Calicut in 2001 and Masters from IISc, Bangalore in 2004. Subsequently he joined Tejas Networks and is responsible for deciding the long term roadmap of the company. He represents Tejas at ITU-T SG15 and has contributed towards the development of ITU-T G.8032 and MPLS-TP standards. His present interests include Cloud RAN, IoT and SDN/NFV technologies. He was closely involved in the design of 3G/4G backhaul architecture with Major Indian and International operators. He is the current chairman of Optical Access and Transport Study Group (SG3) in TSDSI and is actively involved in 3GPP 5G standardization.

He has filed 17 patents and was awarded the best paper award by IETE in 2006.

Ezra Ip

Ezra Ip
NEC labs

Title: Recent Advances in Mode-Division Multiplexed Transmission using Few-Mode Fibers

Abstract: We review recent advances in few-mode fiber transmission. DSP complexity and mode-dependent gain (MDG) control are two key implementation issues. While DSP may be reduced by managing differential modal group dispersion (DMGD) and by using frequency-domain equalization, complexity still grows super-linearly with number of modes. MDG arises in inline amplifiers and can be controlled to a certain degree by optimizing the doping profile. The use of mode scrambling may ultimately be the most effective way of combatting both problems by enabling DMGD and MDG to grow only as the square root of distance. FMF are most likely to be deployed in data-centers that can benefit from high spatial information density. Elliptical-core FMFs is an attractive solution that behaves physically like parallel single-mode fibers.


Mrityunjoy Chakraborty

Mrityunjoy Chakraborty
IIT Kharagpur

Title: Sparse Adaptive Filters - an Overview and Some Emerging Trends

Abstract: In practice, one often encounters systems that have a sparse impulse response (IR), with the degree of sparseness varying over time. Examples of such systems include network echo channels in voice and data communication, wireless multipath channels in mobile communication, echo channels in HDTV, acoustic channels in underwater communication etc. The a priori information about sparseness of the system IR, if exploited properly, can significantly improve the identification performance of the algorithm deployed to identify it. In recent years, several sparse adaptive filters have been proposed that cleverly incorporate the a priori knowledge about sparseness of the system in the coefficient adaptation relations and thus perform better. The first and foremost in this category is the proportionate normalized LMS (PNLMS) algorithm and its variants like the improved PNLMS (IPNLMS) and the μ-law PNLMS (MPNLMS). In the PNLMS category of algorithms, the step size for each coefficient is made proportional to the magnitude of the corresponding coefficient update, thereby making it large for active taps (leading to faster rate of convergence initially) and small for inactive taps (leading to lesser steady state excess mean square error (EMSE)). Apart from the PNLMS family, another powerful class of sparse adaptive filters has come up in recent years, inspired by the recent advent of compressive sensing in general and LASSO in particular. The primary development in this is the so-called zero attracting LMS (ZA- LMS) algorithm, obtained by adding a l1 norm penalty (of the filter coefficient vector) to the LMS cost function. Minimization of the cost function introduces certain zero attractors in the weight update formula which pull the coefficient updates towards zero. The ZA-LMS was later modified to reweighted zero attracting LMS (RZA-LMS) where the shrinkage is restricted only to the inactive taps. The ZA-LMS and the RZA- LMS algorithms offer lesser steady state EMSE as compared to the PNLMS family while enjoying a convergence rate that is reasonably good though not as high as that of the PNLMS. In addition to the PNLMS family and the ZA- based algorithms, there have been several other approaches also to realize a sparse adaptive filter, notably, the partial update LMS, convex combination of adaptive filters etc. Further, sparse adaptive filters have been used as nodes in a distributed network deployed to identify the unknown sparse system and diffusion strategies have been devised for sharing of information within the neighborhood of each node,, resulting in refined estimates.

The purpose of this talk is to present the basics of some of the major recent developments in the context of sparse adaptive filters. No background knowledge in this area will be assumed though some familiarity with basic adaptive filtering will be helpful. It is expected that participants will gain some useful input from this talk, enabling them to pursue further studies in this area in future.

Bio: Mrityunjoy Chakraborty obtained Bachelor of Engg. from Jadavpur university, Calcutta, Master of Technology from IIT, Kanpur and Ph.D. from IIT, Delhi. He joined IIT, Kharagpur as a faculty member in 1994, where he currently holds the position of a professor in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engg. The teaching and research interests of Prof. Chakraborty are in Digital and Adaptive Signal Processing, VLSI Signal Processing, Linear Algebra and Compressive Sensing. In these areas, Prof. Chakraborty has supervised several graduate theses, carried out independent research and has several well cited publications.

Prof. Chakraborty is currently a senior editorial board member of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and also of the IEEE journal of Emerging Techniques in Circuits and Systems. Earlier, he had been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, part I (2004-2007, 2010-2012) and part II (2008-2009), apart from being an elected member (also currently the chair) of the DSP Technical Committee (TC) of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, a guest editor of the EURASIP JASP (special issue), track co-chair (DSP track) of ISCAS 2015 & 2016, Gabor track chair of DSP-15, and a TPC member of ISCAS (2011-2014), ICC (2007-2011) and Globecom (2008-2011). Prof. Chakraborty is a co-founder of the Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA), is currently a member of the APSIPA BOG and also, served as the chair of the APSIPA TC on Signal and Information Processing Theory and Methods (SIPTM). He has also been the general chair and also the TPC chair of the National Conference on Communications – 2012.

Prof. Chakraborty is a fellow of the National Academy of Science, India, and also of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE). During 2012-2013, he was selected as a distinguished lecturer of the APSIPA.

Aswin Sankaranarayanan

Aswin Sankaranarayanan
CMU

Title: Unconstrained 3D Imaging

Abstract: 3D scanning has come of age in the last decade with numerous commercially devices that exploit depth perception to enable advances in automation and entertainment. In this talk, I will discuss some of the key challenges facing 3D scanning today and highlight research from my lab that aim to deliver unconstrained and robust 3D imaging. This includes scanning of objects with complex spatially-varying reflectance, concavities, and even objects that are beyond the line-of-sight of the camera.

Bio: Aswin Sankaranarayanan is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He earned his Ph.D. from University of Maryland, College Park. He was a post-doctoral researcher at the DSP group at Rice University before joining the faculty at the ECE Department at CMU in 2013. Aswin is the PI of the Image Science Lab at CMU; his research spans topics in imaging, machine vision, and image processing. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2017, the 2016 Herschel M. Rich invention award from Rice Univeristy for work on lensless imaging, and the distinguished dissertation fellowship from the ECE Department at University of Maryland for his thesis work in 2009.


Klutto Milleth

Klutto Milleth
CeWit

Title: Flexi-OFDMA waveform for 5G

Abstract: As new applications and usage scenarios are emerging, the traffic volume and the number of connected devices will see an exponential growth in the near future. The global data traffic is expected to increase by 10,000 times in the next ten years. Even while the smart phones form a major part, other types like sensors and machine type communication devices are expected to be deployed in large volumes. Apart from the above requirements, for a sustainable development of the mobile eco-system, it needs to improve energy, operational, and cost efficiencies over a longer period.

Based on the above requirements, the services are divided into the following three categories by 3GPP as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type-communications (mMTC), Ultra reliable, and low latency communications (URLLC). To provide these diverse services that require very low data rate to very high data rates with reduced overhead, and energy efficiency using a single radio throw multiple conflicting design challenges. Moreover, the available radio resources should be used in a spectrally efficient manner. Above all it needs more spectrum, which is only available in the high frequency bands like the millimeter wave bands. Initial research shows that to meet all the above needs using a single radio, it requires a new radio waveform.

Some of the waveforms that are a candidate for the new radio along with their advantages and disadvantages, and a novel waveform called as flexi-OFDMA proposed by CEWiT will be discussed. The flexi OFDMA is a OFDM based waveform that rely on block CP to avoid inter block interference due to different subcarrier spacing supported in the next generation technology. The main advantage of this waveform is that it does not require filtering/windowing, and also gaurd band between bands with different subcarrier frequency that is required for other competing waveforms. It will be shown that flexi-OFDMA has an overall advantage over the other competing waveforms.

Bio: J Klutto Milleth got his B.E. in Electronics and Communication Engineering in 1990 from National Engineering College, Nalattinputhur, and M.E. in Microwave and Optical Engineering in 1994 from Alagappa Chettiar College of Engineering and Technology, Karaikudi. He completed Ph.D. in the year 2004 from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras on the topic space-time coding in MIMO wireless communication systems. He also gained ten years of teaching experience during this period.

He is working for the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology, IIT Madras since October 2004, and currently holding Chief Technologist position. He is currently leading a team comprising of around twenty researchers with focus mainly on the physical layer and some aspects of MAC layer of OFDM based broadband wireless communication systems. He has worked on the OFDM based 4G wireless standards such as IEEE 802.16m (WiMAX-2) and 3GPP-LTE. He has participated in the IEEE 802.16m standards meetings, and has made significant contributions to the IEEE 802.16m-2011 specifications. He has participated in the WiMAX forum meetings, and currently involved in the release 15 of 3GPP standardization, which is referred to as 5G.

Moreover, his research activity till date has led to the publications of his research outputs in fourteen international conferences and six international journals, majority of them got published in IEEE publications. Apart from this he has filed around twenty patents in India and abroad.

K. P. Naveen

K. P. Naveen
IIT Madras

Title: Coverage Properties of One-Dimensional Infrastructure-Based Wireless Networks

Abstract: We consider an infrastructure-based wireless network that comprises two types of nodes, namely, relays and sinks. The relay nodes are used to extend the network coverage by providing multi-hop paths to the sink nodes (that are connected to a wireline infrastructure). Restricting to the one-dimensional case, we aim to characterize the fraction of covered region for given densities of sink and relay nodes. We first compare and contrast our infrastructure-based model with the traditional setting, where a point is said to be covered if it simply lies within the range of some node. Then, drawing an analogy between the connected components of the network and the busy periods of an M/D/\infty queue, and using renewal theoretic arguments we obtain an explicit expression for the average vacancy (which is the complement of coverage). We also compute an upper bound for vacancy by introducing the notion of left-coverage (i.e., coverage by a node from the left). We prove a lower bound by coupling our model with an independent-disk model, where the sinks' coverage regions are independent and identically distributed. Through numerical work, we study the problem of minimizing network deployment cost subject to a constraint on the average vacancy. Finally, we will also discuss about the properties of a general notion of coverage called hop-constrained coverage, that is obtained by introducing hop-counts into our earlier definition of coverage. (This is joint work with Prof. Anurag Kumar from IISc, Bangalore.)

Bio: Dr. K.P. Naveen received the B.E. degree in ECE from the Visveswaraya Technological University (VTU), Belgaum (2005), and Ph.D degree from the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (2013). Subsequently, he was a post-doctoral fellow with the INFINE team at INRIA Saclay, France. He has also worked at the ISRO Satellite centre, Bangalore (Jan-2006 to July-2007). Since Jan. 2016 he is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, as a DST-INSPIRE faculty. His research interests include modeling and performance analysis of wireless networks, stochastic games and optimal control.


Thas Nirmalathas

Thas A. Nirmalathas
University of Melbourne

Title: Integration of Optical–Wireless Networks for Broadband Mobile Networks

Abstract: As the mobile networks begin to offer broadband services, optical-wireless converged networks provide a feasible pathway to addressing key challenges associated with mobile network expansion. In this paper, we present our recent research in to the feasibility of optical access networks for meeting backhaul capacity challenge, the development of backhaul-first approach to network planning and small cell augmentation and proposed architectures for inter-basestation connectivity, forming the basis for optical-wireless network integration approaches.

Bio: Thas A Nirmalathas is the Director of the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and a Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne. He also provides the academic leadership to the Melbourne Accelerator Program which he cofounded to foster entrepreneurial culture through experiential program based start-up acceleration methodologies.


Praneeth Netrapalli

Praneeth Netrapalli
Microsoft

Title: Parallelizing Stochastic Approximation Through Mini-Batching and Tail-Averaging

Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular optimization tool to learn deep networks. However, SGD is an inherently sequential algorithm and parallelizing SGD is an important and critical open problem.


In this work, we provide a new “parallel” SGD algorithm that has two remarkable properties for linear regression : a) the algorithm works in the big-data regime where data is streaming as it cannot be stored in RAM, b) the algorithm achieves nearly same statistical rates as the standard SGD method but with significantly large amount of parallelization.

Bio: Praneeth Netrapalli is currently a researcher at MSR India. He obtained his MS and PhD from UT Austin, and B-Tech from IIT Bombay, all in Electrical Engineering. His research interests are broadly in the areas of optimization and machine learning where he uses non-convex optimization techniques to obtain faster and provable algorithms for machine learning problems. Recently, he has also been working on obtaining faster and statistically optimal streaming algorithms.


Harish Krishnaswamy

Harish Krishnaswamy
Columbia

Title: Full Duplex Wireless: From Fundamental Physics and Integrated Circuits to Complex Systems and Networking

Abstract: Mobile data traffic in 2014 was nearly 30 times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. Next generation wireless networks are targeting 1000x increase in capacity to meet the insatiable demand for more data. Such a tremendous increase in wireless data will require a complete rethinking of today’s wireless communication systems and networks from the physical layer to the network and application layer.

In this talk, I will focus on recent research in CoSMIC lab in this space. The bulk of this talk will focus on our work on enabling full-duplex wireless communication, where transmitters and receivers operate at the same frequency at the same time, thus potentially doubling data throughput, promoting more flexible spectrum usage, and enabling solutions to several network problems. The fundamental challenge in full duplex is the tremendous transmitter self- interference at the receiver, which can be one trillion times more powerful than the desired signal and must be dealt with in all domains. This powerful self-interference is susceptible to uncertainties of the wireless channel (for instance, frequency selectivity and time variance) and the imperfections of the transceiver electronics (nonlinear distortion and phase noise to name a few), making it even harder to deal with.

At the electromagnetic (i.e. antenna) interface, I will talk about our recent work on breaking Lorentz Reciprocity using time-variance to realize the first integrated magnetic-free non-reciprocal circulator. I will also discuss how polarization can be utilized to achieve robust self-interference suppression by embedding complex signal processing functionalities like wireless channel equalization in the antenna domain. Finally, I will discuss how joint self- interference suppression across the antenna, RF/analog and digital domains can enable achievement of the 90- 100dB self-interference suppression levels that are required for practical full-duplex wireless links.

Bio: Harish Krishnaswamy received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, in 2001, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA, USA, in 2003 and 2009, respectively. In 2009, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, where he is currently an Associate Professor.

His research interests broadly span integrated devices, circuits, and systems for a variety of RF, mmWave and sub- mmWave applications.

Dr. Krishnaswamy serves as a member of the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of several conferences, including the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (2015/16-present) and IEEE RFIC Symposium (2013-present). He was the recipient of the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Lewis Winner Award for Outstanding Paper in 2007, the Best Thesis in Experimental Research Award from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award in 2011, a 2014 IBM Faculty Award and the 2015 IEEE RFIC Symposium Best Student Paper Award - 1st Place. He currently serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society.

Sharayu Moharir

Sharayu Moharir
IIT Bombay

Title: Revenue Maximization in Two-Sided Markets

Abstract: We consider the task of revenue maximization in two-sided markets in the setting where the supply and demand curves are unknown. Motivated by the fact that many two-sided marketplaces, e.g., rideshare platforms, are oligopolies, we first show that in oligopolistic markets, the revenue is a unimodal function of price. Next, we exploit this property to design an efficient algorithm to minimize the expected regret, i.e., the expected loss in revenue due to the lack of knowledge of the supply and demand curves. We provide theoretical performance guarantees for our algorithm and show (via simulations) that in the setting we consider, our algorithm outperforms known algorithms for the multi- arm unimodal bandit problem.

Bio: Sharayu Moharir received her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering and M.Tech. in Communications and Signal Processing from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2009 and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. She was a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Technology and Computer Science, TIFR from August 2014 to December 2015. Since January 2016, she has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay as an Assistant Professor. Her research interests include modeling and design of scalable algorithms for large-scale systems including content delivery networks, communication networks, and crowd-sourcing.


Arvind Mishra

Arvind Kumar Mishra
Sterlite

Title: Development of Next Generation Broadband Access Technologies

Abstract: With the continuous growth in bandwidth demand, the cost effective NG-PON access technology is desired to balance between short term investment and sustainable future proof infrastructure. The development trend of various gigabit PON technologies and universal software defined NG-PON platform to support multiple fiber access technologies (GPON, XG-PON, XGS-PON and TWDM-PON) simultaneously over a single access infrastructure will be discussed. These advanced fiber access solution can be used for mobile back-haul to support 5G services. Besides, the NG-PON technology uses much longer wavelength than traditional GPON and its performance will be more sensitive to bending and could lead towards inoperable link when higher speed and distance upgrades would be desired in future. Therefore, network designers, and operators should consider the bend sensitive fibers in FTTH network to prevent network disruptions.

Bio: Dr. Arvind Kumar Mishra has received M. Sc. and M. Tech. degrees from IIT-Delhi and PhD degree from University College Cork (UCC), Ireland. Since 2012, he is working as Associate General Manager at Centre of Excellence, Sterlite Technologies Limited. From May 2016, he is member of Board of Directors (BoD) at FTTH Council Asia-Pacific. He has 16+ years of experience in the development of advanced optical communication technologies and worked at several leading European research organizations.

His research focus on advanced modulation formats, Tera scale energy efficient data transport, Next Generation PONs, and optimal network architecture solution meeting current and future capacity requirements. He has published over 45 articles in peer reviewed international journals and conferences in the area of high speed optical communication system engineering.

Srikanth R

Srikanth R
Microsoft India

Title: Speech recognition in the Indian Context

Abstract: There are several challenges while building speech recognition system for Indic Languages, including Indianized English. Access to good Data is always a problem. We look at ways to deal with building acoustic models for low-resource languages. Another challenge encountered is code-mixing as many Indian speakers are multilingual and exhibit code-mixing in their use of language. Also the multilingual nature of the Indian populous implies the languages are accented by native tongues, e.g. Hindi spoken by a Tamil speaker and so on. Even local language speakers exhibit various accents in the same language e.g. Telugu spoken in Hyderabad differs significantly in accent to the Telugu spoken in coastal Andhra. This also extends to English spoken by Indians from various parts of India. We look at these challenges and the system built in Microsoft.

Bio: Radhakrishnan Srikanth received his Ph.D. in computer science (Neural Networks) in 1993 from Tulane University. After spending 7 years in academia, and two startups, he finally ended up in Microsoft in 2004. He is currently the Group Program Manager for Relevance in the AI & Research division in Search Technology Center in India, Hyderabad.


Zhang Ping

Zhang Ping
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT)

Title: Load Balancing in Small Cell Networks Using User Equipment Transfer

Abstract: This paper aims at balancing the load of small cell networks via user equipment (UE) transfer. To guarantee the fairness of both small cells and UEs, a load definition that jointly considers the small cells’ service ability and UEs’ data rate requirements is adopted. The system load balancing problem is formulated as an integer lexicographical minimization problem whose calculation complexity is NP-hard. Based on the property analysis of the constructed problem, an lexicographical bound of the system load vector is found and the optimal sub-channel allocation strategy is obtained. To reduce the complexity and achieve a satisfying load balancing performance, a UE transfer based load balancing (UTBLB) scheme is proposed by managing the load distribution in a lexicographical non-increasing manner. Simulation results indicate that the performance of UTBLB is approaching the optimal solution and the fairness of both small cells and UEs is improved.

Bio: Prof. Ping Zhang is a full professor of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) as well as the director of Wireless technology innovation Labs (WTI), BUPT, and also serves as a member of China 3G Group, China 863 FuTURE project, Technical Group of China 3G (C3G) Mobile Comm. R&D Project, Expert Group of China 3G Mobile Comm. Technology Tests, Expert Consultation Group of Mobile and Satellite Comm. of MII, China and advisor of Chinese Wireless Technology Standardization (CWTS) Group and advisor of NTT DoCoMo Research and Development (R&D) Advisory Board, and a vision committee member of WWRF. Prof. Zhang has been invited as the TPC member of a series of international conference, such as PIMRC and VTC etc.

Prof. Zhang is famous for his outstanding contribution for the world wireless communication and his research interest mainly focus on the research of mobile communications, especially in physical layer techniques. As project leader or principal investigator, Prof. Zhang has taken on many important projects including governmental projects and companies projects, such as 863 key project “Research and development on the third generation mobile communication systems”, and Natural Science Foundation of China “System, theory and applications in the next generation wireless multimedia networks”, and projects with Siemens, Ericsson and ETRI etc. These projects involved not only development on engineering, but also a lot of researches on fundamental theories.

As an author or co-author, Prof. Zhang has published more than 170 papers in international and domestic journals and international academic conference, 2 books, and owned 18 patents. Due to these great achievements, Prof. Zhang has obtained many honors and awards from Chinese government and Educational Ministry, and is one of the few professors that enjoy Government Special Allowance in China.

Saurabh Saxena

Saurabh Saxena
IIT Madras

Title: Wireline communication: The backbone of data transfer

Abstract: Evolution of wireline communication with first commercialization of telegraph in 1830s to 400Gb/s Ethernet standard in 2020s has served/will serve numerous applications from consumer electronics to high-performance scientific computing. In the last 45 years, the wired communication has evolved with every new IEEE 802.3x standard and scaling in CMOS technology as governed by Moore’s law has benefited the wireline transceiver prototype for every performance upgrade. This talk will elaborate on the evolution of wireline communication in the background of wirelessly connecting billions of nodes by 2020s. The talk will discuss the challenges of wireline communication and future opportunities in the midst of tapering in CMOS technology scaling.

Bio: Saurabh Saxena received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering, the M.Tech. degree in microelectronics and VLSI design from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India, in 2009, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA in 2015. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India.

Dr. Saxena serves as a reviewer for the IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS I—REGULAR PAPERS, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION SYSTEMS, and IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. His research interests include delta-sigma modulators, high speed I/O interfaces, and clocking circuits.

Shajith Ikbal Mohamed

Shajith Ikbal Mohamed
IBM-IRL

Title: Document Extraction and Understanding

Abstract: Documents constitute important information source for building knowledge and learning systems in various domains such as finance, health, legal and education. Very large volumes of documents are getting generated every day in a variety of formats in those domains. However, a majority of the documents are optimized for printing and viewing and do not include structure and metadata for effective machine consumption. For example, Portable Document Format (PDF) documents mainly contain the information of how to ink a page to display the content, but do not contain explicit details of the page format or the table structure. Hence it is important to be able to understand the structure of the documents and estimate the component objects along with their metadata to facilitate effective downstream processing. This talk will provide an overview of the generic document extraction and understanding framework being developed at IBM Research. Some specific aspects of the document understanding such as reading order, table extraction and image extraction will be discussed in detail.

Bio: Shajith Ikbal is a Senior Research Scientist at IBM Research in India, where he is part of Knowledge Engineering and Data Platforms department. His research interests include machine learning, text analytics, speech recognition and language understanding. He holds several patents and publications in international conferences and journals. Prior to IBM he worked as a Post-Doctoral research fellow at Computer Science department of Karlsruhe University in Germany. He received his PhD in the field of Speech Recognition from the Computer Science department of Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland in 2004. His M.S in the field of Neural Networks is from the CS&E Department of IIT Madras, Chennai, India in 1999.

Oliver Cossairt

Oliver Cossairt
Northwestern

Title: SAVI: Synthetic Apertures for long-range, sub-diffraction Visible Imaging Using Fourier Ptychography

Abstract: Synthetic aperture radar is a well-known technique for improving resolution in radio imaging. Extending these synthetic aperture techniques to the visible light domain is not straightforward as optical receivers cannot measure phase information. In this work, we propose to use macroscopic Fourier ptychography (FP) as a practical means of creating a synthetic aperture for visible imaging to achieve subdiffraction limit resolution. We demonstrate the first working prototype for macroscopic FP in a reflection imaging geometry that is able to image optically rough objects. In addition, a novel image space denoising regularization is introduced to reduce the effects of speckle and improve perceptual quality of the recovered high resolution image. Our approach is validated experimentally where the resolution of various diffuse objects is improved sixfold.

Bio: Oliver Cossairt is Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Northwestern University. Before joining Northwestern, he developed several key advances in 3D Display technology while earning my Masters at the MIT Media Lab and as an Optical Engineer at Actuality Systems, resulting in 8 patents. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for his thesis work on the theoretical limits of computational imaging. Prof. Cossairt is currently director of the Computational Photography Laboratory at Northwestern University (http://compphotolab.northwestern.edu), whose research consists of a diverse portfolio, ranging in topics from optics/photonics, computer graphics, computer vision, and image processing. He has written a number of high-impact publications including ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and IEEE Transaction on Image Processing, and received Best Paper (2011) and Honorable Mention (2014) awards for publications at the IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography. He has given a keynote talk at the IEEE Computational Cameras and Displays Workshop (2013), as well as invited talks at a number of conferences including: AAAS (2015), COSI (2013,2015,2016), CLEO Europe (2015), ICIP (2015, 2016), IPAM Computational Photography (2015), and FRINGE (2013). He has co-organized several workshops, serves on 5 conference program committees annually, and as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging. In the Spring of 2016, He co-organized the International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP), held at Northwestern University. His research projects have garnered funding from numerous corporate sponsorships (Google, Rambus, Samsung, Omron, Oculus) and federal funding agencies (ONR, NIH, DOE, NSF CAREER Award, DARPA).

Rohit Budhiraja

Rohit Budhiraja
IIT Kanpur

Title: Joint Transceiver Design for QoS-Constrained MIMO Two-Way Non-Regenerative Relaying Using Geometric Programming

Abstract: Transceiver designs for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) two-way relaying are being actively explored. Most of the state-of- the-art studies optimize a system-wide objective function subject to the transmit power constraints on the two source nodes and the relay. Transceiver designs with quality-of- service (QoS) constraints have lacked attention in two way relaying literature. In this work, we study a MIMO transceiver design, based on the generalized singular value decomposition, that allocates power at the source and relay nodes to optimize the following per- stream rate-constrained objectives: i) network transmit power; and ii) sum-rate. In addition, we also maximize the rate of the transmit stream with the worst signal-to- noise ratio. Through extensive numerical evaluations, we demonstrate the superior performance of proposed design over the existing ones, not only with QoS constraints but also without them.

Bio: Rohit Budhiraja received his MS in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2004. From January 2004 to July 2011, he worked for two startups where he designed both hardware and software algorithms, from scratch, for physical layer processing of WiMAX- and LTE-based cellular systems. He worked on his Ph.D from August 2011 to July 2015 at IIT Madras. He is currently an Assistant Professor in IIT Kanpur. His research interests include application of linear algebra and optimization methods to communications and signal processing, cross-layer design between digital baseband and analog RF, and hardware design for communication systems.

Puduru Viswanadha Reddy

Puduru Viswanadha Reddy
IIT Madras

Title: Strategic and computational trade-offs in endogenous coalition formation

Abstract: We consider an Ν-player strategic form game with transferable utility. We use the so called δ-characteristic function to determine the bargaining strength of all possible coalitions. Here, the value (or bargaining strength) of a coalition is obtained under the behavioral assumption that the left-out players do not react strategically to the formation of that coalition, but stick to their Nash equilibrium actions in the Ν-player non-cooperative game. This assumption has a considerable computational merit compared to previous proposals in the literature such as γ-effectivity, where the left-out players react strategically using best-responses. For the class of games with multilateral externalities (e.g., pollution control, interference in wireless communications) we show that the δ-characteristic function is super-additive and has a nonempty core. Further, we show that δ-core is a selector (or subset) of the γ-core.

Bio: Puduru Viswanadha Reddy received his Ph.D. in operations research from Tilburg University, The Netherlands. After working as a postdoctoral fellow with GERAD, HEC Montreal, Canada, he joined the department of electrical engineering, IIT Madras, as an assistant professor during November 2016. His current research interests are in control systems and decision sciences (game theory and optimization).




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