Communications Society [COM-19]

Presentations

7:00 PM, Thursday, 7 June

The Future of Enterprise Mobility

Panel of Distinguished Analysts:

Chair: Craig J. Mathias, Principal, Farpoint Group

Discussants:

Paul DeBeasi, Research Vice President, Wireless and Mobility, Gartner, Inc.

Rohit Mehra, Director, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure, International Data Corporation

Philippe Winthrop, Managing Director, The Enterprise Mobility Foundation

This special panel presentation of leading analysts will discuss Enterprise Mobility, its trends, directions and potential future.

Advances in wireless and mobile technologies are providing measurable value to a broad range of users in enterprises and many other organizations, large and small, across essentially every mission and application. Yet, despite many years of experience and the availability of many established products and services, enterprise IT managers in network planning, operations, and even line-of-business units are today faced with more alternatives, options, and choices than ever.

While convergence is the rule for most aspects of enterprise IT, divergence is thus far more often the situation with respect to mobility. Competing technologies, services, platforms, devices, and operational strategies present an array of alternatives that often have organizations stuck in perpetual-analysis mode, thinking more about the mechanics of mobility than actually realizing the benefits inherent in a highly-mobile and yet always-connected workforce.

This panel of industry experts will discuss and debate the key mobility issues facing organizations today. They will assess and appraise a diverse group of competing and cooperative mobility alternatives, including:

Successful operational strategies for Wi-Fi
Next-generation wireless LANs: 802/11ac, .11ad, and more
LTE and LTE Advanced – timing, benefits, and alternatives
Personal liability/bring your own device (BYOD)
Mobile Device Management (MDM) and beyond
Applications alternatives – apps vs. the cloud
Other advanced technologies and standards
Controlling and analyzing total cost of ownership

Our interest here is in examining mobility alternatives from a (mostly) technical perspective, and how these will impact key directions for enterprise IT. Our goal is to contribute to a further understanding of how IT managers can improve what are often bet-the-company decisions under conditions of both technological and business uncertainty. And we will also explore the likely evolutionary path of wireless and mobile and the consequential impacts and benefits that organizations can expect over the next five years.

Chair: Craig J. Mathias, Principal, Farpoint Group

Craig J. Mathias is a Principal with Farpoint Group, a wireless and mobile advisory firm based in Ashland, MA. Founded in 1991, the company works with manufacturers, network operators, enterprises, and the financial community in technology assessment and analysis, strategy development, product specification and design, product marketing, education and training, and the integration of emerging technologies into new and existing business operations, across a broad range of markets and applications. Craig is an internationally-recognized expert on wireless communications and mobile computing technologies, and has published numerous technical and overview articles on a wide variety of topics. He is a well-known and often-quoted industry analyst and frequent speaker at industry conferences and events, as well as Webcasts, Webinars, videos, and podcasts. He is currently a member of the Advisory Board for the INTEROP conferences (Las Vegas and New York) and is the Chair of the Wireless and Mobility track. He is Co-Chair of 2012 Mobile Connect conference. He serves as a monthly columnist for InformationWeek.com and the Enterprise Mobility Foundation (theemf.org), ardent blogger (“Nearpoints”) for networkworld.com, an Expert at Focus.com, a member of the Network World Lab Alliance, and a Trusted Voice at ITWorld.com. Craig holds an Sc.B. degree in Applied Mathematics/Computer Science from Brown University. He is a member of the IEEE and the Society of Sigma Xi.

Panel of Distinguished Discussants:

Paul DeBeasi, Research Vice President, Wireless and Mobility, Gartner, Inc.

Paul DeBeasi is a research VP within Gartner’s Burton IT1 research. Mr. DeBeasi manages the research agenda for the IT1 wireless and mobility coverage area. He performs research in the areas of enterprise mobility, wireless LANs, mobile cellular, wireless security, and mobile device management. Prior to becoming an analyst, Mr. DeBeasi spent 12 years working at communication companies (Legra Systems, Cascade Communications, NetSuite, IPHighway) in product management roles. He worked as VP of Product Management for seven of those years. Before that, Mr. DeBeasi was an engineer for 12 years, working at various communication companies (Bell Labs, Prime Computer, Chipcom). He holds a Master Eng., Electrical Engineering, from Cornell University, and a B.S., Systems Engineering, from Boston University.

Rohit Mehra, Director, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure, International Data Corporation

Rohit Mehra is IDC's Director of Enterprise Communications Infrastructure, and the lead analyst for enterprise switching, routing, wireless, voice and network management. He provides expert insight and analysis into industry and technology trends as they relate to enterprise networking and related areas of data, voice, wireless and security. In this capacity, he is responsible for market share and forecast reports as well as global go-to-market strategies. Mr. Mehra also assists clients with custom consulting and research, including user surveys and buyer case studies. He has a deep understanding of networking solutions in key verticals/industry segments, and collaborates closely with IDC Insights and other research groups to assist clients with their specific requirements.

Before joining IDC in 2010, Mr. Mehra spent more than 15 years at several enterprise and telecom infrastructure providers. Most recently, he was Director of Product Marketing at Verisign, before which he was Director of Product Management at 3Com Corporation, responsible for their enterprise wireless portfolio. Prior to 3Com, Mr. Mehra was Director of Product Marketing at a wireless start-up, Bluesocket, and also spent several years at Nortel where he held positions in product marketing, product management and market development. He has extensive product lifecycle and global market development experience, and is a well known industry expert, often speaking/participating at networking, wireless and security events and conferences throughout the world.

Mr. Mehra has a Master’s in engineering management from BITS, Pilani, India, and an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona, USA.

Philippe Winthrop, Managing Director, The Enterprise Mobility Foundation

Philippe Winthrop is the Founder and Managing Director of The Enterprise Mobility Foundation, the organization behind The Enterprise Mobility Forum, the fastest growing content portal and social network exclusively dedicated to enterprise mobility. Philippe has spent his entire career researching emerging technologies and their impact on the corporate value chain. Philippe started his career at GeoPartners research, a boutique strategy consultancy, where he worked on projects including AT&T Wireless’ adoption and migration path to GSM from TDMA as well as the impact of the 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act on Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs).

After GeoPartners, Philippe joined IDC's European IT Services Research group where he spearheaded a wide variety of research and consulting projects for the Top 50 IT Services companies in Western Europe. After IDC, Philippe created Axle Ventures, a boutique business-planning consultancy focused on SMEs. There, Philippe worked with a wide variety of organizations in eCommerce, Healthcare and IT to help them develop winning go to market strategies.

Philippe also launched the Wireless and Mobility research practice at market research firm Aberdeen Group. There, he conducted ground-breaking research to quantify the tangible value of key mobile and wireless technologies, including enterprise mobility strategy adoption, Fixed Mobile Convergence, enterprise Wi-Fi adoption, application deployment on WLANs and more. Philippe recently ended his analyst career after a successful tenure at Strategy Analytics where he spearheaded thought leadership on enterprise mobility management and the growing issues around individual and corporate liable devices.

Venue Note. This is our venue at the new Verizon Technology Innovation Center Campus in Waltham.

The meeting begins at 7 p.m. at the new meeting auditorium at the Verizon Technology Center. The address is 60 Sylvan Road, Waltham, MA 02451. The entrance is by the far corner – with the picnic tables out front – and not the tower or the new building. It is most easily reached by the West Street entrance.

Important Note: Verizon Technology Center requests the names of the meeting attendees in advance of the meeting. If you plan to attend, please send a note via e-mail with your name to John Nitzke at RF@ieee.org by Wednesday, June 6th.

The meeting is preceded by dinner with the speaker at: Bertucci’s, Winter St, Waltham at 5:30 p.m.

Directions to Bertucci's restaurant in Waltham: Take Exit 27B on I95/128, heading west on Winter Street. After exiting, stay all the way to the right and take the first right turn into the shopping plaza. Please let Paul Zorfass know if you plan to attend the dinner at Bertucci’s. Paul can be contacted at paul.zorfass@embeddedtrade.com

Directions to Verizon Technology Innovation Center (old Verizon Labs location), 60 Sylvan Rd. campus, Waltham, MA 02451: Take Exit 27B on I95/128, heading west on Winter Street. Stay all the way to the right. Verizon Technology Center is 1/2 mile ahead. At the second traffic light, turn left onto WEST ST. and then take the first right (at the Verizon sign) which leads into the Verizon campus. The building and entrance for the meeting are on your left. Note that the entrance to the auditorium area is by the far corner – with the picnic tables out front – and not the tower or the new building.

7:00 PM, Thursday, 3 May

Nuance FAQ Access System based on Support Vector Machines

Ding Liu, PhD

This talk will describe the Nuance FAQ access system built based on Support Vector Machines (SVM). Unlike other FAQ access systems, which treat questions and answers equally in the information retrieval process, this system classifies user queries mainly based on their similarity to the questions in the FAQ knowledge base. Only the best lexicon features from the answers, evaluated based on their salience and distance to the words from the questions, are used in the classification. Also, unlike most other information retrieval systems, where machine learning techniques are only used in the second-pass re-ranking, this FAQ access system tries to achieve high accuracy by using SVM classifiers from the beginning to the end.

The end-to-end machine learning based design brings challenges to the SVM classifier in both training and classification. We will discuss how to speed up the classification by using an efficient data structure and algorithm, and how to reduce the learning overhead by using parallel training and incremental training. Empirical results will be presented to show the effectiveness of these methods.

For modern FAQ access systems, it's important to recognize and utilize the current topic of conversation with the user. Correctly detecting topic change is the key to success here. We will discuss how to maintain and use context features in the classification and propose novel methods to train a topic change detector without having sufficient labeled data.

Ding Liu graduated from Tsinghua University working on Computational Linguistics and from the Chinese Academy of Sciences with a Masters of Engineering, concentrating on Pattern Recognition. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, in 2006 and 2010. He is currently a Research Engineer for Nuance Communications Inc in Burlington, MA.

Venue Note: This is our venue at the new Verizon Technology Innovation Center Campus in Waltham.

The meeting is preceded by dinner with the speaker at:

Bertucci’s, Winter St, Waltham at 5:30 p.m.

Communications; Nuclear & Plasma Sciences Chapters; and Women in Engineering

7:00 PM, Thursday, 12 April

OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) Communication Applications over Rapidly Varying Underwater Acoustic Channels

Milica Stojanovic, PhD, Professor, Northeastern University, MIT Visiting Scientist, WHOI Researcher

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is widely used in wireless radio systems, but is still under investigation for underwater acoustic (UWA) communication, where legacy systems are based on single-carrier broadband modulation. While single-carrier acoustic systems must employ accurate phase tracking and equalization to overcome the motion-induced Doppler distortion and the multipath-induced frequency selectivity of the UWA channel, multicarrier modulation offers the advantage of simple, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-based processing that eliminates the need for explicit equalization. In addition—and perhaps more importantly—it supports differentially coherent detection, which eliminates the need for explicit phase tracking. These benefits, however, are contingent upon the assumption that the channel stays constant over the duration of each OFDM block, which may not hold true in all UWA conditions.

In this presentation, we focus on the design of an OFDM system operating over a rapidly varying, Doppler-distorted channel. We discuss a special technique called partial FFT demodulation, whose objective is to compensate for the time variation of the channel before it can create inter-carrier interference (ICI) at the output of the FFT demodulator. Partial FFT demodulation accomplishes this task by employing several FFTs, each operating on an individual (partial) segment of an OFDM block. The partial outputs are then weighted and combined to produce the multi-carrier detection variables. This technique can be used alone, or in combination with ICI equalization. It can also be tailored for use with differentially coherent detection, which is the focus of our design. We consider differentially coherent detection in the frequency domain, i.e. across the OFDM carriers, as this approach simultaneously supports low-complexity processing and high bandwidth efficiency needed for practical UWA systems.

The performance of partial FFT demodulation and differentially coherent detection is discussed using synthetic, as well as real data. The latter come from a series of at-sea experiments, recently conducted off the shores of New England and Hawaii, with varying transmission distances, conditions of mobility, and acoustic bands. Experimental results clearly demonstrate superiority of differentially coherent detection in conditions when rapid time-variation challenges channel tracking and coherent detection. These results also demonstrate the effectiveness of partial FFT demodulation as a low-complexity technique that enables bandwidth-efficient system design with a large number of carriers.

Speaker Bio: Milica Stojanovic, PhD, Professor, Northeastern University, MIT Visiting Scientist, WHOI Researcher

Milica Stojanovic Photo Milica Stojanovic graduated from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1988, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, in 1991 and 1993. After a number of years with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a Principal Scientist, she joined the faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University in 2008. She is also a Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and a Visiting Scientist at MIT. Her research interests include digital communications theory, statistical signal processing and wireless networks, and their applications to mobile radio and underwater acoustic communication systems. Milica is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering and the IEEE Transactions on Signal processing.

Please circulate to interested parties.

Venue Note: This is our venue at the new Verizon Technology Innovation Center Campus in Waltham.

Important Note:

Verizon Technology Center requests the names of the meeting attendees in advance of the meeting. If you plan to attend, please send a note via e-mail with your name to John Nitzke at RF@ieee.org by Wednesday, April 11th.

The meeting is preceded by dinner at Bertucci’s, Winter St, Waltham at 5:30 PM. Regrettably, the speaker will not be able to join us at dinner.

Directions to Bertucci’s follow.

Nuclear and Plasma Science, Antennas & Propagation, Communications, Geoscience and Remote Sensing, and Aerospace & Electronic Systems Societies

4:00 PM, *Fridays, April 6, 13, 20, and 27

Controlled study of space plasma turbulence and effects on satellite and radio communications, using radars, GPS satellites, and optical instruments

(Please Note: This a multi-session chapter meeting )

A series of lectures will be delivered for one and half hours each on the subjects of "Controlled study of space plasma turbulence and effects on satellite and radio communications, using radars, GPS satellites, and optical instruments".

Location: Boston University Photonics Center, PHO 211, 8 St. Mary's Street, Boston, MA 02215.

For more information, please contact Min-Chang Lee at mclee@mit.edu