Lecture of Andrea Goldsmith at the Nanjing Chapter

By Shi Jin - IEEE ComSoc Nanjing Chapter, China and Yueming Cai - IEEE ComSoc Nanjing Chapter, China

Professor Andrea Goldsmith from Stanford University was invited to give a lecture titled “The Road Ahead for Wireless Technology: Dreams and Challenges” at Southeast University, Nanjing, China on June 26, 2015. The lecture was supported by the IEEE Communications Society Nanjing Chapter and hosted by Prof. Nan Liu from Southeast University. More than 260 people attended this seminar, including academic and research staff, professionals, and students from the IEEE ComSoc Nanjing Chapter.

In the lecture, Prof. Goldsmith presented visions about the future of wireless communications and discussed some innovations and breakthroughs in wireless technologies that are required to realize the visions. First she presented an overview of advanced wireless technologies, which include millimeter wave, massive MIMO, non-coherent massive MIMO, small cell, sub-Nyquist sampling, etc. Then Prof. Goldsmith focused on new advances in green wireless communications. She pointed out that the biggest problem with WiFi and the limitation of small cell is resource contention. She elaborated and explained that the shortage of spectrum could be alleviated by research advances in cognitive radios. Further, she mentioned that breakthroughs in energy-efficiency algorithms and hardware would be employed to make wireless systems “green.” Finally, Prof. Goldsmith proposed that most of these research advances are interdisciplinary and a synergistic exploration of knowledge bases from multiple technical domains is required for future research. In the Q&A session, Prof. Goldsmith gave detailed answers to questions about full duplex and the relationship between small cell and D2D techniques. The lecture was very successful and gave audiences a better understanding of green wireless communication and also stimulated their interests in exploring this area.

Andrea Goldsmith is the Stephen Harris Professor in the School of Engineering and a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and of Stanford, and she has received several awards for her work, including the IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society joint paper award, the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award, the National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lecture Award, the IEEE Communication Theory Technical Committee Recognition Award, the IEEE Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal’s Women of Influence Award. She is author of the book Wireless Communications and co-author of the books MIMO Wireless Communications and Principles of Cognitive Radio, all published by Cambridge University Press. She received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from U.C. Berkeley.