DepartmentofElectricalandComputerEngineering

Faculty Profile
ZHI (GERRY) TIAN Professor,IEEEFellow
PhD,ElectricalEngineering,GeorgeMasonUniversity MS,SystemsEngineering,GeorgeMasonUniversity ME,ElectricalEngineering,TsingHuaUniversity,Beijing BS,ElectricalEngineering,Univ.ofScience&Tech.ofChina Contact:ztian@mtu.edu;9064872515

Signals and Systems

Current Research

Cognitive Radio Compressed Sensing Wireless Sensor Networks

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
Cognitive Radio Networks and Ultra Wideband Wireless Communications. Currentwirelesssystemsarecharacterized by wasteful static spectrum allocation, fixed radio functions, and limited network coordination between mobile devices, resultinginasurprisinglylargeportionoftheradiospectrumgoesunused.TheemergingparadigmofDynamicSpectrum Access showspromise of alleviating todays spectrum scarcityproblemby ushering innew forms ofcognitive radiosand spectrum agile networks. Prof. Tian has worked on various aspects of cognitive radio technology, including wideband spectrum sensing, multiple access and spectrum overlay, and joint dynamic resource allocation and waveform adaptation.WithfundingfromtheNSF,sheisworkingonsignalcompressionandusercooperationtechniquesfor(ultra )wideband spectrum sensing and network cognition. She has developed innovative techniques that achieve rapid and accuratedetectionofspectrumopportunitiesoveraverywideoverGHzspectrumatlowsubNyquistsamplingrates,by making use of the waveletbased edge detection approach and compressive sampling techniques. With funding from industrial collaborators, she has developed cyclicbased feature detection techniques that incorporate the benefitsofcompressedsensingforsimultaneousdetection,estimationandclassificationofmultiple communication signals over a wideband of interest, without prior knowledge of the number, frequency locations or types of the signal sources. Prof. Tian is also wellknown for her work on ultrawideband radio communications, which was sponsored by the NSF through a CAREER award. Her main contributions include time synchronization techniques for impulse radios, interference suppression, programmable waveform design under spectral masks and coexistence constraints, and ultrawidebandradiosforhighprecisionrangingandlocalization. Z.Tian,andG.Giannakis,CompressedSensingforWidebandCognitiveRadios,Proc.ofIEEEIntl.Conf.onAcoustics, SpeechandSignalProcessing(ICASSP),pp.IV.13571360,Honolulu,April2007. Z. Tian, Y. Tafesse, and B. M. Sadler, Cyclic Feature Detection from SubNyquist Samples for Wideband Spectrum Sensing,IEEEJournalofSelectedTopicsinSignalProcessing,vol.6,no.1,pp.5869,February2012. F. Zeng, C. Li, and Z. Tian, Distributed Compressive Spectrum Sensing in Cooperative Multihop Wideband Cognitive Networks, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, Special Issue on Signal Processing in Cooperative CognitiveRadioSystems,February2011. Z. Tian, G. Leus, and V. Lottici, Joint Dynamic Resource Allocation and Waveform Adaptation for Cognitive Networks, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Special Issue on Advances in Cognitive Radio NetworkingandCommunications,February2011. F. Wang, and Z. Tian, Wideband Receiver Design in the Presence of Strong Narrowband Interference, IEEE CommunicationsLetters,vol.12,no.7,pp.484486,July2008. S. Gezici, Z. Tian, G. B. Giannakis, H. Kobayashi, A. V. Molisch, H. V. Poor and Z. Sahinoglu, Localization via Ultra WidebandRadios,IEEESignalProcessingMagazine,vol.22,no.4,pp.7084,July2005.

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DepartmentofElectricalandComputerEngineering Faculty Profile

ZHI (GERRY) TIAN Professor,IEEEFellow Page2

Signals and Systems

Distributed Information Processing and Networking in Wireless Sensor Networks. Missioncritical decision making over bandwidth and energylimited wireless sensor networks requires controlling the information flows within the network by optimizing what should be transmitted and how the data should be reduced. To this end, Prof. Tian is working on efficient information processing and sensor management techniques for large networks. For example, a particularly challenging scenario for resourceconstrained sensor networks is when the physical phenomena under monitoring exhibit localized features that appear sparsely over a large sensing field, such as tracking multiple targets or chemical clouds, and monitoring civil structural health conditions. In these cases, sensory measurements do not contribute equally to the monitoring task, but, without prior knowledge of the source locations, a large number of sensors need to be densely deployed and always stay on in order to provide adequate spatial resolution for event detection and field mapping. Prof. Tian is working on both compressed sensing and active sensing techniques for accurate monitoring using only a fraction of sensory data. She has developed decentralized innetwork processing schemes that attain global optimality at scalable costs, and hence extend the network lifetime. She is also investigating the solutions and tradeoffs in adopting difference types of network structure and information flow, such as flat versus hierarchicalnetworking,andcentralizedversusdecentralizedinformationprocessing. Q. Ling, F. Zeng, and Z. Tian, Energyefficient Decentralized Event Detection in LargeScale Wireless Sensor Networks,Proc.ofIEEEIntl.Conf.onAcoustics,SpeechandSignalProcessing(ICASSP),March2010. Q.Ling,andZ.Tian,DecentralizedSparseSignalRecoveryforCompressiveSleepingWirelessSensorNetworks,IEEE TransactionsonSignalProcessing,Vol.58,No.7,pp.38163827,July2010. Y.Fu,Q.Ling,andZ.Tian,DistributedSensorAllocationforMultiTargetTrackingusingSensorNetworks,IEEE TransactionsonAerospaceandElectronicSystems,vol.48,no.4,pp.35383553,October2012. Q.Ling,andZ.Tian,CollaborativeSparseSignalRecoveryinHierarchicalWirelessSensorNetworks,Proc.ofIEEE Intl.WorkshoponComputationalAdvancesinMultiSensorAdaptiveProcessing(CAMSAP),pp.125128,Dec.2009. Q.Ling,Z.Tian,Y.Yin,andY.Li,LocalizedStructuralHealthMonitoringUsingEnergyEfficientWirelessSensor Networks,IEEESensorsJournal:SpecialIssueonSensorsSystemsforStructuralHealthMonitoring,vol.9,no.11,pp. 15961604,November2009.

Statistical Signal ProcessingandInformationFusion. Prof.Tianhasresearchexpertiseandinterestsinthegeneralareas of statistical signal and array processing, estimation and detection theory, and information fusion. She has worked on several DoD SBIR projects on sensing, inference and data fusion for tactical networks. Most recent research highlight is the development of an innovative sparsityaware estimation scheme for tracking moving targets and timevarying phenomena. The new scheme not only is immune to the ambiguity in measurement association, but also circumvents thedifficultyinacquiringthetargetnumberorthemodelorder,andhencecanworkautonomouslywhenthenumberof targetsisunknownorchanginginrealtime.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

Zhi (Gerry) Tian has been on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan Technological University since 2000. Her general interests are in the areas of communications, signal processing, detection and estimation. Specific areas of expertise have included ultrawideband communications, MIMO systems, statistical sensor array processing, adaptive filtering, multitarget tracking, data fusion, Bayesian inference, and decision network theory and applications. Current research topics focus on cognitive radio networks and distributed wireless sensor networks. She is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing for Communications and Networking Technical Committee (SPCOMTC) and the IEEE Wireless Communications Technical Committee (WTC). She has delivered several tutorials at international conferences on topics related to compressed sensing, cognitive radio and information fusion. She has served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and IEEE Transaction on Signal Processing.ShereceivedaCAREERawardfromtheNationalScienceFoundationin2003.

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