Visitor Program

Visitor Program: Dr. Zijian Tang, Research scientist of TNO, the Hague, the Netherlands
Organizer: Urbashi Mitra
Sponsored: Spring 2012
Dr. Zijian Tang visiting USC from January – March 2012

Dr. Zijian Tang has been approved to come to USC as a visiting professor for two months beginning in January, 2012. The goals of the visit are the design of sea trial signals, to be followed by algorithm design, as part of a European project in which the Delft University of Technology and the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) aka TNO are involved. In summer 2011, we designed preliminary signals based on multi-scale Gabor transforms for transmission in a successful sea trial. We are waiting for the declassification of the mobile data and have begun preliminary analysis on the stationary data (stationary transmitter and receivers). The major challenge at the moment is designing high performance channel estimation which will enable us to test the efficacy of some of our newly proposed multi-scale, multi-lag channel equalizers. Dr. Tang and Professor Ubli Mitra are working with a visiting graduate student from the University of Padova (Nicolo Michelusi) on adapting his newly developed channel estimation methods for hybrid channels (with a diffuse and sparse component) to the underwater channels. Mr. Michelusi's Ph.D. advisor is Michele Zorzi and he is also part of the aforementioned European project. Based on a recent collaboration visit, Dr. Tang, Prof. Geert Leus of TUD and Professor Mitra have determined that carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation will be critical for this project. This is a new and exciting research avenue that will likely draw upon CFO work that has previously been undertaken for MIMO systems, but for completely different channel models. We anticipate that both joint research proposals, conference papers and seminars will result from the visit.

Biography: Zijian Tang received the MSc in electrical engineering and the PhD degree from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in 2003 and 2007, respectively. After working with Mathworks for one year, he joined the Sonar Group at Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) in 2008 as a research scientist, where the research area covers underwater acoustic communications, anti-submarine warfare, marine mammal detection etc. Since 2010, he has also been holding a (part-time) research fellow position at the Network & Circuits Group of TU Delft. Zijian Tang is the recipient of the best student paper award (honourable mention) at ICASSP 2007, and was nominated to the Simon Stevin Gezel prize in 2008.

Seminars during visit:
January 24, 2012 Seminar: Low-Complexity Equalization for Multi-scale Multi-lag OFDM Channels
February 28, 2012 Seminar: Low-Complexity Equalization for Multi-scale Multi-lag OFDM Channels

Other MHI sponsored activities