Molecular Communication in Mobile System

The IEEE Toronto Section and University of Toronto – ECE are inviting all interested IEEE members and other engineers, technologists and students to our Distinguished Lecture:

Molecular Communication in Mobile Systems

Prof. Robert Schober
Institute for Digital Communications

Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany

http://www.idc.lnt.de/en/mitarbeiter/lehrstuhlleitung/schober/

Talk Abstract:
Molecular communication (MC) is an emerging research area offering many interesting and challenging new research problems for communication engineers, biologists, chemists, and physicists.
MC is widely considered to be an attractive option for communication between nanodevices such as (possibly artificial) cells and nanosensors. Possible applications of the resulting nanonetworks include targeted drug delivery, health monitoring, environmental monitoring, and “bottom-up” manufacturing. In this talk, we give first a brief introduction to MC and nanonetworking. The main focus of the talk is on stochastic channel modelling for mobile MC systems where the transmitter and/or receiver are not fixed but move subject to diffusion and flow. Metrics such as the mean, autocorrelation function, and probability density function of the channel impulse response will be investigated and the notion of coherence time in MC is introduced. Subsequently, the implications of time-variant channels for MC system design are studied, and corresponding channel estimation and non-coherent detection schemes are developed. The talk concludes with a summary of potential topics for future work.

Speaker Bio:
Robert Schober (S’98, M’01, SM’08, F’10) was born in Neuendettelsau, Germany, in 1971. He received the Diplom (Univ.) and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU), Germany, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. From May 2001 to April 2002 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada, sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). From 2002-2011, he was a Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. Since January 2012 he is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor and the Chair for Digital Communication at FAU. His research interests fall into the broad areas of Communication Theory, Wireless Communications, and Statistical Signal Processing.
Dr. Schober received several awards for his work including the 2002 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Award of the German Science Foundation (DFG), the 2004 Innovations Award of the Vodafone Foundation for Research in Mobile Communications, the 2006 UBC Killam Research Prize, the 2007 Wilhelm Friedrich Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the 2008 Charles McDowell Award for Excellence in Research from UBC, a 2011 Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, and a 2012 NSERC E.W.R. Stacie Fellowship. In addition, he received several best paper awards. Dr.Schober is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada. From 2012-2015 he served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He is currently the Chair of the Steering Committee of the new Communication Society (ComSoc) journal IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multiscale Communication and serves on the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the IEEE. Furthermore, he is a Member-at-Large of the Board of Governors and a Distinguished Lecturer of ComSoc.