Technical Spring 2022

Wireless communications are pervasive and have been used for a century. They are used in a very large set of  security applications (communications by security forces, car key remote, alarm system, access control, drone command and control, surveillance devices) . However, day to day applications also require to be protected for privacy and personal security, such as WiFi or mobile communications (2G/3G/4G). At the same a number of challenges are present in wireless communications security, for example, messages are broadcasted, making it possible to intercept them without being noticed. Wireless signals are subject to jamming, making them unavailable.

This course will give a large perspective of the fundamental challenges in securing wireless communications, from the physical layer, modulations to the application protocols. A special focus will be put on practice with hands on exercises (using software defined radios and WiFi dongles).

Teaching and Learning Methods : Course is composed of lectures, Labs and small projects with final presentation.

Course Policies : Class attendance, labs and projects mandatory.

Teaching and Learning Methods : Lectures and Lab sessions (group of 2 students)

Course Policies : Attendance to Lab session is mandatory

This course provides an introduction to the automatic processing of speech and audio signals.  It starts with a treatment of the human speech production and perception mechanisms and looks at how our understanding of them has influenced attempts to process speech and audio signals automatically.  The course then considers the analysis, coding and parameterisation of signals in the case of different speech and audio processing tasks.  After an introduction to essential pattern recognition techniques, the course considers specific applications including speech recognition, speaker recognition and speaker diarization.  The course also includes a treatment of speech and audio coding, noise compensation and speech enhancement.

Teaching and Learning Methods:

The course is comprised of lectures and exercises and laboratory sessions.

Course policies: Attendance of laboratory sessions is mandatory.

This course treats the subject of modern radio engineering and includes typical RF architectures and their characterizations, modeling, prediction and simulation of radio-wave propagation, cellular planning, systems-level aspects of modern radio network design.

 Teaching and Learning Methods : Lectures and Lab sessions (group of 2 students)

 Course Policies : Attendance to Lab session is mandatory.

This course covers the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) protocols dedicated to IOT. LPWAN is a technology that intends to offer Internet connectivity to a large number of objects   ("Things") under very strict requirements in terms of cost, power consumption, long distance, battery life, indoor penetration, etc. This course presents two families of LPWA protocols specially developed for IOT: (i) LPWAN for unlicensed spectrum (e.g. LoRa, SigFox ...) and (ii) Cellular LPWAN for licensed spectrum (e.g. 3GPP LTE Cat. M1 or Cat. NB).

Teaching and Learning Methods: The course is organized in 4 lectures and 3 labs.

Course Policies: Labs are Mandatory (attendance + reports)

Teaching and Learning Methods : Lectures and Lab sessions (group of 2 students)

Course Policies :  Attendance to Lab session is mandatory.

The architectures of networks and service delivery platforms are subject to an unprecedented techno-economic transformation. This trend, often referred to as Network Softwarization, will yield significant benefits in terms of reducing expenditure and operational costs of next generation networks. The key enablers are Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Cloud Computing (mainly Edge Computing).

This course will cover the principle of Network Softwerization by introducing and detailing the concepts of SDN, NFV and Cloud Computing (focusing on the IaaS model and Edge Computing). Besides covering the theoretical aspects, the course will provide an overview of the enabling technologies, and how combining these concepts will allow building flexible and dynamic virtual networks tailored to services, e.g. Anything as a Service (AaaS) and Network Slicing. 

Teaching and Learning methods:

-          Be able to control a network using a NoS (SDN controller)

-          Be able to deploy a virtual network architecture

This module addresses the access methods in Wireless Local Access Networks (WLAN). The basic contention and management mechanisms are detailed. Current and emerging standards of WLAN toward 5G are also presented.

Teaching and Learning Methods : Lectures and Lab sessions (group of 2 students)

Course Policies :  Attendance to Lab session is mandatory.

Teaching and Learning Methods: Lectures, Homework (2-3), and a case study (study and present a research paper in a group of 2-3 students). 

Course Policies: Mandatory participation, Case study optional, but recommended.

This course introduces fundamental concepts in machine learning (ML), with particular emphasis on communication-efficient distributed learning and applications to networked systems. After a brief introduction to ML methods and deep neural networks (adapted to enrolled students’ prior knowledge), we present key aspects for their efficient application to communication systems. We will cover applications that span different layers and system configurations, including physical layer (signaling, detection), multiple access and radio resource management. We then focus on large-scale distributed and decentralized learning in wireless networks, in particular under constraints (completion time, radio resources, computational efficiency, etc.). We also cover reinforcement learning and theoretical ML topics (generalization, approximation, fairness). Finally, we highlight key challenges in realizing the promise of machine learning for communication networks.

Teaching and Learning Methods: Lectures, exercise sessions, lab sessions, and potentially homework assignments including both problem solving and programming of learned methods. Each session starts summarizing key concepts from previous lecture. Part of each lecture is dedicated to illustrative examples and exercises.

Course Policies: Attendance to lab session is mandatory. Attendance to lectures and exercise sessions is highly recommended.

This course offers a survey of several well-known attacks targeting specific weaknesses of hardware (microprocessors, dedicated hardware cryptographic accelerators...) For each of them the conditions of success are explained and some countermeasures are proposed.

Teaching and Learning Methods : Lectures, lab sessions 

Course Policies : Attendance to the lab sessions is mandatory

The course is roughly divided in two separate parts. The first covers the   topics of computer forensics and incident response. In particular, we   discuss a number of techniques and open source tools to acquire and   analyze network traces, hard disk images, Windows and Linux operating   system artifacts, log files, and memory images.

The second part of the course deals with the analysis of malware and   unknown binaries. Here the goal is to introduce students to the main  classes of techniques used in malware analysis and reverse engineering.   We cover both static techniques (ELF and PE file structures,   dissasseblers and decompilers, data and control flow analysis, abstract   interpretation, ...) and dynamic techniques (sandboxing, library and   syscall traces, dynamic instrumentation, debugging, taint analysis,   unpacking,...). We will use mostly open source tools, with the exception of IDA Pro.

Teaching and Learning Methods :  Lectures and Homework Assignment

This course provides an overview of software and hardware design for smart objects. It shows how to specify, design and validate digital hardware components, how to integrate them in a microprocessor-based system, and how to drive them from the software layers.

Teaching and Learning Methods: Lectures, team-work, lab sessions. Students are provided with prototyping boards and design tools for the whole semester duration.

Course Policies: Attendance to the lab sessions is mandatory

Deep Learning is a new approach in Machine Learning which allows to build models that have shown superior performance for a wide range of applications, in particular Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. Thanks to the joint availability of large data corpus and affordable processing power, Deep Learning has revived the field of Artificial Neural Networks and provoked the renaissance of AI (Artificial Intelligence). The objective of this course is to provide an overview of the field of Deep Learning, starting from simple architectures and pursuing with contemporary and state of the art practices and models. The course is organized as a combination of lectures where the theory is exposed and discussed, and hands-on online tutorials where students can learn technical details of model implementation, training and testing.