Ns-2.33 (and nam) on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)
Coast-to-Coast Seminars
October 20th, 2009 by Jason Ernst
Today I found out about some cross-Canada computer / math seminars that are sponsored by a consortium of research / computing organizations across Canada including SHARCNET, WestGrid, ACENet, IRMACS and AARMS. Today’s talk was given at the University of Toronto by Prof. Geoffrey Hinton (see the SHARCNET site for a description / abstract). The first part of the talk showed a network learning how to recognize written characters. The approach was unique (at least to what I’ve encountered in my soft computing class) in that it didn’t assign and back-propagate the labels from the start. The network learned “features” based on the input patterns and then assigned the labels after the pattern had been learned. The coolest feature was being able to “visualize what the network is thinking” by doing the process sort of in reverse. The second part of the talk applied a similar technique to the motion of person wearing sensors. The network could be trained to recognize the style of motion of the person and then from that, new styles of walking could be “imagined” by the network. For example the network could image the person changing walking styles midwalk through the visualization even though it hadn’t been trained in this way. In all it was very interesting. It would be fun to try to apply some of these techniques to wireless networks. Perhaps the motion modeling could be applied to mobile wireless devices to help with hand-offs?
Anyway, if anyone is interested and you are at one of the Universities which is a part of the groups putting these on, they happen every other week. You can see at schedule at the SHARCNET website, or probably at the group you are a part of at your school. As far as I know, anyone can attend!
Posted in Computer Science, Research by Jason Ernst
ANN for Wireless Network Applications
September 28th, 2009 by Jason Ernst
This semester I have been taking a soft computing course. We have covered fuzzy logic and are starting artificial neural networks (ANN) although I have missed a couple of classes due to the conferences I have been attending. Anyway the ANN class today piqued my interest in how I can apply this to my area which is wireless networks. It seems to me so far that it could be applied to some of my cross-layer work since the network could be trained to tune parameters to settings which yield good performance based on specific network conditions. However, I’m not sure if this approach would be good or if some other AI type of technique may be better. Also I am interested in how ANNs could be applied to breaking encryption schemes if it is even possible. I have tried a few searches on Google and some journals / conferences but nothing of interest has come up yet. I don’t think I really understand ANNs enough to answer any of the questions, but I thought I’d get them down so I can come back later and think when I have more time. Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions on these ideas.
Posted in Computer Science, Miscellaneous, Research, Wireless Networks by Jason Ernst
Tags: Artificial Neural Networks, Encryption, Security, Wireless
AINA 2009 Conference Presentation
June 1st, 2009 by Jason Ernst
This past week I travelled to the UK to present at my first International Conference – Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2009) in Bradford, UK. My presentation was on “Fair Scheduling in Wireless Mesh Networks with Multiple Gateways”. The paper for the conference was published in the main AINA conference and I presented on the first day, in the first session. It was nice to have it over with right away so that I could relax and focus on meeting as many people as possible at the conference. There were people from 40 different countries there and I feel like I met someone from almost every one of them at some point. There were over 300 people at AINA this year, which apparently is down from the last couple of years (where they had 4-500) but it was still a great conference for me. I will post my slides from my presentation in this post in case anyone is interested, along with a link to the paper once it is available. I submitted another paper last night for a conference in Toronto and am working on two more papers, so hopefully I’ll be travelling soon. I am trying to aim for ICC in South Africa next year.
Thesis Defense a Success!
May 19th, 2009 by Jason Ernst
Last Friday I successfully defended my thesis at Guelph. The room was full with lots of friends, students and faculty and everything went fairly smoothly. It definitely feels great to be done after almost two years building up to this. Today I finished the final revisions and submitted all of the copies with an insane amount of paperwork to Grad Program Services. Two to three weeks from now I should get my final bound copy of my thesis and it should soon be available online and in libraries 
. For anyone interested in reading it, email me and I can send you a pdf copy.
Update on the Lack of Updates & PhD Acceptance
April 12th, 2009 by Jason Ernst
Just a quick post to let any readers know why there has been a lack of posts on the blog lately. I have been working like crazy on my thesis with the hope of completing it in the next month or so. I have also been preparing for the AINA 2009 conference I will be presenting at Bradford University in England. Also I have been working on a paper for a conference in Toronto (TIC-STH 2009 I think) with a deadline of May 1st May 31st (extended). So theres been alot going on and not much time.
As soon as I get the thesis completed though I hope to post alot more new content on the blog (as well as a potential redesign since this one seems a little cluttered and busy to me). Check back soon for alot more in-depth info on using ns3 since that is what I have been using for my thesis experiments lately. Update: I am set to defend on May 18th at Guelph. Let me know if you are interested in attending, I will provide more details via email.
In other news, the University of Guelph has officially accepted me to their Ph.D program to start in the Fall of this year (still under Dr. Denko) so I am pretty excited about having the opportunity to continue my research in Wireless Networks. I am still waiting on responses from a couple of other schools (Waterloo & Calgary) so if I end up getting accepted to either of those I will have quite a decision to make. Update: I have accepted a position at the University of Guelph and will be starting there in the fall of 2009.
Posted in Computer Science, News, Research, Simulation, Wireless Networks by Jason Ernst
Tags: Acceptance, AINA 2009, Guelph, ITC 2009, Ph.D., Project, Thesis, Toronto, Wireless
