Azadeh Kushki
Ph.D. Candidate
Multimedia Laboratory
Communications Group
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario

Wednesday, June 4, 2008, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

The problem of positioning and tracking has been studied extensively over the past five decades. Traditionally, the scope of these studies was limited to military and civilian target tracking and navigation because of sensing and computational constraints. More recently, advances in wireless communication have enabled mobility of personal computing devices, such as laptops and cellular phones, in both indoor and outdoor environments. The increasing sensing and computing capabilities of these mobile devices have motivated the development of location-based services (LBS) that are implemented on top of existing communication infrastructures to cater to changing user contexts. Examples of such services include location-based network management and security, navigation, location-based information delivery, and context awareness.

To enable and support the delivery of LBS, accurate, reliable, and real-time user location information is needed. This necessitates the study of effective positioning and tracking solutions for wireless mobile computing applications. In this talk, I will examine the problem of tracking using received signal strength (RSS) in indoor wireless local area networks. RSS-based WLAN tracking is advantageous to traditional indoor tracking techniques, such as visual surveillance, in terms of cost-effectiveness, scalability, and user privacy preservation. Yet, the noisy and non-stationary nature of the indoor radio channel limits the tracking accuracy of RSS-based WLAN systems.

In this talk, I will discuss the design of a cognitive dynamic WLAN tracking system. This design leverages the benefits of feedback through position prediction and adaptive radio scene analysis to effectively cope with variations in the indoor propagation environment.

Azadeh Kushki received the B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. degrees from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto in 2002 and 2003, respectively. She is currently working toward the PhD degree with particular emphasis on radio positioning, multimedia systems, adaptive signal processing, and data fusion methods.