Institute Colloquium by Prof. Andrea Goldsmith (Stanford University) @ 4 pm

Topic: The future of wireless and what it will enable

Abstract:

Wireless technology has enormous potential to change the way we live, work, and play over the next several decades. Future wireless networks will support 100 Gbps communication between people, devices, and the “Internet of Things,” with high reliability and uniform coverage indoors and out. The shortage of spectrum to support such systems will be alleviated by advances in massive MIMO and mmW technology as well as cognitive radios. Wireless technology will also enable smart and energy-efficient homes and buildings, automated highways and skyways, and in-body networks for monitoring, analysis and treatment of medical conditions. Breakthroughs in energy-efficiency architectures, algorithms and hardware will allow wireless networks to be powered by tiny batteries, energy-harvesting, or over-the-air power transfer. Finally, new communication systems based on biology and chemistry to encode bits will enable a wide range of new micro and macroscale applications. There are many technical challenges that must be overcome in order to make this vision a reality. This talk will describe what the wireless future might look like along with some of the innovations and breakthroughs required to realize this vision.

Speaker Biography:

Andrea Goldsmith is the Stephen Harris professor in the School of Engineering and a professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. She co-founded and served as Chief Technical Officer of Plume WiFi and of Quantenna (QTNA), and she currently serves on the Corporate or Technical Advisory Boards of Crown Castle Inc. (CCI), Interdigital Corp. (IDCC), Sequans (SQNS), Quantenna (QTNA) and Cohere. She has also held industry positions at Maxim Technologies, Memorylink Corporation, and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Dr. Goldsmith is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the IEEE and of Stanford, and has received several awards for her work, including the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Technical Field Award, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award, the IEEE Comsoc Edwin H. Armstrong Achievement Award, the National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lecture Award, the Women in Communications Engineering Mentoring Award, and the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s Women of Influence Award. She is author of the book ”Wireless Communications” and co-author of the books “MIMO Wireless Communications” and “Principles of Cognitive Radio,” all published by Cambridge University Press, as well as an inventor on 29 patents. She has also launched and led several multi-university research projects. Her research interests are in information theory and communication theory, and their application to wireless communications and related fields. She received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley.