Prof. Heath Delivers Plenary at the 9th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications.

On July 9, 2008, Prof. Heath delivered a plenary at the 9th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications The talk was entitled “Communication and Signal Processing on the Grassmann Manifold”.

The topic of Prof. Heath’s plenary was on the theory and application of the Grassmann manifold in signal processing and communications. It began with a brief biography of H. Grassmann, a gifted German mathematician who lived in the 1800’s. Grassmann made several important contributions in diverse areas including mathematics, physics, and linguistics, among other topics. One of Grassmann’s more esoteric mathematical contributions was defining what is know known as Grassmann manifold---the set of subspaces of Euclidean space. It turns out that the Grassmann manifold comes up in several important problems in multiple antenna communication especially the subspace feedback problem, known as limited feedback communication. The plenary talk reviewed the applications of the Grassmann manifold in wireless communication and discussed the state-of-the-art of several related manifold signal processing problems such as quantization, estimation, interpolation, and prediction as well as applications outside of communications in areas like optimization and data mining.

Robert W. Heath Jr. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He is Associate Director of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group and Director of the Wireless Systems Innovations Lab. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, in 1996 and 1997 respectively, and the Ph.D. from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 2002, all in electrical engineering.

From 1998 to 2001, he was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff then a Senior Consultant at Iospan Wireless Inc, San Jose, CA where he worked on the design and implementation of the physical and link layers of the first commercial MIMO-OFDM communication system. In 2003 he founded MIMO Wireless Inc, a consulting company dedicated to the advancement of MIMO technology. Since January 2002, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin where he is currently an Associate Professor and member of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group. His research interests include several aspects of MIMO communication: limited feedback techniques, multihop networking, multiuser MIMO, antenna design, and scheduling algorithms as well as 60GHz communication techniques, multi-media signal processing, and bio-signal processing. He has published over 190 refereed articles in these areas and holds eleven U.S. patents.

Dr. Heath has been an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communication and an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. He is a member of the Signal Processing for Communications Technical Committee in the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was a technical co-chair for the 2007 Fall Vehicular Technology Conference, is the organizer and general chair of the 2008 IEEE Communication Theory Workshop, is a co-organizer and general co-chair of the 2009 IEEE Signal Processing for Wireless Communications Workshop, and is technical co-chair for the 2010 International Symposium on Information Theory. He is a co-author of five papers that received best student paper awards. He is the recipient of the David and Doris Lybarger Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Engineering, the 2003 Frontiers in Education New Faculty Fellowship, and is a registered Professional Engineer in Texas.