Invited Speakers
Mining and modeling large scale cell phone data, Jean Bolot
Cell phones are ubiquitous in modern life and the call records collected by network operators are a powerful tool to study the behavior of cell phone users, and how those users use network resources, at previously impossible-to-achieve scales. In this talk I will describe how the analysis of call records data, and more generally of the data generated by mobile users, leads to new and extremely exciting research problems in the areas of social network analysis, privacy, and economics. I will consider two kinds of data, namely social network data (who calls whom, how often, etc) and location data (where cell phones users are and how they move) and will consider questions such as i) what is the structure of the cell phone social network, ii) how predictable and unique are your mobility patterns and what does this mean for location privacy, or iii) how valuable is it to know where you are and how can we quantify the value of private user data such as location or preferences.
Faster and Better: the Promise of Dynamic Spectrum Access, Seth Gilbert
As wireless networks continue to proliferate, the problem of limited bandwidth has become increasingly apparent. In response to this issue, there has been much significant and successful research addressing the question of how to use the available bandwidth more efficiently, and more gener- ally, how to make wireless protocols more scalable. For those researchers focused on the foundations of wireless (or mobile) computing, this direction has encompassed research on contention resolution, data dissemination, and routing in dense networks; it has included research on finding low- degree overlay structures and schemes for data aggregation. For those researchers focused more on systems research, it has led to new MAC-layer protocols and even new radio designs. Overall, there has been significant progress, partic- ularly in the case of fixed networks organized around static base stations.
Wireless Network Coding, Sachin Katti
Wireless is becoming the preferred mode of network access. The performance of wireless networks in practice, however, is hampered due to the harsh characteristics of the wireless medium: its shared broadcast nature, interference, and high error rate. Traditionally, network designers have viewed these characteristics as problematic, and tried to work around them. In this talk, I will show how we can turn these challenges into opportunities that we exploit to significantly improve performance.
To do so, we use a simple yet fundamental shift in network design. We allow routers to "mix" (i.e., code) packets' content before forwarding them. I will describe three algorithms and system designs, COPE, ANC and MIXIT, which exploit this network coding functionality via novel algorithms to provide large practical gains. In this talk, I will discuss COPE and ANC; COPE exploits wireless broadcast, while ANC exploits strategic interference to improve throughput.
Presentation Slides [PDF]
Presentation Slides [PPTX]
Biography
Sachin Katti is currently an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his PhD in EECS from MIT in 2009. His research focuses on designing and building next generation high capacity wireless networks using techniques from information and coding theory. His dissertation research focused on redesigning wireless mesh networks with network coding as the central unifying design paradigm. The dissertation won the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award - Honorable Mention, the George Sprowls Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation in EECS at MIT. His work on network coding was also awarded a MIT Deshpande Center Innovation Grant, and won the 2009 William Bennett Prize for Best Paper in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He has also won the Best Demonstration Award at Mobicom 2010, as well as Hooover, Packard and Terman Faaculy Fellowships. His research interests are in networks, wireless communications, applied coding theory and security.
