EE Systems Seminar

Abstract: Precise and accurate localization is one of the fundamental scientific and engineering technologies needed for the applications enabling the emergence of the Smart World and the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT is expected to interconnect billions of devices with diversified communication needs, densely deployed in the smart space of the future in indoors and in the outdoor.  Establishing an efficient and reliable network among these devices demands accurate localization.  Localization techniques became popular with the Global Positioning System (GPS) for outdoor applications, and in recent years, this has been followed by variety of indoor localization techniques led by Wi-Fi localization. More recently, localization science and technology has progressed into in-body medical applications. Localization technologies have their own specific challenges depending on the application and environment, which are left for scientists and engineers to overcome. This presentation provides the relation among different elements of the Smart World and corresponding localization technologies, classifies localization applications enabling smart devices and environments into logical categories, describes the complexity of the technologies used for localization, and introduces some of the open challenges for localization in the Smart World and the location aware IoT. 

Bio: Kaveh Pahlavan is a Professor of ECE, a Professor of CS, and Director of the Center for Wireless Information Network Studies, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Wireless Information Networks and a member of the advisory board of the IEEE Wireless Magazine.  He has founded and chaired a number of pioneering international conferences in wireless networking. He has been a Westin Hadden Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at WPI, a fellow of the IEEE, a fellow of the Nokia, a Fulbright-Nokia scholar and recipient of the Board of Trustees Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Scholarship at WPI.  He has been involved in research and entrepreneurship in WLAN access and localization for over four decades and has written several books and numerous papers and patents on the topic.