About HMI

Visitor Program: Professor Erik Ström, Chalmers University
Organizer: Ubli Mitra
Sponsored: Spring 2013
Professor Ström is a highly respected communications theorist at Chalmers University. The Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering has several faculty advancing the state‐of‐the‐art in transportation related research. Professor Ström will be visiting USC from June to August 2013.

USC has faculty in the networking area who have been actively studying vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) as well as control system theory for transportation systems. However, our activity in the area of wireless communications for vehicular networks has not been as extensive – thus, this visit and collaboration from Prof. Erik Ström from Chalmers will be instrumental in increasing the amount of research in this area as well as its visibility. European researchers have been much more active in the area of wireless communications for vehicular systems and our faculty and students will certainly benefit from Dr. Ström’s research expertise. Dr. Ström currently heads the Division for Communications Systems, Information Theory, and Antennas at the Department of Signals and Systems at Chalmers and leads the competence area Sensors and Communications at the traffic safety center SAFER, which is hosted by Chalmers. In fact, Dr. Ström’s pre‐eminence in the area of wireless communication systems for vehicular networks was evidenced by his lead editor role for the Proceedings of the IEEE special issue on Vehicular Communications (2011). Professor Ström and I initiated discussion of a joint project in June 2012 when I visited Goteborg University. Follow‐on discussions occurred in January 2013 prompting the proposal of a visit by Prof. Ström to USC to continue the collaboration. We have a junior Ph.D. student (Mr. Vishnu Ratnam) who is working on the extension of a hybrid channel estimation (N. Michelusi, U. Mitra, A. Molisch and M. Zorzi, UWB Sparse/Diffuse Channels, Part I: Channel Models and Bayesian Estimators, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol.60, no.10, pp.5307‐5319, October 2012 and UWB Sparse/Diffuse Channels, Part II: Estimator Analysis and Practical Channels, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol.60, no.10, pp.5320‐5333, October 2012)algorithm that we had developed to the time‐varying case which is relevant to vehicular communications. The visiting student who did the original work, Dr. Nicolo Michelusi has returned to USC as a post‐doc, making this a particularly good time for Prof. Ström to visit (while Dr. Michelusi is at USC).

Our anticipated results include conference and journal publications, co‐authored by Mitra, Strom and relevant students at USC and Chalmers. Furthermore, we propose to pursue further funding options to enable future visits between the researchers at USC and Chalmers.