2005 Australian Communications Theory Workshop
Brisbane, 2-4 February, 2005
Report
The sixth Australian Communications Theory Workshop (AusCTW2005) was held 2-4 February 2005 at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. This annual workshop concentrates on theoretical aspects of physical layer communications, in particular communications and information theory. Specific topics included coded modulation, coding theory and practice, communication systems, channel characteristics and modeling, detection and estimation, digital signal processing for communications, information theory and statistics, iterative decoding algorithms, multiuser detection and space-time coding and processing.
The AusCTW2005 organising committee consisted of John Homer, General Chair (University of Queensland), Vaughan Clarkson (University of Queensland), Iain Collings (Sydney University), Jamie Evans (University of Melbourne), Alex Grant (University of South Australia) and Rod Kennedy (Australian National University), Peter Kootsookos (United Technologies Research Center), Steve Weller (University of Newcastle). The Technical Program Committee included Graeme Woodward, Chair (Agere Systems), Thushara Abhayapala (Australian National University), Hai Huyen Dam (WATRI), Leif Hanlen (NICTA), Sarah Johnson (University of Newcastle), Tony Pollock (NICTA), Hans-Juergen Zepernick (WATRI).
The workshop was generously sponsored by National ICT Australia, Agere Systems, Cohda Wireless, University of Queensland, University of South Australia's Institute for Telecommunications Research, and EmSolutions.
The inaugural AusCTW was held at Sydney University in 2000, attended by 35 postgraduate students and early career researchers. Since then it has become a fixture on the Australian communications calendar, and is regularly attended by over 100 delegates. This year 113 people attended the workshop. This year's workshop was held over two and a half days. Presentations included three 40-minute "Research Overview" talks, twelve 20-minute technical talks and three posters sessions (with over 25 posters presented in each session). The overview talks are intended to provide a birds-eye view of particular research areas, concentrating on concepts rather than specific technical details. This year, the overviews were presented by Dr Steve Weller (University of Newcastle) who spoke on "Low Density Parity Check Codes", Dr Kim Blackmore (Australian national University), who spoke on "The Price of Mobility in Ad-Hoc Networks" and Dr John Ness (EmSolutions), who talked about "Wireless Communications: Taking Theory to Practice". The technical talks, given by local and visiting international researchers concentrated in more detail on recent research results. A record of the entire technical program, including poster sessions, may be found on the AusCTW web site, http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~ausctw05/.
This year a total of 66 full papers were submitted for publication in the workshop proceedings. Following independent peer review from at least 3 local or international researchers, 46 papers were accepted. This year, the published papers will appear on IEEExplore. The workshop proceedings are also available in hardcopy (ISBN 0-9580345-6-7) and on CD-ROM (ISBN 0-9580345-7-5), and can be ordered by contacting John Homer, homerj@itee.uq.edu.au .
The AusCTW 2005 student prize winners were Matthew McKay (best poster) and Nick Letzepis (best paper).
An important contribution to the technical depth of AusCTW is the opportunity for researchers to present material in a relatively informal format of a poster. Both peer reviewed and non-reviewed work may be presented. This provides an excellent opportunity for all researchers to interact. It is an excellent forum for research students to gain feedback on work, and for all those attending to see the very latest results from 'work in progress'. The collaborative links and sense of community inspired by AusCTW has grown to form the seed the $2.5M Australian government funded ARC Communication Research Network (ACoRN), which is now one of the major sponsors of the workshop. This year a number of ACoRN related activities were held, including a half-day tutorial on Turbo Receiver Design, and ACoRN executive and planning meetings. More information about ACoRN can be found at http://www.acorn.net.au.