Title: Horus: A WLAN-Based Indoor Location Determination System

Speaker: Moustafa Youssef, University of Maryland

Abstract:

As ubiquitous computing becomes more popular, the need for context-aware
applications increases. The context of an application refers to the
information that is part of its operating environment. Typically this
includes information such as location, activity of people, and the state
of other devices. Algorithms and techniques that allow an application to
be aware of the location of a device on a map of the environment are a
prerequisite for many of these applications.

In this talk, we will introduce the Horus WLAN location determination
system which is a energy-efficient software solution capable of achieving
a few feet accuracy in indoor WLAN environments. We will start by
describing the WLAN location determination problem and identifying the
challenges of dealing with the noisy characteristics of the wireless
channel. After that, we will describe the two main sets of components of
the Horus system. The first set of components is responsible for handling
the variations of the wireless channel to achieve high localization
accuracy. The second set of components is used to reduce the computational
requirement of the Horus algorithm to save the scarce energy resource of
the mobile units.

Bio:
Moustafa Youssef is a Research Associate in the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Maryland at College Park. He received his
B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Alexandria University, Egypt in
1997 and 1999 respectively and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from
University of Maryland in 2004. His research interests include location
determination technologies, pervasive computing, energy-aware computing,
and protocol modeling. Moustafa is a life fellow for the Egyptian Society
for Talented, an elected member of the honor society Phi Kappa Phi, among
others. He is a member of various professional societies such as IEEE,
IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Communication Society and ACM Sigmobile. He is
the recipient of the University of Maryland Invention of the Year for 2003
for the Horus work.