Distinguished Lectures at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) by Prof. Baras
Professor John Baras delivered a Distinguished lecture on “Dynamic Iterations on Partially Ordered Semirings with Applications to Trust Evaluation in Networks” at the Department of Mathematics, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm on October 23.
Dr. Baras also gave a Distinguished ACCESS Lecture at the ACCESS Linnaeus Center at the same institute on October 12. His talk was titled “Trust in Social, Communication and Other Networks”.
Date: October 23, 2007
Address Title: Dynamic Iterations on Partially Ordered Semirings with Applications to Trust Evaluation in Networks
Place: Stockholm, Sweden
Date: October 12, 2007
Address Title: Trust in Social, Communication and Other Networks
Place: Stockholm, Sweden
John Baras Gives Plenary Address at CAMS '07
Professor John Baras (ECE/ISR) gave one of five plenary addresses at the IFAC Conference on Control Applications in Marine Systems (CAMS'07).
Baras's talk was titled, Collaborative Control of Underwater Vehicles under Severely Limited Communications.
Abstract: The underwater environment represents one of the most difficult media for communications, especially wireless communications. In addition the difficulties with various intense noise fields, there difficulties with multi-path and multiple echoes. These problems exist for all types of wireless communications. We investigate the communication needs for collaborative control of groups of underwater vehicles, and provide communication architectures and schemes that address the sever communication environment that prevails underwater. The proposed solutions combine dynamic algorithms and innovative device and subsystems concepts such as dynamic relay nodes, collaborative communications and multi-mode communications. On the control side we demonstrate the significance of event triggered communications in such difficult and constrained environments.
Event Info: IFAC Conference on Control Applications in Marine Systems (CAMS'07)
Date: September 19-21, 2007
Address Title: Collaborative Control of Underwater Vehicles under Severely
Limited Communications
Place: Bol, Croatia
Invited Address at PIMRC '07 by Dr. Baras
Prof John Baras delivered an Invited address on "Broadband Wireless: Shaping Societies and Civilization” at the 18th IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC07) in Greece.
Event Info: 18th IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC07)
Date: Broadband Wireless: Shaping Societies and Civilization
Address Title: Broadband Wireless: Shaping Societies and Civilization
Place: Athens, Greece
Invited Address at ARL Symposium by Dr. Baras
Prof John Baras delivered an Invited address on "Constrained Coalitional Games and Component Based Networking” at the ARL Fellows Symposium: 'Towards a Science of Networks' at ARL in Maryland.
Date: August 29-30, 2007
Address Title: Constrained Coalitional Games and Component Based Networking
Place: Adelphi, MD
Baras Delivers ECC '07 Plenary, Publishes Paper on Wireless Security
On July 5, 2007, Dr. John S. Baras (ECE/ISR), delivered one of two plenary addresses at the 2007 European Control Conference (ECC’07), which was held at the Kos International Convention Center on the island of Kos, Greece, July 2-5, 2007. The title of Dr. Baras’ plenary lecture was “Security and Trust for Wireless Autonomic Networks: System and Control Methods.” More information is available at the conference web site: http://ecc07.ntua.gr.
In his lecture Professor Baras summarized his work and results, with University of Maryland ECE and ISR alumni Alvaro Cardenas, Tao Jiang, Svetlana Radosavac and George Theodorakopoulos, on the formulation, analysis and solution of various problems on security, information assurance and trust in dynamic wireless networks. These include detection and defense against attacks, detection of propagating viruses, evaluation of intrusion systems, attacks at the physical, MAC and routing protocols, trust establishment-dynamics- management. The focus of the lecture was to demonstrate persistently that systems and control models and methodologies provide new and powerful techniques to analyze these problems. The presentation can be found in http://www.isr.umd.edu/~baras.
A long invited paper, with the same title, describing the results in the lecture, has been published in the special issue of the European Journal of Control entitled: Fundamental Issues of Control, EJC, Volume 13, Number 2-3, pp. 105-133, March-June 2007, and can be found at http://www.elet.polimi.it/ejc/, or at http://www.isr.umd.edu/~baras.
ECC'07 continued the tradition of the control conferences of the European Union Control Association (EUCA), which aims at stimulating contacts among academic and industrial professionals in the area of systems and control, and promoting scientific exchanges within the European Community and between Europe and other parts of the world.
Event Info: European Control Conference (ECC '07)
Date: July 2-5, 2007
Paper Title: Security and Trust for Wireless Autonomic Networks: System and Control Methods
Place: Kos, Greece
Baras Gives Plenary Lectures on Wireless Security
Professor John S. Baras (ECE/ISR) gave an invited plenary consisting of a three-hour set of lectures on Security and Trust for Wireless Autonomic Networks at the Med-Hoc-Net 2007 Conference, on June 12, 2007, in Corfu, Greece.
Med-Hoc-Net is an established annual international workshop aiming to serve as a forum where researchers from academia, research labs and the industry from all over the world, meet to share ideas, views, results, and experiences in the field of ad hoc networking. Anything from theoretical and experimental achievements, to innovative ad hoc systems, prototyping efforts, and case studies is of interest to the Med-Hoc-Net community.
Prof. Baras’ lectures were part of the tutorial and Ph.D. student workshop program of the conference, which was sponsored by the European Union network of excellence CONTENT: Excellence in Content Distribution network Research, the TC6 Technical Committee 'Communications Systems' of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and by the European Union IP FET project CASCADAS “Bringing Autonomic Services to Life." Some 70 PhD students from all over Europe attended the workshop and the tutorials.
Professor Baras’ lectures covered both tutorial aspects as well as promising directions for future research. The lectures were delivered in the historic building of the Ionian Academy in Corfu, Greece.
Event Info: Med-Hoc-Net 2007 Conference
Date: June 12-15, 2007
Lecture Title: Security and Trust for Wireless Autonomic Networks
Place: Corfu, Greece
John Baras Invited Speaker at MIT Enterprise Forum
Professor John S. Baras (ECE/ISR) was an invited featured speaker at the MIT Enterprise Forum (MITEF)-hosted Tech Transfer Lab on May 22, 2007, held in Arlington, Va. This year’s MITEF Transfer Lab focused on mobile technologies. The event showcased the area’s hottest technologies developed at area universities and federal labs. The audience consisted of technical experts, scientists, engineers, interested small/medium size companies, attorneys, marketing and business consultants, investors, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs interested in licensing the technology.
Dr. Baras presented his invention (joint with ISR alumni Junfeng Gu and Yimin Jiang; Dr. Baras was their advisor) of a new method and apparatus for conditional access in broadcast/multicast systems.
Following the rapid expansion of the commercial broadcasting industry, conditional access systems have been deployed extensively to meet consumers' needs. These systems are used to provide services to authorized customers such as cable TV, satellite TV, wireless services subscribers. In fact, some programs are only accessible to those who have made payments to the program providers. In today's growing E-commerce environment, conditional access is imperative to profitable digital broadcasting. The University of Maryland invention developed a low-cost and reliable conditional access scheme. The novel approach successfully utilizes arithmetic coding to achieve encryption purposes for conditional access in digital broadcast systems at a lower cost. Further, an adaptive source symbol frequency model is used, which adds more security to the system.
The invention is part of US patent 7,006,568, “3D Wavelet Based Video Codec with Human Perceptual Model”, issued to Baras, Gu and Jiang on February 28, 2006. As Dr. Baras stated "this is really two patents issued as one." The key invention uses an integrated approach of signal representation via three-dimensional wavelets, perceptual models of the human vision system, and advanced compression techniques, to provide efficient and substantial compression of video streams. The innovative scheme is simultaneously progressive (i.e. it can ‘match’ the quality and resolution of receiving devices) as well as perceptionally lossless (i.e. the compression is not perceived as loss of image quality by the human vision system).
Event Info: MIT Enterprise Forum (MITEF)
Date: May 22, 2007
Place: Arlington, Virginia, USA
Baras Delivers Keynote Address at Control Over Communication Workshop
On April 20, 2007, Dr. John S. Baras (ECE/ISR), delivered the invited keynote address at the Control over Communication Channels Workshop (ConCom07), which was part of the 5th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt07), April 16-20, 2007, in Limassol, Cyprus. The title of Dr. Baras’ keynote address was “Robust Feedback Control vs Uncertainty Model Complexity: from Information Theory to Networked Control.”
The aim of the ConCom workshop is to introduce participants to the multi-disciplinary topic of feedback control over noisy communication channels. Recent technological advances in terms of cost-effective, special-purpose, computing architectures and the high accessibility of network connectivity open up exciting possibilities for computer-based control methodologies that can be applied either centrally or distributively/hierarchically depending on the underlying application and objective. As a result, there is an increased interest in these types of systems and an emerging need to better understand: (i) how feedback control strategies are affected by and can account for noise, capacity constraints and delays that arise due to the nature of the communication channels that are available, and (ii) how perfect or imperfect feedback strategies influence the capacity and fidelity of a given communication channel. The workshop aims to bring together experts from the areas of systems and control, network information theory, communication, and distributed computing.
Event Info: ConCom07, WiOpt07
Date: April 16-20, 2007
Address Title: Robust Feedback Control vs Uncertainty Model Complexity: from Information Theory to Networked Control
Place: Limasol, Cyprus
