April 1, 2015
He is a giant in the communications field, an award-winning teacher, author of two leading textbooks, co-founder of a start-up, and now the 2015 recipient of the Engineering Institute of Canada’s Julian C. Smith Medal—not bad for a high-school dropout.
These are just a few highlights from the career of Alberto Leon-Garcia, who will receive the Julian C. Smith Medal in recognition of “achievement in the development of Canada” at the EIC awards ceremony May 26, 2015 in Montreal.
But long before he adopted Canada as home, Leon-Garcia was a teenager in San Diego, California. After Grade 11 he joined a summer engineering research program for high-school students at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he worked with a professor and graduate student on a materials science experiment on crystals. He quickly distinguished himself, even publishing a paper out of his results, and was offered a scholarship to stay on at USC full-time.
“I think it was the summer of the moon landing, because I remember that,” says Leon-Garcia. “But I never got my high-school diploma—I just never went back.”
At the time, USC was famous for its strong communications program and Leon-Garcia gravitated toward “hard-core” communication theory, taking a graduate course in probability and stochastic processes after his first year as an undergraduate and excelling. Later, when his PhD supervisor moved to University of Maryland, Leon-Garcia went with him and sat in on a course on the brand new topic of computer networks. He was hooked. The professor teaching computer networks knew Professor Tas Venetsanopoulos at the University of Toronto, and had heard that U of T was searching for someone to start a research program on networks, both communications and computer. Leon-Garcia jumped at the chance.
In Toronto, Leon-Garcia began working on packet switching—the new means of transmitting information that would later enable the internet—and on integrating voice and data on the same network.
“Before then, voice and data were carried on completely different infrastructures, and were two completely different industries,” he remembers. “I sort of grew my research with the evolution of packet switching…by the 1980s, we were doing packetized video.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering Professor Paul Chow was launching a course on application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip design, and Leon-Garcia sent his students to take it so they could build their theoretical algorithms into chips. He hoped to incorporate the chips into experimental switches.
By this time, Leon-Garcia’s first student to work on switching, Hyong Kim, was on his second start-up, and had worked on a new optical switch device at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
“We thought, why don’t we put these two together and build a much more ambitious product,” says Leon-Garcia. “At that time, demand for data was beginning to soar, and the realization was that optical networking was required to keep up—so we launched a start-up to address that need.”
Chow and Leon-Garcia brought AcceLight Networks to life over Christmas 1999, in the midst of Canada’s telecom boom. Hyong Kim became CEO. They had secured millions in funding by February 2000, and soon needed to hire more network experts than they could find in Toronto. Their options were clear: move AcceLight’s R&D to either Silicon Valley or to Ottawa, with the optical switch technology staying in Pittsburgh.
“I remember driving down to Ottawa in April, when everything was still frozen, and thinking, ‘What are we doing?’” says Leon-Garcia.
More funding followed, and AcceLight quickly grew to more than 100 people. They successfully built their first product in two and a half years, but like so many Canadian communications companies in the early 2000s, the AcceLight story doesn’t have a happy ending.
“Our timing corresponded with the end of the telecom boom and the huge drop that followed,” says Leon-Garcia. “We tried to save the company by creating a smaller version of the product with the same functionality as the big switch—we called that project ‘MiniMe’ and we kept it secret—but in the end we were unable to convince the board members to change directions.”
AcceLight Networks closed its doors in early 2003.
“To me, it was a really exciting time—it was very intense, working with lots of smart people, making lots of difficult decisions very quickly, back to back,” Leon-Garcia reflects. “You got to see the exuberance at the beginning, then the pain of keeping it going…but overall it was one of the most exciting periods of my career.”
Leon-Garcia doesn’t really do ‘down time’—back at U of T, he continued thinking about how to use virtualization to share the power of some of AcceLight’s enormous and expensive boards among multiple users. He had a series of students working on the theory, but no one willing to try to build it. Then in 2006, he recruited Hadi Bannazadeh to his group for a PhD.
“He’s a born hacker—he loves to take things apart and play with them,” says Leon-Garcia. “There was no one else who really got it, or was fearless enough to try.” By the end of Bannazadeh’s PhD, they had proof-of-concept. But by then, Leon-Garcia had hatched another, much bigger idea: networks in computing and networking are all about resource management, and their resource needs are defined by the applications they run. What if you used the same approach to controlling resources for transportation systems, and power grid infrastructure?
He began writing a Networks of Centres of Excellence application, incorporating these three concepts. “It was really ambitious,” he says now. “I spent the summer writing the proposal. At one point I was out in my backyard every night, sitting in my gazebo at midnight working on this thing, just me and the raccoons.”
They thought they had it after the final meeting with the committee, but in the end lost out to another project. Down but not out, Leon-Garcia decided to split the proposal into its three components: smart communications and computer networks, smart traffic and transportation, and smart grid infrastructure.
The first of the three became Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructure, or SAVI, an NSERC Strategic Network that includes nine universities, more than 20 industry partners, research and education networks, and high-performance computing centres. Leon-Garcia is SAVI scientific director; Bannazadeh its testbed platform architect. Now in its fourth year, SAVI launched its testbed two years ahead of schedule and is currently working on demonstrating applications. The project concludes in August 2016.
“SAVI’s going to be a success—the view that computing and networking have to be integrated has been validated by industry in North America, Europe and Asia,” says Leon-Garcia. And when SAVI wraps next year? “We’ve got some good technologies we’re trying to commercialize.”
Then he can finally shift attention to part two of his grand plan: smart traffic and transportation infrastructure. Naturally, he’s already launched a project in this area called Connected Vehicles and Smart Transportation (CVST), which is designed to pull data from any sources, currently Nokia, Twitter, the City of Toronto, the TTC, Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation, and Bike Share Toronto, to provide a fully integrated view of what’s moving where in the city in real time. The overall goal is to design a platform to support intelligent transportation applications. “Again, I insisted we had to build something,” says the one-time communications theorist. “My next focus will be a network or centre on smart cities that builds on the systems we have developed in SAVI and CVST.”
At this point in his career, after tackling so many big, complex problems, is he looking forward to taking on yet another?
“Oh yes—complicated problems in the real world have so many pieces that it’s easy to get discouraged and not even try,” he says. “But with creativity, persistence and patience you can make things happen.”
More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca