Successful 32nd Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux
The 32nd symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux was held at the Université Libre de Bruxelles on May 10 and 11, 2011. It was jointly organized with the IEEE signal processing chapter of the Benelux by Francois Horlin. More than 50 researchers contributed to the success of the symposium. Stijn van Caekenberghe received the Student Best Paper Award. Two excellent invited speakers gave overview presentations, highlighting the convergence between information theory and signal processing:
Lutz Lampe, from the University of British Columbia, gave a talk on the future of powerline communications (PLC). A short tour through PLC technology from a communication theoretic point of view was provided. Starting with historical perspectives, the popular approaches of channel and network modeling and transmission concepts for PLC were summarized. This led to a number of interesting research opportunities for communication theory and signal processing in PLC, like multicarrier transmission, multiple-input multiple-output processing, collaborative communication, as well as popular new tools like compressed sensing.
- Merouane Debbah from Supelec, gave a talk on the potential of random matrices. The asymptotic behaviour of the eigenvalues of large random matrices has been extensively studied since the fifties. However, as far as communications systems are concerned, until the mid 90's, intensive simulations were thought to be the only technique to get some insight on how communications behave with many parameters. All this changed in 1997 when large system analysis based on random matrix theory was discovered as an appropriate tool to gain intuitive insight into communication systems.The talk presented the fundamentals of random matrices and illustrated the applications in wireless communications through several examples, like the MIMO broadcast channel, network-MIMO channel, multi-stage detectors....
Stijn van Caekenberghe received the Student Best Paper Award for the paper "Preamble-based channel estimation for filterbank multicarrier wireless systems" authored by S. van Caekenberghe, S. Pollin, A. Bourdoux, L. van der Perre and J. Louveaux.