On Thursday, October 14 and Friday October 15, ICICS and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering co-hosted talks by Cecil H. and Ida Green Visiting Professor Gerhard Fettweis, Vodafone Chair Professor at TU Dresden. Abstracts of the talks and a short biography of Dr. Fettweis follow.
Ten Unsolved Hot Problems in Information & Communications Technology
Thursday, October 14, 2010, 4:00-5:00 pm
UBC Kaiser Building, 2020-2332 Main Mall
We are not at an end in information technology development. In this talk, ten unsolved hot problems of communications technology will be laid out, which each pose a multi-faceted research challenge: How can we design radio frequency circuits and antennas to cope with a diverse frequency spectrum available for communications services? How can we cope with impairments of deep sub-micron analog circuits? How do we architect hardware and software in terms of embedded parallel computing? How do we architect the silicon chips of the future as deep sub-micron has driven design costs above the $100M boundary? How can we set up and manage large heterogeneous networks? How can we create communications transmission solutions for the huge appetite in data rate increase every 5 years? How do we integrate energy-starved sensors as nodes in wide area cellular networks? How do we create communications networks with very low energy consumption without compromising performance? How well prepared are we for the vast amount of data that will be sent over the internet of the future, as 3D objects? Do we have the correct network architectures, protocols, as well as the correct physical communications technology in place?
How to be an Entrepreneur in Information & Communications Technology
Friday, October 15, 2010, 2:00-3:00 pm
UBC Kaiser Building, 2020-2332 Main Mall
Professor Fettweis, who has co-founded nine start-ups out of the university so far, delivers a personal view of the pitfalls and chances of creating a start-up. It is clear that information and communications technology (ICT) has been a great opportunity for entrepreneurs. Many of us know names of people who have made it big. An understanding of the ICT roadmap enables one to see which are successful products to choose when considering creating a start-up, and which are doomed. Good product definitions, competition analyses, and market roll-out plans are the foundations for success. The human resources side of creating a company, the motivators and mind-sets of venture capitalists, and how to create an “unfair competitive advantage” will also be discussed.
About Gerhard Fettweis
Gerhard Fettweis earned his Ph.D. under H. Meyr’s supervision from RWTH Aachen in 1990. Thereafter he was at IBM Research in San Jose, CA and then at TCSI Inc., Berkeley, CA. Since 1994 he is Vodafone Chair Professor at TU Dresden, Germany, with currently 20 companies from Asia/Europe/US sponsoring his research on wireless transmission and chip design. He runs the world’s largest cellular research test-bed in downtown Dresden (EASY-C).
Gerhard is an IEEE Fellow, and has received many awards. In Dresden he has spun-out nine start-ups so far, and set up funded projects of more than EUR 1/4 billion volume. He has been actively involved in organizing IEEE conferences, most notably as TPC Chair of IEEE ICC 2009 (Dresden). He remains active within IEEE societies as well as with their publications.