Cheng Li of Simon Fraser University

Abstract: 
The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT), a new class of the Internet of Things (IoT), has emerged in recent years as a network of smart interconnected underwater objects to create a worldwide network that will digitally link the oceans, rivers, and lakes. There have been a number of research and development initiatives tackling technical challenges of the IoUT. These are still in the early stage of investigation. The most challenging remaining tasks include efficient and reliable communication and networking, energy efficiency, and cost reduction.

In this talk, we present an overview of IoUT and its applications with the focuses on the offshore oil and gas industry and marine transportation and fishery industry. We review the challenges faced by the marine monitoring and sensing applications, and introduce underwater communications and networking as the key enabling technologies for the IoUT. We present large-scale array network as the technical solutions for such problems by showing how this can be integrated with the passive network sensing and proactive network sensing approaches. We conclude the talk by reviewing the technical challenges of the underwater communications and networking.    

Biography:

Cheng Li received his B. Eng. and M. Eng. degrees from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, P. R. China, in 1992 and 1995, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Memorial University, St. John's, Canada, in 2004. He is currently a Full Professor and Director of the School of Engineering Science of Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. 

His research interests include wireless communications and networking, communications signal processing, underwater communication and networking, and mobile computing and computer networks. He has contributed 4 book chapters and over 350 research articles, including more than 150 journal publications. Many of them appear at the reputable IEEE journals and IEEE flagship conferences. He is an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for the 2021-22 term. 

He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, the IEEE Internet-of-Things Journal, and the IEEE Network Magazine. He has served as the General Co-Chair of the ICNC'23, Q2SWinet’20, WINCOM'19, and AICON'19, and the TPC Co-Chair for the ICNC'20, ADHOCNETS’19, ACOSIS’19, WiCON’17, MSWiM'14, WiMob'11 and QBSC'10. He also served many times as a Technical Program Co-Chair for various technical symposia/tracks of international conferences, including the IEEE GLOBECOM, ICC, WCNC, and VTC. 

Dr. Li is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Research Excellence at Memorial University in 2021, the recipient of the Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Communications Society Communications Software Technical Committee in 2018, and the recipient of several Best Paper Awards at international conferences, including the IEEE ICC'2023. Globecom'2017 and ICC'2010. He is a registered Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) in Canada and is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of the IEEE Communication Society, Computer Society, Vehicular Technology Society, and Ocean Engineering Society.

Email:

Address:School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada