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TITLE : Paving the Way Towards 5G Wireless Communication Networks

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ABSTRACT : 5G wireless communication networks are expected to fulfill the demand for higher data rates, lower latency, and/or massive connectivity of a growing number of users/devices exploiting a variety of wireless applications. This envisioned rapid increase in the use of wireless services lead the wireless research community to start looking at new technologies to address problems related to the radio-frequency (RF) spectrum exhaustion. This includes the development of (i) new techniques and concepts such as massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems and heterogeneous networks to improve the spectral efficiency at the link and network layers, respectively, and (ii) novel schemes to better utilize the unregulated bandwidth in particular in the upper millimeter wave, THz, and optical portion of the spectrum. This talk will first go briefly over the vision and goals of 5G wireless communication networks. Then it presents some of these emerging enabling technologies that need to be developed to pave the way towards the successful roll-out and operation of these future wireless networks. Finally, the talk offers at the end an overview of some of the recent results in the areas of massive MIMO systems, heterogeneous networks, and optical (Li-Fi) wireless communication systems.

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BIO :  Mohamed-Slim Alouini (S'94, M'98, SM'03, F’09) was born in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, USA, in 1998. He served as a faculty member in the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, then in the Texas A&M University at Qatar, Education City, Doha, Qatar before joining King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia as a Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2009.

Prof. Alouini is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge list of Highly Cited Researchers, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society, and a co-recipient of best paper awards in ten IEEE conferences (including ICC, GLOBECOM, VTC, PIMRC and DySPAN).His current research interests include the modeling, design, and performance analysis of wireless communication systems.

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TITLE : Autonomous self-powered and self-calibrated Microsystems for IoT applications

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ABSTRACT :  “Autonomous Microsystems” refers to smart electronic systems that are able to sense, process and transmit useful information from the environment while being completely autonomous by harvesting readily available solar, thermal or kinetic ambient energy. Deployed in IoT applications, these smart devices are able to monitor water leakage in a water pipe, blood pressure in human body, temperature of frozen food items, but also humidity, air and water quality in intelligent buildings and smart cities. The design of “autonomous Microsystems” must take into consideration a number of challenging IoT constraints such as low cost, self-calibration to minimize human intervention, and self-power generation to replenish depleted energy resources. Silicon based technology is the only alternative solution offering single-chip solutions featuring the best trade-off in terms of cost/performance and enabling large scale integration and mass volume production leading to large scale deployment of “autonomous microsystem” devices in various emerging IoT applications with minimal human intervention.

This talk will present enabling technologies for IoT sensing addressing key issues related to power consumption, energy harvesting and calibration of “autonomous Microsystems”. Three case studies will be presented, namely: (i) smart vision systems with energy harvesting capabilities, (ii) Batteryless temperature sensing for passive RFID applications and (iii) olfactory sensors with self-calibration capability. The talk will cover state-of-the art technological developments in this area, and outline existing challenges as well as emerging new opportunities for research and innovation in this rapidly growing field. The conclusion of the talk will discuss whether “autonomous microsystems” are becoming a reality or is just another engineering dream idea.

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BIO :  Prof. Amine Bermak received the Masters and PhD degrees, both in electrical and electronic engineering (microelectronics and Microsystems), from Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France in 1994 and 1998, respectively. During his PhD, he was part of the Microsystems and Microstructures Research Group at the French National Research Centre LAAS-CNRS, where he developed a 3D VLSI chip for artificial neural network classification and detection applications in a project funded by Motorola. While finalizing his PhD, he was offered a Post-doc position at the Advanced Computer Architecture group at York University – England, to work on VLSI implementation of CMM neural network for vision applications in a project funded by British Aerospace. Prof. Bermak was nominated for the 2013 Hong Kong UGC best teacher award (for all HK Universities). He is the recipient of the 2011 University Michael G. Gale Medal for distinguished teaching (Highest University-wide Teaching Award). This gold medal is established to recognize excellence in teaching and only one recipient/year (out-of over 550 faculty) is honored for his/her contribution. Prof. Bermak is also a two-time recipient of the “Engineering School Teaching Excellence Award" in HKUST for 2004 and 2009, respectively.

Prof. Bermak has received many distinguished awards, including the 2016 DAC best design context award, the “Best paper award” at IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and systems ISCAS 2010; the 2004 “IEEE Chester Sall Award”; the IEEE Service Award from IEEE Computer Society and the “Best Paper Award” at the 2005 International Workshop on System-On-Chip for Real-Time Applications. He has published over 250 articles in journals, book chapters and conference proceedings and designed over 50 chips. He has supervised 25 PhD and 16 MPhil students. He has served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II. He is also currently serving on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems; IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices and Nature Scientific Reports. He is the guest editor of the November 2010 special issue in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems. Prof. Bermak is a Fellow of IEEE and IEEE distinguished Lecturer. He was the co-director of MIT-HKUST Consortium.

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TITLE : Continuous Phase Modulation: a "new" waveform for 5G Massive Machine-Type Communications

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ABSTRACT :  Among the new specifications of the future 5G wireless communication era, communications between machines reveals new technical challenges to take up. Radio access for IoT, or Wireless Sensor Networks, are among the most popular applications of machine-type communications. They are to be deployed where wired communications are lacking and where the energy distribution network is hardly available. Hence, most of the transmitters are battery-powered without any chance to be changed. In this context, how to save the energy consumption in order to increase the battery lifetime as long as possible?

On the physical layer, several new waveforms are competing for the upcoming 5G standardization, all of them being based on filtered multi-carrier modulations. However, the important signal peak power exhibited by multi-carrier modulations has a huge impact on the battery life and should prevent their implementation on the uplink. This talk will show why continuous phase modulations (CPM) can be an interesting alternative to multi-carrier waveforms for IoT and Wireless Sensor Networks. Some issues raised when dealing with CPM will also be presented together with some perspectives on possible solutions.

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BIO :  Frederic Guilloud received the Engineering degree in Electronics from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de l'Electronique et de ses Applications (ENSEA), France, in 1998, and is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (ENS Cachan). He received the Ph.D. degree in 2004 from Telecom ParisTech in Signal and Communications, entitled "Generic Architecture for LDPC Codes Decoding".

Frederic Guilloud is "Professeur Agrégé" in electronics and power electronics since 1999, and Associate Professor at Telecom Bretagne in the Signal and Communications department since 2004. His research and teaching activities are focused on error correcting codes and digital communications including constant amplitude phase modulations, with a special emphasis on short frame communications.

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TITLE : Access control in The Internet of Things: Big challenges and new opportunities

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ABSTRACT : 

We give an extensive state of the art review of different access control models, policies and concepts. Then, we define the four most dominant IoT domains application and analyze their security and privacy requirements. Subsequently, we highlight the pros and cons of traditional as well as recent access control models and protocols from an IoT perspective. We also evaluate in a qualitative and a quantitative way the most relevant IoT related-projects; which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of access control conducted over the recent years (2011- 2016). Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the potential challenges and give hints of future research directions. Our presentation addresses a broad range of models, protocols and frameworks related to access control in IoT. The main goal is not only to analyze, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their pertinence towards IoT.

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BIO :  Dr. Anas Abou El Kalam is a university professor and president of the Moroccan Association of Digital Trust. He co-authored more than 150 papers and is certified ISO 27001 Lead Auditor, CEH (Certified Ethical Hacking) and CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional). He was Assistant director of the OSCARS laboratory and in charge of the “Networks, Systems and Security” master as well as a former head of the “Network and Telecommunication department” at the UCA-ENSA. He also was an associate professor at the “Institut National Polytechnique” (INP) of Toulouse – France where he obtained his HDR (Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches) in “security of critical networks and systems” as well as his PhD in “security policies and models”. He had several responsibilities as the Head of the “Computer Science Department” and the head of the “Networks and Systems security” Department at ENSIB (high school of engineers) – France. He was invited professor at several universities in USA, Tunisia, Bucharest Technical Military academy, etc. as well as a temporary professor at the Department of Defense training center in Bourges. His interest fields are Internet of Things security, Cloud security, critical systems security, access control models, evaluation of security mechanisms.

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TITLE : MirageOS - robust operating system design from the grounds up

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ABSTRACT :  Contemporary operating systems suffer from being enormous code bases, riddled with bugs, still supporting legacy hardware (like floppy drives). A common attack vector is based on unsafe memory operations - lack of bounds checks (buffer overflows) and temporal memory safety violations (double free, use after free).

But the environment changed: for security reasons, each service is usually isolated in its own virtual machine, and the virtual machines are scheduled by the hypervisor onto the physical hardware. The requirements for operating systems changed, but most operating systems are only extended to support more complex environments.

In this talk I will present a radical approach to operating systems design: back to ring 0, starting from scratch. Programming language technology has progressed since UNIX was written in C, automated memory management is widely used, strong and static types are usable, and we learned how to build reusable libraries and package those.

MirageOS is a library operating system written mostly in OCaml, a functional and modular programming language. It targets hypervisors, thus does not contain hardware-specific drivers, but generic drivers (e.g. a VirtIO network driver). Each MirageOS application consists of only those OCaml libraries required - why should my name server have user management and a file system? The lines of code, and thus the attack vectors, are drastically reduced. We already implemented various common network protocols, such as HTTP, TCP/IP, TLS, DHCP. I will explain the design and implementation of our TLS stack in more detail, which separates the effectful bits from the protocol logic very clearly, while preserving reasonable performance.

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BIO :  Hannes Mehnert is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Cambridge working with the semantics, systems, and security group. He finished his PhD at the IT University of Copenhagen about formally verifying software.

He researches in several engineering areas: from programming languages (such as compiler optimisation visualisation, type systems) over full functional correctness proofs of object-oriented code, development environments for dependently typed languages, to network protocols (TCP/IP) and security protocols (TLS, OTR). He feels safe in a garbage collected environment, and appreciates purely functional goodness.