November 2005-January 2006

"Homes are a sanctuary from a hectic world, and we'll spend to make us happy in them. After staring at a computer screen all day at work it's the last thing we want to do when we get home. We want a home network to do tasks for us, entertain us, inform us, and interact with us. And we want to do that naturally - by seeing the network, making gestures to it, or activating objects just by moving around the house. That's the market opportunity - innovation that is easy to use, convenient, and enhances our experience."

(Excerpt, Calgary Herald article on TRLabs, 2005)

"The skyrocketing Digital Home industry is taking Canada by storm. It has been estimated that about two percent of homes in North America are digital. The growth rate is estimated at about 35 percent annually."

(Continental Automated Buildings Association, 2006)

Ideally, all the devices that participate in the network must run the same standard protocols for device discovery, configurations, and control. However, there is no standard that has been accepted by the major industry players. This lack of unified standard has resulted in a large number of standards such as UPnP, Jini, and HAVi that satisfy the requirements of a small, confined Home Network with known devices.

TRLabs Winnipeg M.Sc. student Dinesh Bhat has been researching a framework for interoperability in home networks by looking at the introduction of middleware to develop more seamless automation...finding a common new language amidst the many languages being spoken by devices.

Dinesh has been working to develop a prototype of a unique, interoperable framework based on OSGi. Dinesh's framework extends OSGi's architecture to integrate UPnP and Jini. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented to demonstrate the integration of low-powered devices such as Pocket PCs and embedded network processors such as TINI.

TRLabs' Home Technologies research division was launched in 2003 with seed investment from Western Economic Diversification Canada and Alberta Innovation and Science. A Home Tech demonstration lab is located in Calgary; research activities span the prairie provinces.

Dr. Abu Sesay (TRLabs Calgary), a long-term TRLabs scientist, has been named head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Calgary.

Garth Wells joined TRLabs Saskatoon in November as a visiting researcher from the University of Saskatchewan working on the Synchrotron Laboratory for Micro and Nano Devices (SyLMAND) research initiative.

Dr. Wayne Grover, Chief Scientist in Network Systems started his sabbatical with TELUS in January 2006. Dr. Grover was invited, and agreed to be a member of this year's Canadian Award in Telecommunications Research award committee. Dr. Grover has also accepted an invitation to serve as an Associate Editor for IEEE Communication Letters.

Eric Swanson, IRAP ITA, is now co-located in the Edmonton Lab (January, 2006).

Dr. John Pinkney (TRLabs Calgary) has completed his two-year Alberta Ingenuity Industrial Post-Doctoral Associateship with TRLabs. The technology developed by Dr. Pinkney for low power, symmetrical wireless networks has been successfully licensed by TRLabs to a new company for commercialization.

In October, Jeff Rohne, Director Manitoba Operations and Business Development attended a MRNet Strategic Planning meeting at the University of Winnipeg where he accepted the position of vice-chair of the Strategic Planning committee. In January, Jeff participated in the second meeting of the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce policy subcommittee on Health. Telehealth and Primary Care were the two key policy resolutions that the subcommittee agreed upon. Jeff agreed to chair the Telehealth team.

In December, Dr. Chris Haugen, Director Edmonton Operations delivered a presentation on the TRLabs eHealth research program to the Alberta Network for Health Information Exchange (ANHIX) in Calgary.

TRLabs Saskatoon has been awarded a "2005 Supporting Friend of IEEE Regional Activities Award" for "generous support of IEEE, North Saskatchewan Section Activities."

A paper by L. Zhou and W.D. Grover, "A Theory for Setting the 'Safety Margin' on Availability Guarantees in an SLA," in the 5th International Workshop on Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN 2005), Ischia (Naples), Italy, October 16-19, 2005 won the "Most Innovative Paper" of the conference award.

Graduate student Gregory McFeetors (TRLabs Calgary) won the 2006 WAGS/UMI (Western Association of Graduate Schools/University Microfilms International) Innovation in Technology Award. The Award recognizes innovative application of technology to scholarship.

One patent has been filed in the period October, 2005 to January, 2006:

• David E. Dodds, Bernardo Celaya & Terence Monteith
  Wideband Frequency Domain Reflectrometry to Determine the Nature and Location of Subscriber Line Faults
  Canada Patent No. CA2005/000634
  Filed November, 2005
  

Patent Portfolio.

Conference Chatter

TRLabs Manitoba ICT Symposium - "Technology in the Home"
November 8

96 were in attendance to listen to 8 presentations on a range of home technologies subjects.

Minister Chomiak gives opening remarks at the ICTS

Murray Matiowsky speaks on Advanced Metering for Utilities

Dave Teghtsoonian gives a talk on MTS TV - the largest telco deployment in North America

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In the News...

January 24 News Release - Alliance Between iPark and TRLabs will Benefit Korean and Canadian Companies

January 20 News Release - TRLabs Seeking Subscribed Research Project Proposals from Industry

January 17 News Release - TRLabs to Co-Develop Technology for China Railway

MOU Signing Cermony, Beijing, January 17

January 16 News Release - TRLabs and Optimum Develop High Performance, Fully-Programmable Communications Hardware Platform

November 10 News Release - U.S. Company Re-Locates R&D to Alberta and Joins TRLabs

Media Coverage Highlight - January 13 TRLabs article in the Edmonton Journal
(reproduced on U of A web site)

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Envionmental Scanning

A good update on the status of Canada's ICT industry can be found in an October Report on Industry Canada's Strategis web site. Highlights:

• Since 1997, ICT has grown by 8.4%, more than twice as fast as the broader Canadian economy (3.6%). This growth has been led by the telecommunications services sector followed by the ICT manufacturing sector.
• Most of the employment gains have been in the software and computer services industries, where the number of workers is 64% larger than in 1997. The employment shift demonstrates the structural shift in the industry from manufacturing to services.
• ICT industries are still the largest performers of private R&D in Canada, accounting for 38% of total Canadian private sector R&D.
• The ICT workforce is characterized by a high level of education, with 38% of all ICT workers having a university degree compared to a national average of 21%.

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Grad Resumes

Recent grad Shirley Mayadewi (TRLabs Winnipeg) puts her name on the TRLabs Wall of Honour, January, 2006

17 resumes of recent or soon-to-be graduates are posted on the TRLabs web site (Members Only).

TRLabs has trained 810 highly skilled university graduates since 1986. 50% have remained in western Canada to fuel growth of the ICT sector.

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Research Relevance..."The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat"

TRLabs Edmonton's Network Systems group is a world-leader in innovating methods to design, operate, plan and evolve cost-efficient networks that withstand failures. The importance of Network Systems' research is underscored by a recent article posted on wired.com.

"A study issued last month by the Common Ground Alliance (CGA) - an industry group comprised of utilities and construction companies - calculated that there were more than 675,000 excavation accidents in 2004 in which underground cables or pipelines were damaged. And an October report from the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions found that cable dig-ups were the single most common cause of telecom outages over a 12-year period ending in 2004, with the number of incidents dropping in recent years but the severity and duration of the outages increasing.

In 2004, Department of Homeland Security officials became fearful that terrorists might start using accidental dig-ups as a road map for deliberate attacks, and convinced the FCC to begin locking up previously public data on outages. In a commission filing, DHS argued successfully that revealing the details of "even a single event may present a grave risk to the infrastructure."

"We see people talking about the digital Pearl Harbor from the worms and Trojans and viruses," says Howard Schmidt, former White House cybersecurity adviser. "But in all probability, there's more likelihood of what we call the 'backhoe attack' that would have more impact on a region than a Code Red, or anything we've seen so far."

Full story.