Date: Friday, February 27, 2004
Place: CS Conference Room
_____ Engineering 1, Rm. 2114
Time: 4:00 pm — 5:00 pm (Refreshments served at 3:30 pm)

Abstract:
Telecommunications in the 20th century has consisted primarily of a combination of narrowband, circuit-switched voice, fax and data and, more recently, packet-switched data and voice. The 20th century networks have supported multiple formats and data rates, using mainly electronic switching with SONET rings for multiplexing to high data rates, and high-speed restoration. The telecom landscape is changing radically and rapidly in virtually every dimension and the telecom network of the 21st century will be radically different from the network of today. All traffic will be packet-switched through a single format IP-network, with an optical backbone (running at rates in excess of 10 Tb/s), with optical switching, and optical restoration.

Along with the changes in the physical network will come changes in the ways in which we:

• access the network (from narrowband to wideband and ultimately to broadband pipes),
• the devices we attach to the network (from telephones and computers to multipurpose universal communicators),
• the operations associated with running the network (from people-oriented to automated via web or via multimodal computer interactions), and
• the services that run on the network (from simple voice and data services to a panoply of communication, messaging, find, help, sell, entertain, control, store, and community services).

Each of these changes will precipitate a range of new technology that will be required to build and maintain the network of the 21st century.

In this talk we look at major market and technology trends in the areas of optical networks, wireless networks, the Internet, and broadband technologies with the goal of understanding how we will move from narrowband to wideband to broadband networks over the next decade. Multimedia demos of some basic wideband and broadband services will be included in the presentation.

Biography:
Lawrence Rabiner was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 28, 1943. He received the S.B., and S.M. degrees simultaneously in June 1964, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in June 1967, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts.

From 1962 through 1964, Dr. Rabiner participated in the cooperative program in Electrical Engineering at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany and Murray Hill, New Jersey. During this period Dr. Rabiner worked on designing digital circuitry, issues in military communications problems, and problems in binaural hearing. Dr. Rabiner joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1967 as a Member of the Technical Staff. He was promoted to Supervisor in 1972, Department Head in 1985, Director in 1990, and Functional Vice President in 1995. He joined the newly created AT&T Labs in 1996 as Director of the Speech and Image Processing Services Research Lab, and was promoted to Vice President of Research in 1998 where he managed a broad research program in communications, computing, and information sciences technologies. Dr. Rabiner retired from AT&T at the end of March 2002 and is now a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University, and the Associate Director of the Center for Advanced Information Processing (CAIP) at Rutgers. He also has a joint appointment as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Dr. Rabiner is co-author of the books “Theory and Application of Digital Signal Processing” (Prentice-Hall, 1975), “Digital Processing of Speech Signals” (Prentice-Hall, 1978), “Multirate Digital Signal Processing” (Prentice-Hall, 1983), and “Fundamentals of Speech Recognition” (Prentice-Hall, 1993).

Dr. Rabiner is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the IEEE, Bell Laboratories, and AT&T. He is a former President of the IEEE Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society, a former Vice-President of the Acoustical Society of America, a former editor of the ASSP Transactions, and a former member of the IEEE Proceedings Editorial Board.

Host:B. S. Manjunath, Professor of ECE