Evans Keynotes at 2008 Texas Wireless Summit

Professor Brian Evans of WNCG was one of the keynote speakers at the 2008 Texas Wireless Summit held Oct. 15-16 at the Hilton Austin Hotel in Austin Texas.

His talk was entitled: “Improving Wireless Data Transmission Speed and Reliability to Mobile Computing Platforms”.

For next-generation mobile networks to deliver the data speeds and reliability they promise, we must overcome interference problems that plague mobile devices. A particularly difficult one is the interference generated by the mobile device itself – a source of interference that in our estimation reduces user data reliability by 10x. Here, at UT Austin, we have uncovered techniques that address the problem of self-interference. Our techniques could allow chip and equipment vendors a way to differentiate their products in the market and command pricing premiums.

Due to its small form factor, the mobile platform has many sources of self-interference that interfere with wireless reception. These sources include not only clocks and busses, but also power saving subsystems. We have developed methods for wireless receivers to sense and reduce the self-interference from the mobile platform. These methods are complementary to the static circuit-level and board-level design methods used to mitigate self-interference. We have bundled prototypes of our methods in freely distributable software releases to assist engineers in incorporating these methods into products:

Dr. Brian L. Evans is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching efforts are in embedded real-time signal and image processing systems. In signal processing, his research group is focused on the design and real-time software implementation of ADSL transceivers and multiuser OFDM systems, with the goal of maximizing connection rates for high-speed Internet access. In transceiver design, his group's primary contribution is the first ADSL equalization structure that maximizes a measure of bit rate and is realizable in real-time fixed-point software. In image processing, his group is focused on the design and real-time software implementation of high-quality halftoning for desktop printers and smart image acquisition for digital still cameras. His group also researches perceptual image hashing and its applications in multimedia authentication, databases, and watermarking. In imaging, his group's primary contribution is in the design, analysis, and quality assessment of halftoning by error diffusion for real-time processing by printer pipelines. In signal and image processing, Dr. Evans has published over 140 refereed conference and journal papers.

Dr. Evans is the primary architect of the Signals and Systems Pack for Mathematica, which has been on the market since October 1995. He was a key contributor to UC Berkeley's Ptolemy Classic electronic design automation environment for embedded systems, which has been successfully commercialized by Agilent and Cadence. He developed and currently teaches two graduate courses, Multidimensional Digital Signal Processing and Embedded Software Systems, and two undergraduate courses, Real-Time Digital Signal Processing Laboratory and Linear Systems and Signals, in order to help train undergraduate and graduate students in the theory, algorithms, design, and implementation of signal and image processing systems. His B.S.E.E.C.S. (1987) degree is from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and his M.S.E.E. (1988) and Ph.D.E.E. (1993) degrees are from the Georgia Institute of Technology. From 1993 to 1996, he was a post-doctoral researcher in the Ptolemy project at UC Berkeley. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, a member of the Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He is the recipient of a 1997 US National Science Foundation CAREER Award.