Events

Date: 28 May 2025   Time: 14:00 - 15:00     

Location: David Sizer L.T. + Online

Online Teams Link

Summary

In many applications, the sensor array's geometrical layout is assumed to be fixed and given in advance. However, it is possible to change the geometrical layout of the array including adjacent sensor spacing and these additional spatial degrees of freedom (DOFs) can be exploited to improve the performance in terms of either beamforming or direction finding or both. With the development of compressive sensing (CS) or the sparsity maximization framework, a new CS-based framework with a theoretically optimum solution (due to convex nature of the formulation) has been developed for general sensor location optimization, with robustness against various array model errors considered too. In this talk, the CS-based framework for sensor location optimization will be presented for effective and robust beamforming, including a general introduction to both narrowband beamforming and broadband/wideband beamforming.

Biography

Wei Liu (S'01-M'04-SM'10) received his BSc (Space Physics) and LLB (Intellectual Property Law) degrees from Peking University, China, in 1996 and 1997, respectively, MPhil from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Hong Kong in 2001, and PhD from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, in 2003. He then worked as a postdoc first at Southampton and later at Imperial College London. From 2005 to 2023, he was a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Sheffield, UK and from 2023 to 2024, a Reader at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London (Visiting Professor from 2024 to 2027). Since 2024, he has been a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He has published 470+ journal and conference papers, six book chapters, and two research monographs titled ``Wideband Beamforming: Concepts and Techniques'' (Wiley, 2010) and "Low-Cost Smart Antennas'' (Wiley, 2019), respectively. His research interests are mainly focused on sensor array and multichannel signal processing and its various applications, such as robotics and autonomous systems, human computer interface, radar, sonar, and wireless communications.

He is a member of the Applied Signal Processing Systems Technical Committee (Vice-Chair for 2025-2026) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), the Digital Signal Processing Technical Committee (Chair for 2022-2024) of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, and the IEEE SPS Education Board (2024-2026, Chair of its Educational Conference Program Committee), and a former member of the Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE SPS (Chair for 2021-2022), the IEEE SPS Technical Directions Board (2021-2022), and the IEEE SPS Conference Board and its Executive Subcommittee (2022-2023). He also acted as an associate editor for IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, IEEE Access, and Journal of the Franklin Institute, and an Executive Associate Editor-in-Chief of the journal Frontiers of Information Technology and Electronic Engineering; currently he is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers and IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters. He is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (2023-2026).