Syracuse Chapter of Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Presents:

The EMBS HealthTech Symposium Spring 2010


Thursday April 15, 2010, presentation starting at 3:30 P

At the Welch Allyn Lodge

4341 State Street Rd, Skaneateles Falls, NY 13153-0220


Cost: $20 for professionals, $10 for IEEE Members, Free for students and EMBS Members. Payment received at the door







For up to the date information, see the EMBS chapter website

(https://www.ewh.ieee.org/r1/syracuse/EMBSWeb/SyracuseEMBS.htm)

Sponsored by Syracuse Section of the IEEE, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and Blue Highways



RSVP: e-mail to EMBS Webmaster ( syrembswebmaster@ieee.org)


Come join us for an evening opportunity to meet some of your regional colleagues in the Medical Engineering field.






Breaking the Barriers in Wireless Network Information Theory
Salman Avestimehr, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University

Information theory is well poised to tremendously impact the design of distributed wireless networks of the future, such as ad-hoc networks. However, the challenge is that most network information theory problems are notoriously difficult and the mathematical barriers that must be overcome are quite high. In this talk, I will discuss our approach to overcome this challenge, which is based on developing simple, deterministic channel models that capture the main features of the wireless medium, and utilizing them to approximate more complex models. In particular, I will discuss the applications of our approach to "relay networks" and "distributed compression in sensor networks". This work is based on collaboration with Suhas Diggavi (UCLA) and David Tse (UC Berkeley).


Biography:Salman Avestimehr is currently an assistant Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in 2008 and M.S. degree in 2005 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, both from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, he obtained his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2003. He was also a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for the Mathematics of Information (CMI) at Caltech in 2008. He has received a number of awards including the NSF CAREER award (2010), the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize from the U.C. Berkeley EECS Department (2008), and the Vodafone U.S. Foundation Fellows Initiative Research Merit Award (2005). His research interests include information theory, communications, and networking.


Addtional reference material: Cornell University



Recent Advances in Wireless Body Sensor Networks for Physiological Monitoring
Gill R Tsouri, Director - Communication Research Laboratory Rochester Institute of Technology

A Body Sensor Network (BSN) is a set of mobile and compact intercommunicating wireless sensors used to relay physiological data to a designated caregiver at a remote location. Although BSNs are a type of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), their design requirements differ substantially. WSNs are typically comprised of many redundant nodes deployed over a wide area to collect and relay information to a remote sync. In BSNs the nodes are non-redundant and communicate with a central hub typically located on the body up to two meters away. In addition, BSNs are deployed around the human body which exposes communication to severe attenuations due to shadowing of body parts and mobile scenarios. A major challenge in designing wireless BSNs is to achieve a secure and reliable communication link while adhering to strict resource-constraints of body sensors (low power consumption, computation power, memory space, etc.). This talk presents a novel wireless BSN design in the unlicensed 2.4GHz frequency range. The design is based on three novelties: relaying of creeping wave components of the transmitted signal, securing communication using the randomness of the wireless channel as a cryptographic tool, and applying frequency agility for supporting mobility and mitigating interference. The result is a secure and reliable communication link to any sensor on the human body using low power consumption, computation power and memory space.


Biography: Gill R Tsouri received his B.Sc degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ben-Gurion University, Israel in 2000. From 1998 to 2002 he was with Yitran Communications, where he developed power-line communication technologies. From 2002 to 2008 he completed M.Sc. and Ph.D. studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ben-Gurion University. His research encompassed diversity methods, wireless secrecy, multiple access platforms and OFDM. Major contributions from his PhD research are PCT patented and being commercialized by industry partners. From 1996 to 2008 he developed algorithms for frequency allocation applications of the Israel Defense Force (IDF). He served as a consultant to SigNexT Wireless from 2006 to 2008. In August 2008 he joined the Rochester Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, where he established the Communication Research Laboratory (CommLab). His current research interests are in communication platforms for bio-medical applications, wireless secrecy and OFDM.


Addtional reference material: Gill Tsouri, RIT