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Professor Alex Grant
Position: Director: Inst for Telecommunications Research
Division/Portfolio: Research and Innovation Portfolio
School/Unit: Institute For Telecommunications Research
Campus: Mawson Lakes Campus
Office: W2-01
Telephone: +61 8 830 23310
Fax: +61 8 830 23873
Email: Alex_dot_Grant_at_unisa_dot_edu_dot_au
URL for Business Card: http://people.unisa.edu.au/Alex.Grant

Alex Grant received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of South Australia in 1993 and 1996 respectively. In 1997, he was a research fellow at the Laboratory for Signal and Information Processing, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. Since March 1998 he has been with the Institute for Telecommunication Research, University of South Australia, where he is now Research Professor of Information Theory. Prof. Grant is Leader of the Coding and Information Theory Research Group at ITR and his research concentrates on the application of information theory to multiple user communications problems. He has made contributions in the areas of random matrix analysis and iterative decoding methods for multiple-access channels.

Prof. Grant is a member of the IEEE Information Theory and Communications Societies and served as Chairman for the Australian Chapter of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2000-2003). He served as Technical Program Chair for the 2001 IEEE Information Theory Workshop and is an organizing committee member for the Australian Communications Theory Workshop (founding member) and the 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Spread Spectrum Techniques and Applications. He is General Co-Chair for the 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, to be held in Adelaide.

Prof. Grant has published over one hundred technical papers and is supported by several Australian Research Council grants and industry-sponsored projects. Prof. Grant is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne and a Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta.


Alex's Personal Home Page

I teach the following courses

EEET 5084Information Theory
(This course is not currently being taught)

Professional associations

Senior Member, IEEE

2000-2003 Chairman, SA/ACT/Vic/NSW Sections Joint Chapter of the IEEE Information Theory Society

Qualifications

PhD, University of South Australia 1997

B.E. (Hons) University of South Australia 1993

Research interests

  • Multiuser Information Theory and Coding
  • Iterative Algorithms for Communications
  • Space-Time Coding
  • Turbo Coding

Research publications

For a list of publications, please visit my personal home page.

Expertise for Media Contact

I am able to provide media comment in the following areas of expertise:

Discipline: Telecommunications

Research Degree Supervisor

Dr Grant conducts research into the mathematical theory of communications systems. Of particular interest are high-speed data networks and wireless access.

Current Projects:

 Information Theory of Space-Time Networks
 Many communications links suffer a phenomenon known as fading, in which the amount of channel attenuation varies randomly in time. This causes problems at the receiver, since at certain times the channel may be so badly attenuated that no communication is possible. Sometimes it is possible to improve the performance of a communications link by using multiple transmit and receive antennas. The idea is that if the link between one transmit/receive antenna pair is bad, there may be another link which is good. Such channels are known as space-time channels. This project will focus on finding theoretical limits on the amount of information that can be transmitted over space-time channels, and consider the use of space-time channels in mobile communications networks.
Iterative Architechtures for Data Communications
 Growing markets for data intensive applications such as real-time video or speech necessitate continual improvements of communications systems. Iterative information processing algorithms have recently received attention for communications equipment design, however theoretical understanding of these methods is still lacking. Within an iterative processing paradigm, the project aim is the optimization of complex communications systems subject to constraints on computational complexity. Theoretical analysis and design methodologies for such systems will be developed, resulting in basic contributions to statistical science and in cheaper communications infrastructures supporting a wider range of services through better use of limited bandwidth, power and computational complexity.



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