Speaker：Dr. Ruixin Niu, Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, 23284, U.S.A.

Time： 10:00 am, March 21.
Address：Room 211，New Building， College of Control Science and Engineering

Abstract: This talk will cover two aspects of Dr. Ruixin Niu’s research on distributed signal processing and information fusion in networked sensing systems. In the first half of the talk, an inference-driven adaptive sensor management framework will be presented, which is based on the new recursive conditional posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound (C-PCRLB) on the mean squared error (MSE), derived for Bayesian nonlinear filtering problems. In comparison with the state of the art sensor management approaches based on entropy or mutual information, the C-PCRLB has significantly reduced complexity and is directly related to the estimation performance in terms of the MSE. Examples, such as sensor selection in WSNs, will be presented to illustrate the advantages of the proposed approach.

The second part concerns distributed compressive sensing (CS) in a distributed network. Compressive sensing is an emerging technique which allows perfect recoveries of sparse signals sampled below Nyquist rate. An efficient distributed approximate message passing (DAMP) algorithm is developed for distributed CS signal recovery in sensor networks with signal sparsity unknown. To reduce communications among the sensors, a new data query algorithm, called global computation for AMP (GCAMP), is proposed, which ensures exactly the same recovery solution as the centralized AMP with a significantly reduced communication cost.

Bio: Dr. Ruixin Niu received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Connecticut in 2001. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University. His research interests are in the areas of statistical signal processing and its applications, including detection, estimation, tracking, information fusion, sensor networks, radar signal processing, compressive sensing, security in signal processing, and wireless communications. Dr. Niu publishes extensively in the above mentioned areas. He received the Best Paper Award at the Seventh International Conference on Information Fusion in 2004 (Fusion’04). He is a coauthor of the paper that won the Best Student Paper Award at Fusion’10. He served as the secretary of IEEE Richmond Section. He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and is the Associate Administrative Editor of the Journal of Advances in Information Fusion. He was an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks between 2010 and 2012.