Contents

11. JOINT TECHNICAL MEETINGS FOR 2003 AND 2004

All members are invited to attend the listed joint meetings with the I.E. Aust., ITEES and IEE. All meetings are held at 5.30 for 6.00 pm (with light refreshments) at the Institution of Engineers, Australia Lecture Theatre, Eagle House, 118 Alfred St, MILSONS POINT, unless otherwise shown.

12. DETAILS OF UPCOMING JOINT TECHNICAL MEETINGS

USING MULTIPLE ANTENNAS TO MULTIPLY MOBILE NETWORK CAPACITY

Thursday, 23 October 2003

Speaker: Dr Graham Woodward, formerly with Bell Labs Research Australia now with Agere Systems (graemew@ieee.org)

Synopsis: Fundamental limits on the capacity of wireless channels were established by Claude Shannon, of Bell Labs, in 1948, marking the birth of information theory. These limits still apply today. However, in the mid 1990's Gerry Foschini and colleagues, also of Bell Labs, devised ingenious ways of exploiting multiple antennas at each end of a radio link to multiply the capacity achievable in a volume of space. Furthermore, the BLAST family of algorithms was proposed as computationally feasible methods of detecting the signal components sent between the multiple antennas. With advances in digital signal processing, Bell Labs Australia has recently prototyped silicon devices proving the feasibility of even higher performance algorithms for system configurations currently under consideration for third generation (3G) mobile wireless systems. This talk will track the advances in wireless capacity made possible through the use of multiple antenna technology and introduce the prototype chipset designed by Bell Labs Australia.

Biography: Graeme K. Woodward (MIEEE) holds B.Sc, B.E and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Sydney. From 1991 to 1994 he worked at Alcatel Australia in digital switching systems. During PhD studies he was a visiting researcher at Yokohama National University, Japan, in 1996 and at Northwestern University, USA, during 1998. From 1999-2000 he worked with Southern-Poro Communications, Sydney, in channel modeling, 3G cellular systems and multiuser detection for CDMA, in collaboration with The University of Oulu, Finland.

In 2001 he joined Bell Laboratories Research, Lucent Technologies, Sydney, Australia, researching 3G systems, multi-antenna systems, multiuser detection, interference suppression and adaptive digital filter algorithms for equalization.

BROADBAND OPTICAL FIBRE SYSTEMS

Thursday, 27 November 2003

Speaker: Associate Professor Graham Town, Macquarie University

Synopsis: Optical signals are theoretically capable of carrying information with terahertz bandwidths with quantum-limited noise. Development of robust and affordable subsystems for the generation, transmission, signal processing, and detection of broadband optical information involves a number of challenges which, if solvable, allow optical and photonic systems to provide significant advantages over purely electronic systems in a variety of applications.

In this presentation, Dr Town will review recent and ongoing developments in the field of broadband guided-wave optics, particularly optical sources and novel waveguides and waveguide devices for transmission and signal processing of optical signals with large optical bandwidths. The presentation will include both theoretical and experimental results generated in the course of research by Dr Town and his students on topics such as soliton lasers, multiwavelength lasers, optical supercontinuum generation, ultrafast all-optical switching, and coupled-mode filter design for broadband signal processing. A particular focus will be placed on the unique properties and applications of microstructured or "holey" optical fibres in applications such as telecommunications and optical tomography.

Biography: Associate Professor Graham Town is with the Department of Electronics at Macquarie University. His research interests are primarily in the area of broadband guided-wave linear and nonlinear optics, with applications in telecommunications and biomedical engineering. He was previously with the Department of Electrical Engineering at Sydney University where he worked on optical fibre devices and systems, and had been part of a team which built a small nuclear magnetic resonance imaging system. Prior to that he was employed in the Australian electronics and telecommunications industry.

OTHER LISTED MEETINGS

No details of the other listed meetings have been provided at the time of printing this newsletter. Please visit the 'News' page of the Section web site for details in the weeks preceding the meeting.

13. IEEE SPONSORED CONFERENCES

Details of conferences and other forthcoming international events can be found by visiting the IEEE web site www.ieee.org/conferencesearch/. 

14. POWER ENGINEERING CHAPTER NEWS

Our traditionally brief AGM will be held on Friday, 28 November 2003, at 6.00 pm, prior to the Section AGM. Come and join us, have your say, with good food and fine wine to follow.

Graeme Gwilliam
Chair

15. ANTENNAS & PROPAGATION/ MICROWAVE THEORY & TECHNIQUES CHAPTER NEWS

This year the Chapter has provided several speakers for the Joint Institutions technical meetings and separate meetings have not been held so far. However, the Chapter Committee is planning a talk to be held in December at CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory, Corner Vimiera and Pembroke Roads. Details of this talk will be emailed to Chapter members and listed on the NSW Section web site in late November. 

Trevor Bird
Chair (ts.bird@ieee.org) 

16. COMPUTER CHAPTER NEWS

There is a possibility of a lecture coming up in December, in association with the Symposium on Consumer Electronics. I will keep you posted and also please watch the News page of the NSW Section web site.

Stephanie Boyd
Chair (stef@isb.net.au) 

17. IEEE PRESIDENT VISIT 30 OCTOBER

The current IEEE President Mike Adler will be meeting with IEEE NSW Section members on Thursday, 30 October, at the Duxton Hotel. This follows a tradition of visits by earlier IEEE Presidents. Official visits by IEEE Presidents to Australia include:

• Robert Tanner 1972

• Arthur Stern 1975

• Ivan Getting 1978

• Richard Damon 1981

• Robert Larson 1982

• James Owen 1983

• Charles Eldon 1985

• Bruno Weinschel 1986 (accompanied by Carleton
  Bayless 1990)

• Emerson Pugh 1989

• Thomas Cain 1995 (accompanied by Convocation that included Troy Nagel 1994, Wallace Read 1996, Kenneth Laker 1999, Bruce Einstein 2000, Joel Snyder 2001).

The September 2003 issue of THE INSTITUTE (page 12) carries portraits of all Past Presidents since the creation of IEEE in 1963 from a merger of the IRE and the AIEE. Forty-one years ago, members voted on the merger following many years of discussions (see the leading article in the same issue of the THE INSTITUTE).

18. MEMBER PROFILE - STEPHANIE BOYD

Stephanie Boyd is a software engineer who is very active in the IEEE NSW Section Committee. Early in her career, she became responsible for customer support with the GMB research & Development, who supplied records management and document imaging software to a worldwide clientele, including the US drug Enforcement Administration, the UK Inland Revenue, the Queensland and Victorian Health departments and the whole of the South Australian government. After leaving GMB she formed a software consulting company called 'Information Systems Builders' in partnership with another engineer. As a freelance consultant with this company she has created television graphics software for Channel 9's cricket broadcasting, participated in the creation of what is believed to be the first ever software to sell insurance over the Internet, played a part in the software for the Sydney Olympic Games and been a factor in many other major and innovative projects.

Stephanie joined the NSW committee of the IEEE Computer Society at the beginning of 2002. She is Chair of the NSW Computer Chapter in 2003 and is also Chair of the student activities sub-committee of the NSW Section. She is a firm believer in professional societies and the role of these societies in striving towards the betterment of the industry and society as a whole.

19. SUCCESSFUL ENGINEERING WEEK 2003

Many judged engineering Week 2003 as the most successful yet held. The highlights were the Harricks Address, given by IEEE Senior Member Associate Professor Sam Reisenfeld, and a forum that examined the future uses of Sydney Harbour. Each year, Engineers Australia leads an organizing team that includes an IEEE representative (for the past three years this has been Jim Logothetis) that produces a program of nine days of activity to show to the general public some of the work of the engineering profession.

The topic of the Harricks address was 'Experimental Radio Communications with the Australian FedSat Satellite'. Associate Professor Sam Reisenfeld and his team from the University of Technology have been responsible for developing two tracking earth stations that will be used to run the FedSat communications experiments over the next three years. The FedSat microsatellite is the first Australian-built satellite in more than 30 years and was launched in December 2002 for the Cooperative Research Centre for Satellite Systems (CRCSS). The UTS earth stations operate in Ka-band which is an emerging frequency band for satellite communications. The Ka-band link will be used to demonstrate future high-speed communications via satellite for rural and remote communications in Australia. The Ka-band transponder on board FedSat was developed by CSIRO Telecommunications and Industrial Physics.

The Forum discussed 'It's time to decide what we want from our harbour'. Speakers included Wayne Johnson of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, Dominic Johnson and Rob Bennet of Planning Australia and Ian Kiernan of Clean Up Australia. The week concluded with the 'Brain Strain' trivia night which attracted over 20 teams.

20. IEEE JOURNALS RANK HIGH IN ANNUAL CITATION STUDY

Access to the latest technology is one of the benefits of IEEE membership. IEEE publishes the top eight journals in electrical and electronics engineering and the top seven journals in telecommunications, according to recently released results from the Institute for Scientific Information's annual Journal Citation Reports (2002 edition). The ISI study ranks journals by their impact factor - the number of times their papers are quoted or cited by other scientific publications in their initial year of issue publication. You can view the report in more detail at https://www.ieee.org/citations. 

21. E-MAIL ALIAS SERVICE STOPS VIRUSES IN THEIR TRACKS

All members are encouraged to make use of the IEEE Personal E-mail Alias Service. There are many advantages of this service including the virus-screening feature. Last September, virus screen had ample opportunities to flex its muscles as it turned away a record number of Internet virus attacks. To find out how this free benefit protects members' e-mail, click here.

22. BECOME AN IEEE SENIOR MEMBER

Some of our members have recently enjoyed the benefits of IEEE Senior Membership. Many other members of the NSW Section are also eligible for Senior Membership. Anyone with ten years in the profession (not ten years of IEEE membership) is eligible. Your educational experience is counted towards this ten-year requirement. In addition, you need five years of significant performance and three IEEE Senior Member or Fellow references. If you are nominated, only two references are needed. As well as recognizing your performance and contribution to the profession in a tangible way, each new Senior Member receives an attractive fine wood and bronze engraved Senior Member plaque and a US$25.00 gift certificate towards one new Society membership.

Now it is even easier to become a Senior Member via the IEEE website. Details and application forms are obtained at www.ieee.org/organizations/rab/md/smprogram.html.

23. 2002 M.A. SARGENT MEDAL WINNER IS IEEE FELLOW

Congratulations are extended to Professor Yianni Attikiouzel (Fellow) of the Western Australia Section who was presented with the 2002 MA Sargent Medal on 20 June. The Electrical College of Engineers Australia awards this medal annually to an electrical engineer who has made a significant contribution to the practice and/or science of electrical engineering.

24. 2003 IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON CONSUMER ELECTRONICS, SYDNEY

The 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Electronics (ISCE'03) will now be held in Sydney, Australia, from 3 to 5 December 2003. The Symposium venue is the Grace Hotel, 77 York Street, Sydney.

ISCE is the premium forum for researchers, system developers, and service providers to share ideas, designs, and experiences on the emerging technologies for consumer Electronics. ISCE originally aims to be the consumer electronics industry's premier technical conference in the Asia Pacific Region, but has since expanded to include the Europe region where ISCE'02 was held in Erfurt, Germany, and for the first time, will be held in the southern hemisphere in Australia. 

The conference will bring together top technical professionals from the consumer electronics industry and academics to exchange information and results of recent work on systems, circuits, technology, processes and applications in all areas of consumer electronics. Technical papers are invited for all areas of interest in traditional and new consumer electronics products such as Digital Video Disk, Interactive TV, HDTV and digital-video consumer products. 

For further details and registration form please visit the ISCE'03 web site.

25. 7TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DIGITAL IMAGE COMPUTING - TECHNIQUES AND APPLICATIONS (DICTA 2003)

Date: 10 - 12 December 2003

Venue: Macquarie University, Sydney

Website: http//www.tip.csiro.au/dicta2003 

DICTA 2003 is the seventh biennial conference on Digital Image Computing - Techniques and Applications to be held in Sydney by the Australian Pattern Recognition Society. The conference will feature keynote addresses and technical presentations. Keynote speeches will be delivered by experts in their fields. DICTA 2003, https://www.tip.csiro.au/dicta2003, will be held in conjunction with ANZIIS; view the website at https://www.eese.bee.qut.edu.au/anziis2003/. The IEEE NSW Section is a technical co-sponsor of the conference.

Invited Speakers
Professor Nicholas Ayache (INRIA, France)
Professor Richard Hartley (ANU, Australia)
Professor Henk Heijmans (CWI, The Netherlands)
Professor Thomas Huang (UIUC, USA)
Professor Ray Jarvis (Monash, Australia)

Scope
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Object Recognition, Scene Understanding, Photogrammetry, Multimedia, Image Segmentation, Image Registration, Medical and Biomedical Imaging, Mathematical Morphology, Computer Graphics, Visualization, Virtual and Immersive Environments, Digital Video Communications, Multi-view and Stereo Vision, Motion Analysis and Surveillance, Automation and Robotics, Imaging Applications.

Organizing Committee
Hugues Talbot, CSIRO (General Chair)
Changming Sun, CSIRO (Program Co-chair)
Sebastien Ourselin, CSIRO (Program Co-chair)
Tony Adriaansen, CSIRO (Program Co-chair)
Carolyn Evans, CSIRO
Paul Jackway, CSIRO
Len Hamey, Macquarie University
Liz Gorry, CSIRO (Secretary)

Please see the web site given above for further details.

26. STUDENT PAPER COMPETITIONS

Once again, at this time of year, entries are now invited for three student paper competitions. Two are provided by the IEEE Australia Council and the third, the Max Simons Prize, by the IEEE NSW Section. The aims, the conditions of entry and the method of submission are the same. These and other details are given below.

Aims

(a) To promote the interest of undergraduate / postgraduate students in writing high quality technical papers in the research areas within the technical areas of IEEE

(b) To promote the interest in all aspects of electrical, electronics, communications, and Computer engineering inclusive of all areas of IEEE interest

(c) To promote IEEE membership throughout Australia.

Prizes

For the undergraduate competition, a $500 cash prize is awarded to the student author of the paper judged to be the best submission. For the postgraduate competition a cash prize of $500 is also awarded, together with up to $1000 support for the winner to travel to an IEEE-sponsored Australian or International conference of his/her choice in 2004, provided that the student presents their paper at that conference. The IEEE Australia Council/NSW Section reserves the right not to award either prize if it believes that there is no paper of a suitable status. 

Max Simons Prize

The best paper submitted from the New South Wales Section will be eligible for the Max Simons Prize. This includes $200 cash and a certificate.

Certificates

Each of the Best Paper winners of the two competitions (Undergraduate and Postgraduate) is awarded a Certificate from the IEEE Australia Council. In addition a Certificate of Rank is awarded to each of the first and second runner-up student papers of the two competitions. 
Subject of the Paper: The author is free to choose the subject of the paper which, however, must be within the traditional fields of Electrical, Electronic, Communications, and Computer engineering, or within the emerging fields of Information Technology, Bio-medical, and Nano-Technology inclusive of all technical areas covered by the IEEE.

Eligibility

The IEEE Australia Council Student Paper Competition is open to all IEEE Undergraduate and Postgraduate Student Members studying in Australia. Separate undergraduate and postgraduate prizes will be awarded. Papers must be submitted in the first instance to the IEEE Section in which their institution is located if a Section level contest is held. The best and the first runner-up undergraduate and postgraduate papers from each Section will then be sent to the IEEE Australia Council where the final decision will be made. In case where there is no section level contest, the student authors may send their papers directly to the IEEE Australia Council. The papers will be judged on technical merit (50%) and presentation (50%). 

Judging Criteria

The papers will be judged on their technical content, original ideas as well as written presentation. Details of the criteria can be found in the IEEE Australia Council web site: 

https://www.ieee.asn.au 
https://ieee.asn.au/postg_criteria.htm 
https://ieee.asn.au/underg_criteria.htm 

Paper submission

Papers should be submitted as follows to:

David Burger
Secretary, New South Wales Section
C/- Professional Centre of Australia
Private Bag No. 1, Darlinghurst NSW 2010
Email: by 12 December 2003 so that the short-listed papers can be forwarded to the IEEE Australia Council committee. 

Paper Format

NSW Section should receive six copies of hardcopy or a softcopy (pdf file) of the Technical Paper in IEEE standard paper format. The IEEE Format is available here, other web sites of IEEE.

Contest Rules

All entries must be accompanied by a certificate from an IEEE Student Branch Counsellor or Faculty Member of the entrant's home institution, confirming the entrant is an IEEE Student Member and indicating which competition (undergraduate or postgraduate) the student is entering. The entrant's IEEE Student Membership Number must be stated in the certificate. If the student is in the process of becoming an IEEE student member, then a photocopy of the duly completed application must accompany the manuscript. The paper may report on the entrant's undergraduate thesis or postgraduate research on a topic in the areas of electrical, electronic engineering, computer science or allied subjects in the fields of interest of the IEEE Technical Societies. 

The paper must be the student's own work, and the student should declare this in a cover letter with the submission. The maximum length of the paper is six A4 pages including all text and figures.

Deadline

Six printed copies or one softcopy (pdf file) of the technical paper in accordance with the Contest Rules must be received by the NSW IEEE Section no later than 12 December 2003. In the event of a student failing to submit before this deadline due to a valid reason (e.g. medical reasons), the student may still submit the package to the IEEE Australia Council (contact below).

Further information can be obtained from David Burger (details above) or:

Dr. W. W. L. Keerthipala
Student Paper Contest Coordinator 
IEEE Australia Council
Tel: 61 (08) 9266 7901
Email: rkeerthi@cc.curtin.edu.au 

27. SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON PROJECT MANAGEMENT

This special interest group has been established for organizations to consider and share best practices in Project Management. The next meeting of the group is 10 November. 

If you would like further details, please contact Phil Bryant on ph. (02) 9981 4114, or email filbe@tpg.com.au. 

28. IF YOU WANT TO CONTINUE TO RECEIVE CIRCUIT BY MAIL PLEASE DOWNLOAD AND COMPLETE THE FORM

Except for the July issue, Circuit will normally be provided electronically by downloading from the NSW Section Web site https://ewh.ieee.org/r10/nsw. Members will be notified by email using the address provided at the membership renewal time when a new issue has been posted on the web site.

Circuit will be mailed only to those members requesting a printed copy or those not having an email address. If you require a hard copy of CIRCUIT mailed to you please complete the form and return to the Editor at the address shown. To download the printable form, please click here.