Heath hosts IEEE Workshop

The 2008 IEEE Communication Theory Workshop was held May 11-14, 2008 in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. The workshop, organized by Prof. Robert Heath had more than 85 participants from across academia and industry. There were a number of WNCG attendees including Prof. Ted Rappaport, Prof. Jeff Andrews, and Prof. Sanjay Shakkottai, as well as a number of WNCG students: Ramya Bhagavatula, Steven Peters, and Rahul Vaze. This IEEE workshop received sponsorship from Qualcomm, Intel, Texas Instruments, Motorola, the WNCG, CWSA, and support for travel grants from the National Science Foundation.

The location of the conference hotel, the Divi Carina on the southeastern shore of St. Croix, provided the perfect venue for an intimate workshop. A 3-hour afternoon break provided time to frolic on the beach, while several evening social events with high class food and open bar allowed attendees to network in a relaxed environment.

As always, the technical quality of the workshop was considered to be outstanding with an especially diverse program this year. There were three plenary speakers: Dr. Alxei Gorokhov from Qualcomm, Prof. Larry Milstein from UC San Diego, and Prof. Bruce Hajek from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

There were five different invited sessions including:

• Feedback, Channel State Information, and Overhead organized by Prof. Michael Honig at Northwestern.
• Cognitive Radio and Dynamic Spectrum Access organized by Prof. Vahid Tarokh at Harvard and Prof. Qing Zhao at UC Davis.
• Ad Hoc Network Capacity and Network Information Theory organized by Prof. Andrea Goldsmith at Stanford and Prof. Jeff Andrews at UT Austin.
• Two-Way Communication in Networks organized by Prof. Ashutosh Sabharwal at Rice and and Prof. Holger Boche at TU Berlin.
• Security, Communication, and Information Theory organized by Prof. Hesham El Gamal at Ohio State.

As well as two stimulating panels:

• Effective Communications between the Theory and Practice of Communications Systems, Organized by Prof. Arogyaswami J. Paulraj at Stanford, including participation from Prof. Ted Rappaport at UT Austin, Bob O'Dea at Motorola, Prof. Helmut Bölcskei at ETH Zurich, Dr. Alexei Gorokhov at Qualcomm, and Dr.  Tarik Muharemovic at Texas Instruments.
• Communication Theory and Ad hoc Networks, Organized by Dr. Ananthram Swami at Army Research Labs, including participation from J. Christopher Ramming (formerly of DARPA), Prof. Anna Scaglione from Cornell, Prof.Massimo Franceschetti from the UC San Diego, and Prof.  Sanjay Shakkotai from UT-Austin.

Finally, there were more than 15 posters presented during the Hot Topics Poster Session.

All presentations from the workshop are available at:
http://www.ieee-ctw.org/program.html.