Entrevue avec Dr. Alex Vukovic du CRC sur le Congrès 2007 du Wireless and Optical Communications (WOC), pour lequel il est président.
Date : 11 mars, 2007
Durée : 9 minutes 16 secondes
*Cette transcription est fournie dans la langue d'origine de l'entrevue audio.

Scott - Welcome back. You're listening to mytechnologylawyer.com, we're listening to you. Call in toll free, 866-685-7469. Miss Linda is monitoring our board operations this afternoon. Many of you know her. Give her a call. She would be glad to put you through. Or if you're listening at the desktop as 80 per cent of our audience does at work, you can just slip me an email on the quiet. If you prefer radio, at mytechnologylawyer.com I monitor them live as the program progresses. I've got on the line with me the very talented co-host Nadia Leamy. Nadia welcome to the program.

Nadia - Thank you very much Scott.

S - And we're talking today about the wireless and optical communications conference which is scheduled for May 30 to June 1 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. And you have as you always do, brought the conference chair to the program to talk a little bit about it. Why don't you introduce him to our audience and we'll find out what he knows.

N - Okay, thank you very much. I am pleased to introduce Dr. Alex Vukovic, who is the conference chair for IASTED international conference on wireless and optical communication. Dr. Alex Vukovic provides research and technology leadership in optical communications, network architecture, and system development for over 20 years. He is currently at the communications research centre in Ottawa, Canada. Dr. Vukovic's focus is on research leadership on network concepts and building blocks for next generation communication networks. Dr. Vukovic, do want to say a few words about WOC 2007.

Vukovic - Yes, good afternoon to everybody. It is my pleasure to be the chair of the wireless and optical communication conference. Wireless and optical conference WOC 2007 in fact will be the major forum for scientists and engineers. It is a global conference and scientists and engineers will have a chance to present their latest results, ideas, latest developments of course and applications and all of that will be in two major areas of communications, wireless on one side and optical communication on the other side.

S - Well this program. Welcome to the program. This conference just looks pretty fabulous. Tell me a little bit about your background and Communications Research Centre in Canada just so our listeners can have a reference point.

V - Yes, the communications research centre is based in Ottawa and it is a federal government primary laboratory for research and development in advanced communications, including wireless technologies, broadband networks, satellite systems, broadcasting and photonics. Our organization is recognized for its technological breakthroughs such as invention of several types of fibre bragg grating components, licensing of patents and sharing technical expertise with companies worldwide. In short my organization has a strong tradition to inspire and value innovation. My role in that organization is to provide research leadership on other concepts, architectures, building blocks, or what you call the next generation of network solutions and my research focuses on development, verification and validation of optical communications, architectures, control and management solutions for network level solutions.

S - Yeah, I see now why they picked you as the conference chair.

V - Right.

S - Because you know so much about this. Tell me a little bit about the agenda for this year. We talked about this a little bit earlier today when we were preparing for today's show. The folks who are attending. This is the seventh WOC 2007 and obviously the issues on the minds of the attendees and the R&D issues in the first year are different from what's anticipated for this year. Tell me about some of those differences.

V - Yes. I would like to point out a couple of challenging areas this conference is going to cover in fact. If you look there are if I could say two basic concepts. One is wireless and another one is optical communication and in each in those two areas there is tremendous development that we have now-a-days. For example, in wireless area we have WiMAX which is the next generation wireless. We also have a wireless centre network which is a very vibrant and dynamic area. On the other side, on the optical communication we witness huge developments in broadband technologies and 40G system which is the next generation optical systems. So those areas are very hot and we already received a huge number of papers which cover those areas. However, maybe what is even more impressive is, and what we expect to hear at the conference is, integration of certain wireless and optical technologies. Because if you look on them, optical communication provides speed, provides high bandwidth, but wireless technology provides mobility. So if you combine two of them we in fact have one network with the ability to establish communication channel with anybody anytime anywhere, so that is uniqueness of WOC 2007.

S - Yeah, to what extent will the conference focus in on the issues of spectrum management or is that a primary focus or secondary or how does that play into the whole agenda. You got any representatives from government showing up who work for their respective FCC departments that are part of the agenda.

V - That is one of the topics and I would say that is an important topic that the conference will also cover and I would say this is an ongoing topic for some time.

S - It's a tough problem.

V - It is. It is. Definitely.

S - Yeah. Now you've got some very distinguished keynote speakers here. Tell us about them and how you managed to recruit them into your conference.

V - Yes in fact if I could say we plan on four keynote speakers and we already secured the one from Nortel Networks and one really distinguished lecturer from a university down in Buffalo. However there are also two additional heavyweight professionals coming. We brought in a representative from Nokia and we are working on that and another one from Agilent Technologies in regards to next generation 40G optical characterization technologies. So I believe with having such professionals as keynote speakers in addition to special sessions and tutorials we believe that we'll have a chance for a really, really comprehensive coverage of latest developments in wireless and optical communication.

S - Yeah and you do have this special session going on also for medical applications. Tell me a little about that.

V - Yes, that's something which is really, really new for the WOC but it is a result of the latest development. What we see is application of wireless technologies in a medical area so this is something that will be new for a lot of us attending, but it's another proof that conference try to deal with things which are very hot at this point in time and definitely applications in wireless technologies in medical applications is a hot topic also.

S - Okay, check it out at the IASTED website, wireless and optical communication, WOC 2007, May 30 to June 1. You can go there, IASTED.com and find out how to register. This one is worth attending, especially if you are in the wireless community. Thank you so much Alex for being on the show.

V - It's my pleasure.

S - Nadia you outdid yourself again. Thanks so much.

N - Thank you.

S - When we come back we're going to be with Elon and his guest talking about open source. So don't go away. You're listening to mytechnologylawyer.com and you know it to be true. We'll be right back.