Additionnally, Olivier is one of the many newcomers in the IEEE Student Branch members this year. He will join the seminar team in charge of organizing many exciting talks this year!

“Cyber Attacks on Internet of Things Sensor Systems for Inference”

given by Prof. Rick S. Blum, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Lehigh University (U.S) and a IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer.

The event will be held on Monday July 8th 10:00 am in the Shannon meeting room (Maxwell building). The talk will be followed by the presentations of Igor Zavalyshyn, Louai Kechtban and Raziel Carvajal-Gomez, researchers in ICTEAM .

“Cyber Attacks on Internet of Things Sensor Systems for Inference”

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) improves pervasive sensing and control capabilities via the aid of modern digital communication, signal processing and massive deployment of sensors. The employment of low-cost and spatially distributed IoT sensor nodes with limited hardware and battery power, along with the low required latency to avoid unstable control loops, presents severe security challenges. Attackers can modify the data entering or communicated from the IoT sensors which can have serious impact on any algorithm using this data for inference. In this talk we describe how to provide tight bounds (with sufficient data) on the performance of the best algorithms trying to estimate a parameter from the attacked data and communications under any assumed statistical model describing how the sensor data depends on the parameter before attack. The results hold regardless of the estimation algorithm adopted which could employ deep learning, machine learning, statistical signal processing or any other approach. Example algorithms that achieve performance close to these bounds are illustrated. Attacks that make the attacked data useless for reducing these bounds are also described. These attacks provide a guaranteed attack performance in terms of the bounds regardless of the algorithms the estimation system employs. References are supplied which provide various extensions to all the specific results presented and a brief discussion of applications to IEEE 1588 for clock synchronization is provided.

Biography: Rick S. Blum received a B.S.E.E from Penn State in 1984 and an M.S./Ph.D in EE from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987/1991. From 1984 to 1991 he was with GE Aerospace. Since 1991, he has been at Lehigh University. His research interests include signal processing for cyber security, smart grid, communications, sensor networking, radar and sensor processing. He was an AE for IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing and for IEEE Communications Letters. He has edited special issues for IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing and IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He was a member of the SAM Technical Committee (TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was a member of the Signal Processing for Communications TC of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and is a member of the Communications Theory TC of the IEEE Communication Society. He was on the awards Committee of the IEEE Communication Society. Dr. Blum is a Fellow of the IEEE, an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer (twice), an IEEE Third Millennium Medal winner, a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Sigma Xi, and holds several patents. He was awarded an ONR Young Investigator Award and an NSFResearch Initiation Award.

“IoT Nightmare and How to Deal with It”

Abstract: A widespread adoption of Internet-connected devices that can sense and react to changes in the surrounding environment has a tremendous impact on our lives. So-called Internet of Things (IoT) helps to reduce the utility bills, improve the quality of life and cut the production costs. IoT provided a lot of new opportunities in many areas, from healthcare to agriculture, but at the same time, like any other technology, it introduced many challenges.
The number of connected devices and the tremendous amount of data they collectively generate can be overwhelming.
Thus secure and privacy-aware data collection, transfer and processing can be a challenging task. Existing IoT-based systems failed to address this challenge and became the primary target for attacks. Various security vulnerabilities of such systems can lead to profit loss, privacy violation and even death (e.g. health care systems in medical centers). At the same time, some of these systems may be intentionally configured to invade the personal life of their users and gain unauthorized access to sensitive information. We aim to address the security and privacy challenges IoT systems face, as well as to provide the users of such systems with more control over their personal IoT data. We developed a system that may be applied to existing commercial and open source IoT systems, and at the same time act as a foundation for privacy-aware IoT systems
built in the future.

“Deep Learning-based device identification using physical wireless signatures”

Abstract: Device identification using physical wireless signatures can be utilized to assess the identity of a wireless transmitter. Physical characteristics can be mapped onto a large feature space that allows the use of machine learning techniques to accurately discriminate or even identify wireless devices. We propose a deep-learning-based radio identification (DLID) solution that leverages hardware imperfections of internal components of radio transmitters introduced during the manufacturing process to achieve highly accurate device discrimination and identification. We evaluate DLID on an experimental test-bed of 20 identical low-cost WiFi IoT devices. Although our experiments only deal with IEEE 802.11b (2.4 GHz WiFi), our approach could be extended to other wireless communication protocols. The experimental results show that, first, training DLID at different distances from the access point does not reduce the identification accuracy, second, switching transmitting channels has little impact on the identification accuracy, third, DLID can differentiate between network devices with accuracy in excess of 98%.

“Emergent Overlays for Adaptive MANET Broadcast”

Abstract : Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) allow distributed applications where no fixed network infrastructure is available. MANETs use wireless communication subject to faults and uncertainty, and must support efficient broadcast. Con- trolled flooding is suitable for highly-dynamic networks, while overlay-based broadcast is suitable for dense and more static ones. Density and mobility vary significantly over a MANET deployment area. We present the design and implementation of emergent overlays for efficient and reliable broadcast in heterogeneous MANETs. This adaptation technique allows nodes to automatically switch from controlled flooding to the use of an overlay. Interoperability protocols support the integration of both protocols in a single heterogeneous system. Coordinated adaptation policies allow regions of nodes to autonomously and collectively emerge and dissolve overlays. Our simulation of the full network stack of 600 mobile nodes shows that emergent overlays reduce energy consumption, and improve reliability and coverage compared to single protocols and to two previously- proposed adaptation techniques.

” Graphene and Two Dimensional Materials FET sensors “

given by Benjamin Iñiguez Nicolau , EDS Distinguished Lecturer and professor at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain).

The event will be held on Wednesday June 5th 11:00 am in the Euler a.002 meeting room. Sandwiches and drinks will be offered after the talk to all registered participants by the Student Branch.
Registration is free but mandatory, please sign up at the bottom of this page.

Abstract: Electronic sensors based on graphene and two-dimensional materials (TDM) have a high potential in many applications, due to the unique properties of the these materials. This seminar is a review where the authors discuss the properties of graphene and two dimensional materials which are useful to sensing applications and they report and describe different types of sensors based on graphene and two dimensional Field Effect Transistor (FET) structures: biological, mechanical, gas and chemical sensors. We also discuss the ways to functionalise graphene and the related materials, as well as the used device structures. We compare the performance of the main types of biological, mechanical and chemical sensors. Finally, we explain the future challenges of based FET sensors based on graphene and two dimensional materials, in order to make sensing systems and smart sensors with these materials, which would be their main breakthrough application.

• Presentation of the useful electronics components for DIY projects.
• Audio amplifier and filter project.
• Introduction to DC motors and chopper circuits for motor control
• Arduino-based guided robot
• Robot track contest (coming soon…)

If you would like to know more, don’t hesitate to contact members of the Club Elec, visit their website (here), or come to room Stevin a.143 any Wednesday between 1pm and 2pm.

Note that it is still time to take part in the ongoing robot project and contest, if you’re interested.

A few photos of recent activities:

Congratulations to Antoine Paris with his paper entitled “Identifiability Conditions for Multi-Channel Blind Deconvolution with Short Filters“! Next step: Eurocon 2019 Novi Sad, Serbia, where Antoine will represent UCLouvain and defend his paper in front of an international jury.

Join us on Wednesday February 20th in the Maxwell a.173 (ELEN cafeteria) for a fun afternoon together. As usual, we bring some board games, drinks and treats, and you come to spend some enjoyable time with us.

The event will start at 4 pm and finish at 6.30 pm, but you can come whenever it suits you and stay as long as you want. If you have a fun board game at home that you’d like to share and play with other researchers, don’t hesitate also to bring it with you.

In order to help us estimate the necessary quantities, please fill in the form below if you are interested in participating. (Note that this is only for information purposes only and it won’t commit you to anything.)

Join us on Thursday December 6th in the Maxwell a.173 (ELEN cafeteria) for a fun afternoon together. As usual, we bring some board games, drinks and treats, and you come to spend some enjoyable time with us.

The event will start at 4 pm and finish at 6.30 pm, but you can come whenever it suits you and stay as long as you want. If you have a fun board game at home that you’d like to share and play with other researchers, don’t hesitate also to bring it with you.

In order to help Saint Nicholas estimate the necessary quantities, please fill in the form below if you are interested in participating. (Note that this is only for information purposes only and it won’t commit you to anything.)

The UCL IEEE Student Branch is glad to invite you to the following lecture :

“GNSS: From Telecommunication Signals to Satellites”

given by Xavier Maufroid, who works in the field of satellite telecommunications and is project manager for the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) project at the European Commission. After a brief presentation of his career, the speaker will present his current work within GNSS. Future perspectives in the field of satellite communications and aerospace engineering will also be discussed.

The event will be held on Friday November 23rd at 1:00 pm in the BARB01 auditorium. Sandwiches and beverages will be offered by the Student Branch to those who attend the talk. Registration is free but mandatory in order to receive a sandwich, please sign up at the bottom of this page.

Biography: Xavier Maufroid received his electrical engineering degree from UCL in 2000. After a second master in space engineering at ISAE-SUPAERO, he successively worked for Alcatel ETCA, the European Space Agency and Newtec Cy. He has now been working at the European Commission for almost 10 years as project manager in the framework of GNSS : Global Navigation Satellite System (including for instance the satellite Galileo).

“Physically Compliant CMOS Electronics Enabled Interactive Electronic System”

given by Muhammad Mustafa Hussain, EDS Distinguished Lecturer and professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

The event will be held on Wednesday September 12th at 11:00 am in the Shannon Room (Maxwell A.105). Sandwiches and drinks will be offered to all registered participants by the Student Branch.
Registration is free but mandatory, please sign up at the bottom of this page.

Abstract: As we are gradually approaching Internet of Everything (IoE) generation, proliferation of interactive electronic system is inevitable. In that context, we need to address a few fundamental questions: (i) What is interactive electronic system? (ii) Why are they important? (iii) How can we manufacture them? (iv) Are they going to expand the horizon of existing applications or they will add new dimension to electronic applications? 

 In response to these questions, in this talk, some examples will be shown which includes human, things, plants and animals integrated electronics. Such electronics are built with physically compliant CMOS electronics and often with non-functionalized papers. It will be shown that in addition to sensory devices, how we can use the monitored data and execute machine enabled decisions using in-situ actuators. Integration of multi-components will be complex and critical. Using example of a smart thermal patch, add-on electronics, plant wearable and marine skin, this talk will report future of interactive electronic systems. 

Biography: Dr. Muhammad Mustafa Hussain (PhD, ECE, UT Austin, Dec 2005) is a Professor of Electrical Engineering, KAUST. He was Program Manager in SEMATECH (2008-2009) and Process Integration Lead for 22 nm node FinFET CMOS in Texas Instruments (2006-2008). His research is focused on futuristic electronics which has received support from DARPA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, GSK-Novartis and SABIC. He has authored 300+ research papers and patents. His students are serving as faculty in KFUPM, KAU, Jeddah University and as researchers in MIT, Caltech, UC Berkeley, Harvard, UCLA, TSMC, and DOW Chemicals. He is a Fellow of American Physical Society and Institute of Physics, a distinguished lecturer of IEEE Electron Devices Society, and an Editor of IEEE T-ED. Scientific American has listed his research as one of the Top 10 World Changing Ideas of 2014. Applied Physics Letters selected his paper as one of the Top Feature Articles of 2015. He and his students have received 41 research awards including IEEE Outstanding Individual Achievement Award 2016, Outstanding Young Texas Exes Award 2015 DOW Chemical Sustainability Challenge Award 2012, etc. His research has been highlighted extensively in international media like in Washington Post, Wall Street Journal (WSJ), IEEE Spectrum, etc. 

Join us on Thursday May 28th in the Maxwell a.173 (ELEN cafeteria) for a fun afternoon together. You know the drill : we bring some board games, drinks and treats, and you come to spend some enjoyable time with us.

The event will start at 4 pm and finish at 6 pm, but you can come whenever it suits you and stay as long as you want. As last time, if you have a fun board game at home that you’d like to share and play with other researchers, don’t hesitate also to bring it with you.

In order to help us estimate the necessary quantities, please fill in the form below if you are interested in participating. (Note that this is only for information purposes only and it won’t commit you to anything.)