[Colloq] Colloquium: Tuesday, Oct. 2 **Wagen Jean-Frédéric**

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

Presents:
Wagen Jean-Frédéric

Who will speak on:
“Applied research at the Mobile Systems Group (HES-SO Fribourg Switzerland)”

Tuesday, October 2, 2007
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.,
366 West Village H
Northeastern University

Abstract:
HES-SO: who are we?
The University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland (HES-SO in its French acronym) is a network of 7 sites with a total of 12’000 students offering Bachelor’s and (starting in 2008) Master’s degrees mainly in Engineering, Architecture, Business and Management, Healthcare, Social sciences, Design and Art. The EIA-FR is the French acronym for the college of engineering and architecture in Fribourg. Our Mobile Systems group belongs to an institute (“Institut des technologies de l'information et de la communication” ITIC), which also fosters competences in the areas of Man Machine Interface, Middleware and Security. The ITIC is part of the CoreGRID NeO (http://www.coregrid.net) and supports a CISCO academy (CCNA- and CCNP-level) and an XML academy. 
 
Medical remote supervision and monitoring
The Mobile Systems Group is currently developing solutions for medical telemetry and alarms. Using mostly open source software, our demonstrator involves the chain from wireless medical sensors, a WLAN/GSM/GPRS PocketPC gateway to a JBoss application server managing the patient records and the medical personal interventions. The PocketPC gathers via Bluetooth the data from several sensors (currently ECG, SP02, GPS, and a “panic-button”), pre-processes this data if required, and send them via WLAN or GPRS to the application server. The application server, developed by our project partner, handles the alarms and will dispatches them to the most appropriate person while keeping all records in a patient database. More details are available at http://www.hes-so.ch/iminet. In addition, current work in collaboration with a physician (Prof. Montani, http://www.unifr.ch/inph/) allows us to compute the co-called pulse transit time from ECG and SP02 data. 

Special interfaces for mobile applications (J2ME, voice, camera, ...) 
We are developing Java and C applications for voice and mobile camera based services. In the past we have also investigated software agent and currently push technologies for mobile applications. For example, we have developed a complete solution including mobile applications for the car sharing service FriMobile (http://swissmobil.eif.ch/). Another example of successful demonstrator is the SmartHome Sensor Network developed in collaboration with Northeastern University, USA (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/noubir/projects/smart-homes-d/demoFinal.AVI). All of our past and current works are related to mobile systems, services and technologies focusing especially on existing network elements, emerging architectures to experiment various technologies via the development of demonstrators using J2ME, voice or image recognition, … 

Service coverage prediction in indoor environments
Increase of WLAN network deployments in public and company building lead to the need of developing efficient tools to predict coverage in terms of available service. In this paper we propose to establish service coverage based only on approximate floor plans by using the so-called PixelFlow algorithm. The PixelFlow algorithm is based on discrete version of the Huygens principle and appears to be rather robust to approximation in the floorplan. Measurements of service performances have been performed and used to calibrate the prediction results. A new metric has been developed to quantify in meters the differences. 

Brief Biography
Dr. Fred (Jean-Frédéric) Wagen (jean-frederic.wagen at hefr.ch)
Jean Frederic Wagen heading the Mobile Systems-Comptence Groupe and is in charge of the Mobile Internet Platform of the Telecom Laboratory at the University of Applied Sciences in Fribourg. He is heading or collaborating to several applied research projects on mobile and multi-modal internet technologies involving applications, services and wireless networks. He teaches computer communication, telecommunications, and graduate short courses on VoIP, wireless and mobile communications, and mobile internet. Dr. Wagen serves as Senior Consultant to Wavecall SA, a unique provider of advanced radio coverage prediction tools. Dr. Wagen also serves as expert to the Swiss delegate to the Joint Communication Board of the ESA. Since 1988, Dr. Wagen has accumulated experience in the areas of mobile radio communications from radio propagation, radio network planning, mobile systems, service deployment and, at the EIA-FR, applied research and prototype development. 
Dr. Wagen holds a Diplôme d’ingénieur électricien from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (1982), a MSc EE from Lehigh University Bethlehem, PA, USA (1984) and a PhD EE from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA (1988). Upon graduation, he worked at GTE Laboratories (now Verizon) in Waltham, MA, USA until 2001 and then at Swisscom’s Corporate Technology Center, Berne, Switzerland, and, at the EIA-FR since 2000. 
Dr. Wagen has co-authored 9 journal papers and contributed to over 40 conference papers, chapters in 4 books and very recently finished an introductory book on wireless and mobile communications. He is co-holding one patent in the area of adaptive WiFi channel selection for large WLANs.