Past and upcoming colloquiums are posted at http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/graduate/colloquium/.
Wednesday May 11 10:00 - 10:50 AM Owen 102 Yasamin Mostofi Postdoctoral Scholar Electrical Engineering California Institute of Technology New Design Theories for Delay-Sensitive Mobile Sensor Networks Abundance of cheap embedded sensors equipped with processing, communication & actuation capabilities has created considerable interest in sensor network applications. In order to solve the fundamental problems underlying these systems, multi-disciplinary approaches are required that can integrate between different fields such as sensing, communication, estimation and control. In this talk we develop new theoretical foundations for mobile sensor networks running real-time applications with the aim of integrating communication and estimation/control. On the communication side, we will show that the communication protocols and designs suitable for other already-existing applications like data networks may not be entirely applicable for estimation and control of a rapidly changing dynamical system. Then we develop new design theories to improve the performance and stability of these systems. For instance, we examine the role of a cross-layer feedback and will see how the optimum design should provide a balance between information loss and communication noise in the absence of such a feedback. On the control side, we will consider decentralized control of sensor trajectories. There we provide new design strategies that would consider the trade-offs between sensing and communication. Biography Yasamin Mostofi is a postdoctoral scholar in the department of Electrical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. She received her Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1997. She then received her MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1999 and 2003. Her research areas of interest include sensor networks, communications and control and dynamical systems. ========= Wednesday May 11 4:00 - 4:50 PM Covell 216 Distinguished Speaker John P. Hayes Claude E. Shannon Professor Engineering Science University of Michigan Quantum Circuits: A New Way to Compute Quantum computation is a recent approach to information processing which is based on quantum mechanics rather than classical physics. Information is represented by quantum bits (qubits) which correspond to quantum states such as photon polarization. Because of the superposition property of these states, n qubits can store up to 2n binary words simultaneously, suggesting a type of massive parallelism. Quantum states also allow powerful forms of interaction such as interference and entanglement, which have no counterparts in classical (non-quantum) computation. Quantum computers can solve a few important and hitherto intractable problems such as prime factorization of large numbers. Novel forms of highly secure communication are also possible. In practice, however, quantum computing devices and circuits are extremely difficult to construct, since they are nanoscale in size and operate at extremely low energy levels. Consequently, they have many more failure modes than classical circuits For example, quantum signal states are inherently unstable and tend to decay rapidly due to interaction with the environment (decoherence). Quantum gate operations are defined by continuous parameters that allow small errors to arise and propagate to other gates. Furthermore, state measurement is probabilistic and the measurement process itself affects the state being measured. This talk will review the history and development of quantum circuits, with emphasis on their relation to classical computer circuits and their fault-tolerance requirements. Biography John P. Hayes is the Claude E. Shannon Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Michigan, where he teaches and conducts research in the areas of VLSI CAD, fault tolerance, mobile embedded systems, and quantum computing. He received the B.E. degree from the National University of Ireland, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois. At Illinois he participated in the design of the ILLIAC III computer. He spent ten years with the University of Southern California, before moving to the University of Michigan. Hayes was the founding director of Michigan's Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory (ACAL). He is the author of numerous technical papers, several patents, and five books, including Computer Architecture and Organization, (3rd ed., McGraw-Hill, 1998). Hayes is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM. He received the University of Michigan's Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 1999 and the Humboldt Foundation's Research Award in 2004. _______________________________________________ Colloquium mailing list [email protected] https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/colloquium
