Dr. Ghassan Karame, Research Scientist NEC, Germany

Abstract:

The secure outsourcing of computations proves to be useful in a number of application-scenarios. Techniques for securely outsourcing computations can, for instance, be used in mobile and cloud computing settings to verify the integrity of remote computations. The outsourcing of computations also finds applicability in constructing client puzzles and Proof-of-Work (PoW) systems, in which a prover needs to demonstrate to a verifier that it has performed a certain amount of computations. In this talk, we outline two schemes that enable the outsourcing of computations to untrusted helpers. First, we describe low-cost client-puzzles that enable a computationally-limited verifier to securely verify the outcome of modular exponentiations. Second, we outline a micropayment model for commodity web-services based on the outsourcing of microcomputations and we show that our model provides incentives for clients to execute the outsourced microcomputations.

Biography:

Dr. Ghassan Karame has received his Masters of Science in Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in December 2006, and his PhD degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2011. Between 2011 and 2012, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Information Security of ETH Zurich. Ghassan is currently a Research Scientist in the security group of NEC Laboratories Europe. His research addresses various aspects of security, privacy and applied cryptography, with a special focus on system security and cloud computing security. Ghassan has served on the program committees of several conferences and has reviewed for several journals. He is a member of the IEEE and of the ACM

Mr. Khaled Noubani, Engineering & Architecture Librarian American University of Beirut

The session will include: 1- Citation searching (using Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar) 2- Finding high Impact factor journals (using JCR and Scopus), 3- Finding influential authors or researchers in the field of study (using WOS and Scopus) 4- Acquiring articles and conference proceedings in full text (via DDS) 5- Locating dissertations and theses from AUB and other universities 6- Keeping up with new research (email alerts from IEEEXplore, Google scholar, and Scopus) 7- Direct importing and organizing of references according to the required style (using Refworks or Endnote) 8- Reading the Thesis manual and finding dates of deposit.

Dr. Roger Abou-Jaoude, Technical and Business Consultant

Abstract: This seminar will cover the strategic and financial considerations for rolling-out new technologies for the last-mile: LTE for the wireless access and FTTH for the fixed access. Both technologies have been introduced, standardized, tested and rolled-out in limited quantities in mature markets, with emerging markets still considering the technico-economic feasibility. In all cases, understanding the financial implications (on Operational Costs, Capital Expenditures and Revenue Generation) is of primary importance to network operators, regulators and governments. Moreover, the existence of legacy technologies poses a dilemma when considering swapping old equipment, upgrading existing networks and the availability of terminals at mass market prices. All those aspects are related to strategy making and will be introduced in this lecture, starting with the basic building blocks of financial models for LTE and FTTH, derivation of key indicators for strategy setting and decision making, typical benchmarks from leading network operators and strategic considerations such as competitive analysis, evolving market dynamics, segmentation, operational capabilities and Innovation potential. Biography: Dr. Roger Abou-Jaoude is a Strategic and Technical Telecommunications expert with 10+ years of experience gathered in Western Europe and the US. He worked for several multinationals (Siemens, Intel, Invantia, Huawei, Booz & Company) and as a consultant to several Tier 1 Operators. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Communications Engineering from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and a BE in Electrical Engineering from the American University of Beirut. He has 15+ publications in international conferences and holds 3 patents. He is currently active in technical and business consulting, developing operating models, novel Governance models (such as Public-Private-Partnerships and Infrastructure Sharing), Digitization strategies (eGov, M2M, eHealth, SmartGrid, Cloud services), evolution of mobile and fixed networks architectures (Offloading, QoE, QoS, Convergence) and their applications to vertical industries (Oil and Gas, Automotive, Healthcare and Media).

Dr. Hassan Al-Sakka, Post-Doc Météo France

Abstract: The principle of the radar is based on the electromagnetic wave that characterized by its amplitude, frequency and polarization state. When the radiated wave from the radar interacts with moving particles in the atmosphere, all three characteristics of the scattered wave change, and by monitoring this change it is possible to infer the particles’ size, radial velocity, shape and orientation. The use of dual-linear polarizations at horizontal and vertical states was proposed in the late 70s. The transmitter power is split equally into two channels by a precision power divider and the sensitivity in any one receiving channel is reduced by 3 dB as compared with transmitting the full power at one polarization state. The benefit of dual-polarization radars for operational use was shown that dual-polarized radars offer significant advantages over single polarized radars in (a) improving data quality (correction of the attenuation and distinguishing meteorological echoes from non-meteorological echoes such as clutter and birds/insects), (b) classification of hydrometeor types using fuzzy logic methods, and © improvement of rainfall estimation. Biography: My Name is Hassan AL-SAKKA, I work at Météo France as a Post-Doc in Polarimetric radar. I have a Ph.D in Meteorology and radar from UVSQ Versailles, a masters in Technology of Information and Systems from UTC Compiègne and Bachelor degrees in CCE from the Lebanese University, Faculty of Engineering. My research topics are the Polarimetric radar and the hydrometeor micro-physics (hydrometeor classification, hail, Ice, …).

Dr. Hamzeh Zwawy IBM Inc.,
Software Client Architect, Levant region (Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan)

AUB, ELH– Engineering Bechtel Building

Root Cause Analysis for software systems is a challenging diagnostic task due to the complexity emanating from the interactions between system components. Furthermore, the sheer size of the logged data makes it often difficult for human operators and administrators to perform problem diagnosis and root cause analysis. The diagnostic task is further complicated by the lack of models that could be used to support the diagnostic process. Traditionally, this diagnostic task is conducted by human experts who create mental models of systems, in order to generate hypotheses and conduct the analysis even in the presence of incomplete logged data. A challenge in this area is to provide the necessary concepts, tools, and techniques for the operators to focus their attention to specific parts of the logged data and ultimately to automate the diagnostic process. The work described in this talk aims at proposing a framework that includes techniques, formalisms, and algorithms aimed at automating the process of root cause analysis. In particular, this Work uses annotated requirement goal models to represent the monitored systems’ requirements and runtime behavior. The goal models are used in combination with log data to generate a ranked set of diagnostics that represent the combination of tasks that failed leading to the observed failure. In addition, the framework uses a combination of word¬based and topic-based information retrieval techniques to reduce the size of log data by filtering out a subset of log data to facilitate the diagnostic process. The process of log data filtering and reduction is based on goal model annotations and generates a sequence of logical literals that represent the possible system’ observations. A second level of investigation consists of looking for evidence for any malicious (i.e. intentionally caused by a third party) activity leading to task failures. This analysis uses annotated anti-goal models that denote possible actions that can be taken by an external user to threaten a given system task. The framework uses a novel probabilistic approach based on Markov Logic Networks. Our experiments show that our approach improves over existing proposals by handling uncertainty in observations, using natively generated log data, and by providing ranked diagnoses. The proposed framework has been evaluated using a test environment based on commercial off-the¬shelf software components, publicly available Java Based ATM machine, and the large publicly available dataset (DARPA 2000).

Dr. Hamzeh Zawawy has 15 years of experience in IT, and is the author of 6 academic and industry publications and 3 patents. Currently, Dr. Zawawy is working for IBM as the Software Client Architect covering the Levant region (Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan). Following his bachelor degree, he worked in the IT field in Kuwait, Saudi, Oman, Greece and Canada (CCC and Sabre-American Airlines). His masters thesis was sponsored by IBM Canada and was geared towards developing a capacity planning framework for IBM DB2 database management systems using Queueing Networks. Following his masters, he joined IBM Toronto Lab working for 5 years as part of the development team that built the tooling of the IBM middleware (WebSphere Message Broker). Next, Dr. Zawawy consulted in Canada and Saudi Arabia building integration solutions using IBM WebSphere software. Following that, he joined the PhD program at Waterloo where he researched the automation of fault detection in large enterprise environments. This research was sponsored by Computer Associates (CA). He received his PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada 2012, his Masters in Computer Science from Queen's University, Canada, 2002 , and his Bachelor of Computer and Communication Engineering from AUB, Lebanon, 1994.

Mohamad Jaber, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, AUB

Modern systems are increasingly required to be capable of dynamically changing their architectures at run-time (e.g., web services, robotic systems, reconfigurable middleware, wireless sensor networks, fault-tolerant systems, etc.). However, their implementation and deployment is still time-consuming, error-prone, and hardly predictive task. In this talk, I will present the dynamic component-based framework Dy-BIP. DyBIP is an extension of the BIP (Behavior, Interaction, Priority) framework. BIP is a powerful and expressive component-based framework for the formal construction of heterogeneous systems. Dy-BIP is based on rigorous operational semantics and supports powerful and high-level primitives for describing dynamic architectures, however. These are characterized by symbolic constraints offered by interacting components and computed efficiently by an execution Engine. I will present experimental results for non-trivial case studies which validate the effectiveness of Dy-BIP.

Mohamad Jaber is an Assistant Professor at American University of Beirut. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Grenoble University - Verimag Laboratory, France in 2010, under the supervision of Professor Joseph Sifakis. He received his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Grenoble University, France in 2007, and B.E. degree in Computer Science from Lebanese University, Lebanon in 2006, respectively. After one year as a post-doc at Verimag, he has joined the System Level Synthesis Group at TIMA Laboratory. His current research interests are in the domain of distributed and parallel systems, component-based design and implementation, model checking, runtime verification. He also visited many research centers around the globe such as Microsoft Research and Vanderbilt University.

by: Mageda Sharaffedine, PhD Candidate, ECE, AUB

AUB, ELH– Engineering Bechtel Building

Current out-of-order processors increase performance and minimize the memory wall problem- performance dropping due to long memory accesses- using complex and power hungry structures. In an out-of-order machine instructions do not wait for long latency operations to finish. Using register renaming instructions can issue and execute out-of-order. A re-order buffer ensures the in-order retirement of instructions and the precise state of the machine in the event of exceptions and mis-predictions.

With semiconductor advances following Moore's law by fitting twice as many transistors every two years on the same die size, the power wall has been reached. As a result power has become a first class design problem. Multiple simpler cores are believed to be more power-efficient than large power-hungry processors. But multi-core and coarse-grain parallelism (thread-level parallelism) alone will not solve the problem. Further improvements in fine-grain parallelism (instruction-level parallelism ILP) are necessary to avoid transistor under-utilization and excessive energy consumption.

Checkpoint architectures, introduced by Yale Patt, provide a simpler alternative to out-of-order execution. Checkpoint architectures do not use re-order buffers and keep a copy of a safe state of the machine to roll back to in the event of exceptions and mis-predictions. The main drawback of modern versions of this micro-architecture is the need of: 1) physical registers for renaming and 2) multiple copies of the safe machine state in order to reduce roll back execution.

Virtual Register Renaming (VRR) micro-architecture is a novel checkpoint processing architecture. Two new key features are introduced: 1) no use of physical registers for renaming, and 2) checkpoint or context fusion. We use virtual register renaming which does not require storage allocation. Hence, we no longer need to maintain complex power hungry structures for maintaining the free list and counters associated with physical registers. With checkpoint fusion, we release checkpoints out of order simplifying register file requirements and potentially reducing roll back during checkpoint mis-speculation. Moreover, our contexts can use simultaneous multithreading (SMT) contexts, when available, to speed up single thread execution. We specifically target emerging power efficient medium-size cores, known to exhibit low power characteristics, in the pursuit of enhanced performance.

Mageda Sharafeddin is a PhD candidate working on computer architecture advancement with her adviser Prof. Haitham Akkary. Mageda finished her BE degree in CCE from AUB in 1993. She moved to the US and finished her MS degree from The Ohio State University in 1995. She joined IBM in NY where she spent her next 14 years in IBM Electronic Design Automation labs working on high-level synthesis and logic simulation tools. While with IBM, she held team lead position of IBM's latest generation high-level synthesis tool. Her PhD work focuses on next generation CPU architectures with the goal of optimizing power consumption while improving performance. Along with Prof. Haitham Akkary, Mageda filed a US patent for her VRR work. She recently spent a four-month internship at Intel corporation in Oregon. Her internship goal was to evaluate the virtual register renaming (VRR) micro-architecture against Intel’s state-of-the art architectures and simulators. She successfully modeled the VRR architecture and proved its power and performance merit. This work culminated with an outstanding ranking-the highest given at Intel.

Key radio system challenges and RF architecture concepts” By: Dr. Walid Y. Ali-Ahmad Mediatek Inc., Technical Director and RF Lead

AUB, ELH– Engineering Bechtel Building

The growing demand for increased data rates and the surging volume of data traffic volumes have been behind the main push for the evolving 3GPP cellular standards. In order to meet those stringent network demands, the UE will need to evolve in the future to support the different 3GPP HSPA and LTE configurations required. Ultimately, 3GPP Rel-10 LTE-Advanced or True-4G enables peak data rates exceeding 1Gbps. This presentation will focus on reviewing some current 3G mobile platforms, then discussing key system challenges which the evolved UE configurations will impose on future cellular mobile platforms, and last but not least, some new RF architecture concepts going forward.

Walid Y. Ali-Ahmad is currently a Technical Director and RF Lead in the RF division of Mediatek Inc.; he has been with Mediatek since Oct 2007, and is responsible for 3G and 4G cellular RFIC systems development. His system design work led to the successful development of Mediatek’s first HSPA+ multi-band transceiver chipset which is currently in mass production for low-cost 3G Smart Phones. Between September’04 and September’07, he was an associate professor in ECE department at the American University of Beirut; before his AUB post, between June’97 and September’04, he was a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Maxim Integrated Products, Sunnyvale, CA, in the wireless communications division, where he led the architecture and system design of the first direct-conversion radios for broadband CDMA Wireless Local Loop systems and for WCDMA cellular handsets. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in December 1993, and his B. E. in Electrical Engineering with distinction from the American University of Beirut in June 1988. He is a Senior IEEE member and on the steering committee of the IEEE RFIC conference. He has given several invited talks at different IEEE workshops in the area of cellular transceivers system design and high-frequency radio development. Dr. Ali-Ahmad holds two patents in the area of RF design and has more than 40 publications in conferences, journals, and technical magazines.

By: Jacques Ekmekji SeeCOSM, Lebanon and Delaware

AUB, ELH– Engineering Bechtel Building

The talk will include the following: 1) The mission and concept overview of seeCOSM, 2) the characteristics, market opportunity, and key leverage points of seeCOSM, 3) the platform of seeCOSM, and 4) the level of participation at seeCOSM. Then the talk will discuss the following technical components: a) platform and technologies (Prototype), b) gameplay, c) the TV game show (trailer), and d) the online game (live play & scoring).

Jacques Ekmekji is founder and president of seeCOSM S.A.L. (Holding), Lebanon, and seeCOSM Inc., a Delaware corporation that engages in spatially enabling the e- “see”, to provide seeSolutions, by integrating Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Spatial technologies, Communication, 3D Intelligent Visualization and converging Technologies with emphasis on online games and TV Game Shows. He is Group Advisor and Senior VP of AlGihaz, Riyadh, KSA; and shareholder and Director in ArabiaGIS, Lebanon.

Prior to founding seeCOSM in 2004, Ekmekji was a Director/Partner in the Lebanon-based Khatib & Alami (K&A) Engineering firm from 1978-2003.

Since his graduation from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1971 with a BS in Civil Engineering and through 2003, Ekmekji held different executive, managerial, technical and operational positions with K&A. He was a Board Member, Director, and Shareholder from 1978-2003. During this period he served as Head of the Environmental Department; Resident Manager, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia; Deputy Managing Director of the Joint Venture of Metcalf & Eddy - Saudi Consolidated Engineering Company; Director of Special Assignments; Director of the Khobar Office Operations serving particularly ARAMCO and the government sector; Director of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Services Division; Director, ArabiaGIS; and Director, AMERICEC Inc., USA.

PROFESsee(www.professee.com), the online game and TV game show, is a thematic, sequential and episodic edutainment game. It is modeled around the Great Chain of Being namely the microcosm, mesocosm and macrocosm (Body, Earth, Universe). It is a cyber-rally, in which speed is of essence.
Ekmekji is the Devisor, Originator, Episode Writer, Developer, and Producer of PROFESsee. Derived from Professor, PROFESseeis the eternal learner in pursuit of knowledge, wisdom and truth.

By: Anas Chaaban, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany

AUB, RCR – Engineering Bechtel Building

A symmetric butterfly network (BFN) with a full-duplex relay operating in a bi-directional fashion for feedback is considered. This network is relevant for a variety of wireless networks, including cellular systems dealing with cell-edge users. Upper bounds on the capacity region of the general memoryless BFN with feedback are derived based on cut-set and cooperation arguments and then specialized to the linear deterministic BFN with really-source feedback. It is shown that the upper bounds are achievable using combinations of the compute-forward strategy and the classical decode-and-forward strategy, thus fully characterizing the capacity region. It is shown that net rate gains are possible in certain parameter regimes.

Anas Chaaban was born in Doha, Qatar, on December 11, 1984. He received his Maitrise es Sciences degree in electronics, and his M.Sc. degree in communications technology from the Lebanese University, Lebanon, in 2006, and from the University of Ulm, Germany, in 2009, respectively. During 2008-2009, he was with the Daimler AG research group on machine vision, Ulm, Germany. He was a Research Assistant with the Emmy-Noether Research Group on Wireless Networks at the University of Ulm, Germany, during 2009-2011, which relocated to Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany, in 2011. His current research interests are in the area of network information theory with main focus on relaying and interference management.

by Elie Adam Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), MIT

Elie grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. He earned his B.E. in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2010, and his S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2012. He is now pursuing his PhD at MIT EECS. He is part of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) working with Professors Munther Dahleh and Asuman Ozdaglar. His research interest lies (at a very broad level) in multi-agent networked dynamical systems (infused with a combinatorial flavor). Recent focus has been on cascading behavior over networks. His work is supported by a Jacobs Presidential Fellowship, a Siebel Scholarship and a Xerox Fellowship.

We study a model for cascade effects over finite networks based on a deterministic binary linear threshold model. Our starting point is a networked coordination game where each agent's payoff is the sum of the payoffs coming from pairwise interaction with each of the neighbors. We first establish that the best response dynamics in this networked game is equivalent to the linear threshold dynamics with heterogeneous thresholds over the agents. While the previous literature has studied such linear threshold models under the assumption that each agent may change actions at most once, a study of best response dynamics in such networked games necessitates an analysis that allows for multiple switches in actions. In this talk, we develop such an analysis and construct a combinatorial framework to understand the behavior of the model. To this end, we establish that the agents behavior cycles among different actions in the limit and provide three sets of results.

We first characterize the limiting behavioral properties of the dynamics. We determine the length of the limit cycles and reveal bounds on the time steps required to reach such cycles for different network structures. We then study the complexity of decision/counting problems that arise within the context. Specifically, we consider the tractability of counting the number of limit cycles and fixed-points, and deciding the reachability of action profiles. We finally propose a measure of network resilience that captures the nature of the involved dynamics. We prove bounds and investigate the resilience of different network structures under this measure.

by Haitham Hassanieh MIT, PhD Student

Haitham Hassanieh is a 4ht year PhD Candidate at the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT. He received his MS in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2011. He also received his BEng in computer communication engineering from AUB in 2009.

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is one of the most fundamental numerical algorithms. It computes the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of an n-dimensional signal in O(n log n) time. The algorithm plays an important role in many areas.

In many applications (e.g., audio, image or video compression), most of the Fourier coefficients of a signal are “small” or equal to zero, i.e., the output of the transform is (approximately) sparse. In this case, there are algorithms that enable computing the non-zero coefficients faster than the FFT. However, in practice, the exponents in the runtime of these algorithms and their complex structure have limited their applicability to only very sparse signals.

In this talk, I will describe a new set of algorithms for sparse Fourier Transform. Their key feature is simplicity, which leads to efficient running time with low overhead, both in theory and in practice. In particular, we can achieve a runtime of O(k log n), where k is the number of non-zero Fourier coefficients of the signal. This improves over the runtime of the FFT for any k = o(n).

by Dr. Ziad Bawwab Microsoft Speech Labs, San Jose, California

Location: Room 503, Bechtel building

Dr. Ziad Al Bawab is a CCE 2001 graduate of AUB. He obtained his Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 2003 and his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009.

Dr. Al Bawab had been a scientist in the applied research group at Yahoo! Labs since January 2010. He worked on problems related to search query processing, spelling correction, trending topics identification, and web recommendation. Ziad's research interests include trend detection, language modeling, information retrieval, and machine learned ranking. His graduate school work had been in the speech processing and speech recognition fields. He held several internship positions with companies including Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Microsoft Research, and BBN Technologies. In July 2012, Ziad will be joining Microsoft Speech Labs to work on problems related to natural language understanding. Ziad currently resides in San Jose, California. He is an active board member of AUB alumni northern California chapter. Ziad enjoys hiking the Bay Area trails. Ziad can be reached at ziadalbawab@gmail.com and on LinkedIn.

Time permitting, the talk will cover two topics. The first will focus on his work at Yahoo! Labs and the second will focus on his PhD research work.

In this talk, we present our approach for geographic personalization of a content recommendation system. More specifically, our work focuses on recommending query topics to users. We do this by mining the search query logs to detect trending local topics. For a set of queries we compute their counts and what we call buzz scores, which is a metric for detecting trending behavior. We also compute the entropy of the geographic distribution of the queries as means of detecting their location affinity. We cluster the queries into trending topics and assign the topics to their corresponding location. Human editors then select a subset of these local topics and enter them into a recommendation system. In turn the recommendation system optimizes a pool of trending local and global topics by exploiting user feedback. We present some editorial evaluation of the technique and results of a live experiment. Inclusion of local topics in selected locations into the global pool of topics resulted in more than 6% relative increase in user engagement with the recommendation system compared to using the global topics exclusively.

In this talk, we present a novel approach for speech recognition that incorporates knowledge of the speech production process. We discuss our contribution on going from a purely statistical speech recognizer to one that is motivated by the physical generative process of speech. We follow an analysis-by-synthesis approach. Firstly, we attribute a physical meaning to the inner states of the recognition system pertaining to the configurations the human vocal tract takes over time. We utilize a geometric model of the vocal tract, adapt it to our speakers, and derive realistic vocal tract shapes from electromagnetic articulograph (EMA) measurements in the MOCHA database. Secondly, we synthesize speech from the vocal tract configurations using a physiologically-motivated articulatory synthesis model of speech generation. Thirdly, the observation probability of the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) used for phone classification is a function of the distortion between the speech synthesized from the vocal tract configurations and the real speech. The output of each state in the HMM is based on a mixture of density functions. Each density models the distribution of the distortion at the output of each vocal tract configuration. During training, we initialize the model parameters using ground-truth articulatory knowledge. During testing, only the acoustic data is used. We present phone classification results using our novel dynamic articulatory model and following our adaptation procedure.

Prof. Tareq Yousul Al-Naffouri Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering Department King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) Saudi Arabia

Location: ELH (Room 316)

There has been increased interest in sparse signal reconstruction algorithms (commonly known as compressed sensing) due to their wide applicability in various fields. In this talk, we present a novel low complexity Bayesian approach to the estimation of sparse signals. The approach jointly utilizes 1) the sparsity information of the desired signal 2) the a priori statistical information about the signal and noise and 3) the inherent structure in the sensing matrix to obtain near optimal Bayesian estimates. The proposed approach is able to deal with both Gaussian and non-Gaussian priors. The approach also exhibits relatively low complexity compared to the widely used convex relaxation methods as well as greedy matching pursuit techniques. The discussion will be illuminated with several signal processing applications including channel estimation in UWB and estimation and cancellation of noise/distortion.

Tareq Y. Al-Naffouri received the B.S. degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering (with first honors) from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1995, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, CA, in 2004. He was a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, from January to August 2005 and during summer 2006. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Southern California from February to September 2008. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Electrical Engineering Department at King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) and jointly at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Saudi Arabia.

His research interests lie in the areas of adaptive and statistical signal processing and in compressed sensing and their applications to wireless communications, and in multiuser information theory. He has over 65 publications in journal and conference proceedings, nine standard contributions, and four issued patents and three pending. Dr. Al-Naffouri is the recipient of a 2001 Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE-EURASIP Workshop on Nonlinear Signal and Image Processing (NSIP) 2001 for his work on adaptive filtering analysis, the IEEE Education Society Chapter Achievement Award in 2008, and Al-Marai Award for innovative research in communication in 2009.

Mr. Emile Azar, General Manager, Metacs, SARL Ashrafieh, Beirut

Location: ELH (Room 316)

Modern industrial processes are, to a steadily increasing extent, being composed of various intelligent sometimes complex industrial control components. A modern system engineer responsible for the maintenance of an industrial machine, for its performance, its design, or its troubleshooting is required nowadays to have enough knowledge about the overall system operation, its efficiency, points of strength and weaknesses, but also enough knowledge about the individual industrial and control components that should efficiently interact together to ensure a trouble free overall industrial process. One of the main components in many modern Automation Processes is the Variable Speed Drive: having a direct effect on performance, efficiency, and ease of operation. In this Seminar Emile Azar will be discussing the many specificities of Variable Speed Drives in addition to the many advantages, practical applications, and future trends.

Emile Azar is an Electrical Engineering and Emba graduate from AUB. He is also the General Manager of METACS sarl, specialized in the Industrial Automation Sector and its various Control and Automation technologies. METACS closely collaborates with OMRON/Japan, YASKAWA/Japan, VACON/Finland and other prominent players in the Industrial Automation sector.

As an Engineer he has undergone various extensive Automation trainings in the USA, Germany, Netherlands, and Finland, and has also collaborated with other Engineers from these countries on the design and testing of various complex Automation projects. Some of his main focuses have been geared towards energy savings and new technologies, in addition to promoting local technology transfers and expertise, and establishing various training programs in Academia and various Manufacturing and Automation Industries. Throughout his work within METACS he has enabled various homegrown engineers and companies to locally renovate, enhance, and optimize old, outdated systems and also build new complex systems.

Professor Enzo Alberto Candreva, Department of Electronics Computer Science and Systems (DEIS) University of Bologna Senior Staff Engineer, ICT solutions, Mavigex Srl, Bologna

Location: ELH – Room 316

This seminar will discuss the performance degradation of OFDM systems in presence of non-linearities, and it will illustrate the most common countermeasure, namely the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction. Indeed, the reduction of the dynamics of the signal allows, in a non-linear environment, either for a transmit power saving or for a reduction of the signal distortion. Several PAPR reduction techniques will be presented and their features will be analyzed, in terms of system trade-off, design parameters, and performance.

Enzo Alberto Candreva was born in Venice (Italy) in 1983. He studied at the University of Bologna, receiving B.S. and M.S. degrees (summa cum laude) in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Bologna in 2004 and 2006, and the Ph.D degree in Telecommunications in 2010. From March 2009 to September 2009 he was a visiting researcher at Stanford University, California, under the guidance of Prof. John Cioffi.

Currently he is a Post-Doctoral researcher at the Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems (DEIS) of the University of Bologna and a Senior Staff Engineer in the ICT solutions department of Mavigex Srl, Bologna, Italy. His research activities are mainly focused on the next generation wireless telecommunication systems, on both terrestrial and satellite components. In particular, his interests include countermeasures to non linear distortion, synchronization, and performance evaluation techniques. He is involved in several international research projects on satellite communication systems, supported by ESA and EU, and he is involved in DVB technical modules. Dr. Candreva is co-recipient of the Best Student Paper Award ad ICSSC 2009.

Prof. Elias Aboutanious, Senior Lecturer, School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, The University of New South Wales

Location: ELH (Room 316)

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy has become a prominent technique in the analysis of chemical and biochemical mixtures. When placed in a magnetic field, nuclei with magnetic dipoles can be excited using microwave radiation, provided the microwave frequency matches their resonance frequency. The resonance frequency of a nucleus depends among other things on the chemical environment of the nucleus. This allows NMR spectroscopy to be used to analyse a chemical sample and determine the compounds in the mixture as well their concentrations. The recorded NMR signal, called the free induction decay (fid), is modelled as a sum of decaying complex exponentials in noise. The signal processing task then becomes that of detecting and extracting a large number of decaying sinusoids in white noise. A significant drawback of current methods is that they suffer from a deterioration in their performance due to the fact that the NMR spectra are crowded. Thus, relatively weak components are masked by stronger ones and go undetected. Our goal is to develop novel detection and estimation algorithms that improve the performance of NMR spectroscopy by permitting weaker components to be extracted more reliably. This talk will first give an overview of our teaching and research activities, before delving in more detail into the research results in NMR signal processing.

Elias Aboutanios received a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering in 1997, from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the PhD degree in 2003, from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia. From October 2003 until January 2007, he was a research fellow with the Institute for Digital Communications at the University of Edinburgh. Since February 2007 he has been a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales where he teaches in many areas covering the breadth of the Electrical Engineering domain, including signal processing, communications, control, power, networking, as well as design and ethics. Since 2009, he has been developing a new subject, Electrical Engineering Design Proficiency, for which he has received the faculty teaching excellence award. In 2011, he secured a large grant from the Australian Government Department of Science and Innovation to set up Australia’s first Masters program in Satellite Systems Engineering. His research interests include parameter estimation, algorithm optimization and analysis, adaptive and statistical signal processing and their application in the contexts of radar, NMR Spectroscopy, and GPS. He is the joint holder of a patent on frequency estimation.

Prof. Joseph Costantine,

Assistant Professor, EE Department California State University, Fullerton

Location: ELH (Room 316)

The ability of reconfigurable antennas to tune resonances, change polarization and modify their radiation patterns, made their development imperative in modern telecommunication systems. Their agility and diversity created new horizons for different types of applications especially in cognitive radio, Multiple Input Multiple Output Systems, satellites and space communications. Reconfigurable antennas satisfy the requirements for increased functionality, such as direction finding, beam steering, radar, control and command, within a confined volume. There is a need for such adaptive antennas to cater for the new technological advancements whether in terrestrial or space communications. Reconfigurable antennas constitute great candidates to swiftly respond to sudden changes in the surroundings under unknown and harsh conditions. The key in designing such systems lies in achieving reliable antennas that assure continuous operation and overcome failures without compromising their original design objectives. These different advances of reconfigurable antennas have fueled the recent interest in the potential of merging reconfigurable and deployable antennas. The goal is to obtain more efficient holistic designs suited for space applications. These antennas will be transported to space and then deployed as part of a whole reconfigurable satellite. This presentation covers a detailed classification of reconfigurable antennas with their different categories and properties. Examples of various software controlled reconfigurable antennas with several reconfiguration techniques are presented. Clear guidelines for the design and redundancy reduction of reconfigurable antenna structures using graph models are discussed. Detecting failures and analyzing the reliability and complexity of single and multi-element reconfigurable antenna arrays are covered. A methodology to assure a continuous antenna operation under unknown environment is presented. The merging of reconfigurable and deployable antennas with actual prototypes that deploy in different shapes and configurations based on the frequency needed for the desired application is also analyzed.

Joseph Costantine is an assistant professor at the electrical engineering department in California State University Fullerton. He received his doctorate degree from the University of New Mexico in 2009 where he also completed a post-doc fellowship in July 2010. Dr. Costantine has a Masters in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut in 2006 during which he was awarded a 6 months research scholarship at Munich University of Technology (TUM) as part of the TEMPUS program. His bachelor’s degree is in Electrical, Electronics, Computer and Communications Engineering from the second branch of the Faculty of Engineering in the Lebanese University in 2004. His major research interests reside in reconfigurable antennas for wireless communication systems and deployable antennas for small satellites. He is the recipient of many awards including, the 2011 and 2012 summer faculty fellowship award from the Space Vehicles Directorate at the Kirtland Research National Laboratory. He has also published many research papers (around 70 journal/conference publications) many of which received finalist positions and honorable mentions in several paper contests in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. He has two patents, and is a co-author of an upcoming book on reconfigurable antennas by John Wiley and Sons.

Dr. Nahas ,

American University Hospital, American University of Beirut

Location: ELH (Room 316)

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) remains the most effective acute antidepressant treatment for TRD, but with significant risks of cognitive impairment. The efficacy and side effects of conventional ECT are contingent on the anatomic positioning of electrodes and stimulus dosage, which determine where the electrical current flows, and where the seizure initiates. A technique that could spatially target the prefrontal cortex, and reduce the involvement of medial temporal lobe regions, may preserve the efficacy of ECT while simultaneously reducing the memory (amnestic) and other cognitive side effects.

Dr Ziad Nahas joined the AUB community in the Summer of 2011 as Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry Dr. Nahas received his Medical Degree from Saint Joseph University in Lebanon. He then completed an internship in Psychiatry at L’Institut Paul Silvadon (a lacanian day-hospital in Paris) and Hopital Charles Foix in Paris France. Dr. Nahas moved to Houston Texas in 1993 as a resident in Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. He also attended the Houston-Galveston psychoanalytic Institute psychodynamic psychotherapy course. He joined the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in 1997 where he completed a research fellowship in Functional Neuroimaging and Pyshcopharmacology and later a Master of Science in Clinical Research. Dr. Nahas held the title of a Tenured Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences with an adjunct appointment in the Department of Physiology and Neuroscience until he recent move to Beirut. His scientific interest lies in translational neuropsychiatric researcher in mood dysregulation and depressive disorders. His current studies cover the full spectrum from clinical research and functional neuroimaging to basic science including mathematical modeling of longterm antidepressant outcomes. He is a renowned expert in brain stimulation therapies. Dr Nahas is also actively involved in bridging psychoanalytical concepts and affective neurosciences. He is primarily focused on investigating brain stimulation technologies (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Vagus Nerve Stimulation, Deep Brain Stimulation and Epidural Cortical Stimulation), functional neuroimaging and basic animal model of depression. He has received funding from various sources, notably the NIMH, National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) and most the Hope for Depression Research Foundation (HDRF). He has chaired CME courses on brain stimulation at the APA for the past 8 years and chaired the Neuroimaging Committee of a large multicenter NIMH funded clinical trial in TMS and depression. He has received several awards including the NARSAD Independent Investigator Award and the Developing Scholar Award at MUSC. He is also a full member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. His recent studies have demonstrated the feasibility, safety and possible efficacy of bilateral epidural cortical stimulation for TRD. The first patient to be implanted in the world following this methodology was February 2008. Results were published in Biological Psychiatry as a Priority Communication and his research on the topic was listed in the Top 10 research development for year 2009 by NARSAD. Dr Nahas recent studies, also focused on understanding the homeostasis of depression to explore interventions that facilitate contextual treatment. Given the importance of social relatedness in depression, Dr Nahas focused on studying the role of oxytocin and brain functions. He has shown that depressed patients tend to process mental attribution of affective states with the same intensity than simple gender identification, whereas normal control show complementary but distinct functional neuronal activity to both tasks. A 40 I.U. intra-nasal oxytocin administration normalizes functional activity in depressed patients while engaged in mental attribution. This may help better define the functional role of oxytocin in contextual attention to other and lead for possible therapeutic applications in depression in general and post-partum depression in particular. Over the next 5 years, Dr Nahas’ goal is to grow the AUBMC Department of Psychiatry, enrich its multidisciplinary collaborations, bring innovative brain stimulation and various psychiatric sub-specialties to Lebanon and the region while continuing his translational and clinical research to develop a solid understanding of the pathophysiology of chronic depression and investigating new treatments for relapse prevention. He also intends to be a strong advocate for the parity of mental health care coverage in Lebanon.

Professor Yves Peysson,

Commissariate a l'energie atomique et aux energies alternatives (CEA), France

Location: TBD

The ITER project aims to achieve thermonuclear plasma in order to demonstrate that it may represent a promising source of energy for the future. Besides the physical and technological issues of such a project, it represents an achievement of a long standing international effort in order to control magnetized plasmas in toroidal devices. After recalling the basics of hot plasmas which are underlying the gigantism of the size of ITER, a broad overview of the project is performed, including some satellites aspects like IFMIF in Japan, or the general organization. The present status of the building site is discussed. ITER will represent the state of the arts of tokamak plasmas. Their control will be a challenging issue, and for this purpose, a large modeling effort is carried out throughout the world, and in Europe specifically. From the physical point of view, some important points are highligted, with a specific emphasis on current drive problem.

PhD in physics of University of Grenoble (France), engineer of “Ecole Nationale Supérieure Polytechnique de Grenoble”, physicist at the “Institut de Recherches sur la Fusion Magnétique”, Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (et aux énergies alternatives) since 1987. Was head of the heating and current drive group (1999-2003), deputy task force leader for the heating, current drive and MHD of fast particles within the European task force for the integrated tokamak modeling (2005-2009). Professor at the Institut National des Sciences et Techniques Nucléaires (Paris), teach the heating and current drive in magnetized plasmas, and simulation techniques at Paris XI university.

Professor Walter Czarnetzki,

University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen Germany

Location: AUB, RCR – Engineering Bechtel Building

Recently alkaline membrane fuel cells (AMFCs), which use solid anion exchange membrane as polymer electrolyte, have attracted worldwide attention, because of the several potential advantages over proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), i.e. use of non-precious metals as catalysts, facile kinetic of the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). The electrolyte materials for AMFCs is dominating the performance of AMFCs. Typical Membrane materials consist of hydrocarbon main chain with quaternary ammonium group as the anion exchange group. AEMs, can be prepared thin enough up to 10μm, showing OH- conductivity around 40mS/cm. OH- conducting ionomer have been investigated, which are essential for the construction of catalyst layer. AMFC can perform around 500mW/cm2 in case of H2/O2, around 350mW/cm2 in case of H2/clean air. For the durability, AMFC with standard material can be operated for about 700hrs, and it can be prolonged up to 4500hrs with cross-linked materials. The developments of AMFC components and some preliminary study of AMFCs will be summarized.

Prof. Dr. Engineering Walter Czarnetzki is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences, Esslingen, Germany. He got his doctor degree at the University of Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg. He has held a teaching position at the technical College of Hamburg in the area of manufacturing of process instruments, and worked as the Director of R&D department at Sator Laser, Hamburg, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the same University. Prof. Czarnetzki research interests are in the area of heat transfer, heat pumps, fuel cells and electrolysis.