Category: Research talks

Citi Seminar – Sheng YANG 13Th February 11AM

Speaker 
Sheng YANG

When / Where
13th February 2025  ; room TD-C ; Heddy Lamarr building INSA Lyon; Villeurbanne

This seminar is open to everyone and is recognized by the EEA doctoral school for doctoral training hours. We will have a sign-in sheet for PhD students who wish to attend the seminar (in person).

visio
https://insa-lyon-fr.zoom.us/j/92678255340<https://insa-lyon-fr.zoom.us/j/92678255340>

Title
From Bayesian Statistics to Large-Scale MIMO Communications

Abstract
Large-scale MIMO systems have emerged as a cornerstone for next-generation wireless communication networks. While extended research has been conducted on signal processing and transceiver design in these systems, the fundamental Shannon capacity limit remains elusive in many settings, particularly in the presence of system non-linearities. In this talk, we explore the connection between statistics and communication, and introduce a novel approach that leverages information-theoretic asymptotics from Bayesian statistics to derive the Shannon capacity of such systems. We reveal the critical role of the Fisher information and Jeffreys’ prior in this characterization, and
demonstrate how to apply this method to derive the asymptotic capacity of various channel models. Examples include the MIMO channels with 1-bit ADC, clipping, phase noise, and imperfect channel state information.

Biography
Sheng Yang received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China, in 2001, and both the engineer degree and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Telecom ParisTech, Paris, France, in 2004, respectively. In 2007, he obtained his Ph.D. from Université de Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI).
From October 2007 to November 2008, he was with Motorola Research Center in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, as a senior staff research engineer.
Since December 2008, he has joined CentraleSupélec, Paris-Saclay University, where he is currently a full professor. From April 2015, he also holds an honorary associate professorship in the department of electrical and electronic engineering of the University of Hong Kong (HKU).
He received the 2015 IEEE ComSoc Young Researcher Award for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa Region (EMEA). He was an associate editor of the IEEE transactions on wireless communications from 2015 to 2020.
He is currently an associate editor of the IEEE transactions on information theory.


PhD defense Pierre Marza : “Learning spatial representations for single-task navigation and multi-task policies”

The defense will take place on november 25 at 9 AM

Title
Learning spatial representations for single-task navigation and multi-task policies

Abstract
Autonomously behaving in the 3D world requires a large set of skills, among which are perceiving the surrounding environment, representing it precisely and efficiently enough to keep track of the past, making decisions, and acting to achieve specified goals. Animals, for instance humans, stand out by their robustness when it comes to acting in the
world. In particular, they can efficiently generalize to new environments but are also able to rapidly master many tasks of interest from a few examples. We will study how artificial neural networks can be trained to acquire a subset of these abilities. We will first focus on training neural agents to perform semantic mapping, both from augmented supervision signal and with proposed neural-based scene representations.
Neural agents are often trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) from a sparse reward signal. Guiding the learning of scene mapping abilities by augmenting the vanilla RL supervision signal with auxiliary spatial reasoning tasks will help navigate efficiently. Instead of modifying the training signal of neural agents, we will also see how incorporating specific neural-based representations of semantics and geometry within the architecture of the agent can help improve performance in goal-driven navigation. Then, we will study how to explore a 3D environment to build neural representations of space that are as satisfying as possible based on robotic-oriented metrics we will propose. Finally, we will move from navigation-only to multi-task agents, and see how important it is to tailor visual features from
sensor observations to the task at hand to perform a wide variety of tasks, but also to adapt to new unknown tasks from a few demonstrations.

Jury
* Ivan Laptev, Directeur de Recherche (INRIA Paris / MBZUAI), Rapporteur
* Karteek Alahari, Directeur de Recherche (INRIA Grenoble), Rapporteur
* Nicolas Thome, Professeur des Universités (Sorbonne Université), Examinateur
* Georgia Chalvatzaki, Full Professor (TU Darmstadt), Examinatrice
* Laëtitia Matignon, Maître de Conférences (UCBL), Co-Directrice de thèse
* Olivier Simonin, Professeur des Universités (INSA Lyon), Co-Directeur de thèse
* Christian Wolf, Principal Scientist (Naver Labs Europe), Co-Directeur de thèse


PhD defense Zhiyi Zhang : “Deployment of mobile base stations in cellular networks”

The defense will take place on January 10th, 2025 at 9am in Amphi Est, Humanités Building, INSA Lyon

Title
Deployment of mobile base stations in cellular networks

Abstract
In current commercial mobile networks, we use fixed base stations (FBS) to provide services to users. However, the first step for deploying fixed base stations requires detailed studies to determine the architecture, the location of the base stations, the capacity, their configurations, etc. With the miniaturization of electronic equipment and network functions virtualization, it is now possible to attempt to embed base stations on movable platforms (e.g., drones) that are able to adjust their position when necessary.

For the ANR DEMON project that funds this thesis, the goal is to establish an adaptive mobile network with movable base stations (MBS). The MBS are thus capable of repositioning themselves to adapt to network changes in real-time. First, we need to understand what the use of MBS in mobile networks can bring to users and for telecommunication operator. Therefore, this thesis explores the advantages and limitations of using MBS in mobile networks. We progressively study the use of MBS in three scenarios: a post-disaster emergency area, an urban neighborhood, and an entire city.

In this thesis, we will show that, MBS can adjust their position in real-time based on the mobility of the users and also considering the user demand, MBS can often outperform FBS in terms of performance, with less base stations deployed. For example, when users form a group, if the MBS and FBS have the same transmit power, the MBS can quadruple the user throughput. In addition, we will highlight when the transmit power of MBS is 50 dBm lower than that of FBS, the performance can be comparable.
Traffic demand in mobile networks is evolving in time and space, when using FBS, we need to respond to the highest demand.
Thanks to the flexibility and mobility of MBS, they can be self-deployed only when needed, which reduces costs by about 20%. The use of MBS allows the concept of self-deployable network to become a reality.

Jury
* André-Luc Beylot, Professeur des Universités (ENSEEIHT), Rapporteur
* Véronique Vèque, Professeure des Universités (Université Paris Saclay), Rapporteure
* Walid Dabbous, Directeur de Recherche (Centre Inria d’Université Côte d’Azur), Examinateur
* Xavier Lagrange, Professeur des Universités (IMT Atlantique), Examinateur
* Razvan Stanica, Maître de Conférences HDR (INSA Lyon), Directeur de thèse
* Fabrice Valois, Professeur des Universités (INSA Lyon), Co-Directeur de thèse


CITI @The Conversation

The laboratory gets attached to engage in dialogue with society by explaining news from the university community and the world of research. Several citizens have published articles in TheConversation newspaper:


CITI seminar – Edward Knightly (Rice University) – 23/05 at 10AM

Speaker: Edward Knightly (Rice University)

Date: 23/05/2024

Time: 10AM

Place: Amphi Chappe/Lamarr, 6 avenue des arts, La Doua Campus

Title: Curved Beams, Flying Metasurfaces, and Emerging Capabilities for 6G

Abstract: Next-generation wireless networks promise unprecedented performance by exploiting wide bandwidths available in millimeter wave to sub-Terahertz spectrum. At such frequencies, transmission is necessarily highly directive in order to overcome path loss. In this talk, I will debunk two myths about such networks: the first myth is that intelligent surfaces or smooth specular-reflecting surfaces are required to overcome blocked paths via reflected paths. Instead, I will show the theory and experimental results for curving beams around obstacles. The second myth is that highly directional rooftop backhaul links are inherently immune to interception by an eavesdropper. Instead, I will show the theory and experimental results for intercepting a roof-top sub-THz backhaul link without detection by using a metasurface-equipped UAV.

Bio: Edward Knightly is the Sheafor–Lindsay Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Rice University. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.S. from Auburn University. He is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and a Sloan Fellow. He received the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award, the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance Award for Research on New Opportunities for Dynamic Spectrum Access, the George R. Brown School of Engineering Teaching + Research Excellence Award, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He won eight best paper awards including ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc, IEEE Communications and Network Security, and IEEE INFOCOM. He serves as an editor-at-large for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and serves on the scientific council of IMDEA Networks in Madrid and the scientific advisory board of INESC TEC in Porto. He served as the Rice ECE department chair from 2014 to 2019.


CITI seminar – Victor Morel (Chalmers University of Technology) – 18th March 2024 at 2PM

Speaker: Victor Morel (Chalmers University of Technology)

Date: 18th March 2024

Time: 2PM

Place: Meeting Room, 4th floor, Inria building (Antenne), La Doua Campus

Title: Of cookies and paywalls 

Abstract: Cookie paywalls allow visitors of a website to access its content only after they make a choice between paying a fee or accept tracking. European Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) recently issued guidelines and decisions on paywalls lawfulness, but it is yet unknown whether websites comply with them.
We studied the prevalence of cookie paywalls on the top one million websites using an automatic crawler. We identified 431 cookie paywalls, all using the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF). We then analysed the data these paywalls communicate through the TCF, and in particular, the legal grounds and the purposes used to collect personal data. We observed that cookie paywalls extensively rely on legitimate interest legal basis systematically conflated with consent. We also observed a lack of correlation between the presence of paywalls and legal decisions or guidelines by DPAs. Following the publication of the paper, we disseminated our results to several legal bodies in the EU, in order to contribute to the debate surrounding the last move of Meta to propose a similar ‘pay-or-okay’ business model for Facebook and Instagram.

Bio: Victor Morel is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Security & Privacy Lab at Chalmers University of Technology on usable privacy for IoT applications. He holds a PhD in computer science from Inria – Privatics. His research interests include privacy and data protection, networks security, usability and Human-Computer Interactions, applied cryptography, and ethics of technology in a broad manner. He is also a selected member of the EDPB’s support pool of experts. He appreciates sober, hackable, and accessible technology that works. Besides his academic activities, he is a member of FELINN’s collegiate council, a French association (1901) defending decentralization, privacy, and free software through popular education.