WNCG Faculty Give Plenary Talks at NIWeek

Several members of WNCG attended National Instruments' annual conference and exposition, NIWeek, at the Austin Convention Center, Aug. 8-10, 2006. Profs. Jeff Andrews and Al Bovik both gave invited one hour talks to some of the several thousand conference attendees.

Andrews's talk on the emerging WiMAX standard separated the hype from the actual capabilities of the standard, and presented an objective view at this exciting emerging wireless broadband standard on the same day that Sprint announced a $2.5b investment in WiMAX infrastructure. The presentation was featured in the RF and Wireless Communications Summit along with Freescale's expert on wireless sensor networks, Dr. Jon Adams, Director of the Radio Technology and Strategy group and Berkeley professor and National Semiconductor chief technologist Dr. Ahmad Bahai.

Bovik gave the Keynote Address for the NI Vision portion of the NI Week conference entitled "New Measures for Image and Video Quality." In this talk he discussed revolutionary new methods for automatically assessing the quality of images and videos suffering distortions from a variety of sources, such as compression, wireless fading, noise, and so on. He also discussed the state-of-the-art in designing image processing and communication algorithms using quality assessment metrics.