SPAWC 2024 is hosting the following keynotes, focusing on hot topics in signal processing for wireless communications, and to be held in the Plenary room:
Keynote 1: Towards the Quantum internet: Entanglement meets classical communications
Speaker: Angela Sara Cacciapuoti (University of Naples Federico II, Italy)
Wednesday Sept. 11, 9:00 – 9:45
Keynote 2: Radio localization and sensing towards 6G: The carrier pendulum swing
Speaker: Henk Wymeersch (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
Wednesday Sept. 11, 11:15 – 12:00
Keynote 3: Wireless renaissance: AI’s transformative role in PHY
Speaker: Sharad Sambhwani (Apple Inc., USA)
Thursday Sept. 12, 9:00 – 9:45
Keynote 4: Understanding power consumption in next-generation wireless receivers
Speaker: Sundeep Rangan (New York University, USA)
Thursday Sept. 12, 11:15 – 12:00
Keynote 5: Emerging 6G wireless: Challenges and opportunities at base station and terminal sides
Speaker: Mattias Gustafsson (Huawei Technologies Sweden AB, Sweden)
Thursday Sept. 12, 14:00 – 15:00
Keynote 6: Statistical inference over networks: Decentralized optimization meets high-dimensional statistics
Speaker: Gesualdo Scutari (Purdue University, USA)
Friday Sept. 13, 9:00 – 9:45
Keynote 7: Semantic communication networks: The next frontier for 6G and beyond
Speaker: Aylin Yener (Ohio State University, USA)
Friday Sept. 13, 11:15 – 12:00
Keynote details
Towards the Quantum internet: Entanglement meets classical communications
Abstract: Internet just turned 50: five decades that shaped the world we live in. Indeed, Internet itself evolved astonishingly since the beginning, from a network prototype consisting of a few static nodes in the early days to a leviathan interconnecting with billions of devices half of the world’s population. But what comes next, the so-called Quantum Internet, will be even more revolutionary. In fact, the Quantum Internet, aka a network enabling quantum communications among remote quantum nodes, can provide functionalities with no counterpart in the classical world, such as advanced quantum security services, distributed quantum computing characterized by exponential increase of the computing power, and new forms of communications. These functionalities have the potential of fundamentally changing our lives, in ways we cannot image yet. The aim of the talk is to provide the participants with a wide view about quantum communications by highlighting the challenges and the opportunities connected to the design of the Quantum Internet, which requires a major network-paradigm shift and a multidisciplinary effort to harness the counter-intuitive marvels of quantum mechanics.
Bio: Angela Sara Cacciapuoti (http://www.quantuminternet.it) is a Professor of Quantum Communications and Networks at the University of Naples Federico II (Italy). Her work has appeared in first tier IEEE journals and she received different awards, including the “2024 IEEE ComSoc Award for Advances in Communication”, the “2022 IEEE ComSoc Best Tutorial Paper Award”, the “2022 WICE Outstanding Achievement Award” for her contributions in the quantum communication and network fields, and “2021 N2Women: Stars in Networking and Communications”. Angela Sara is also one of the authors of the first RFC on the architectural principles of the Quantum Internet within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Lately, she also received the IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Service Award for EMEA 2023, assigned for the outstanding service to IEEE ComSoc in the EMEA Region. Currently, she is an IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer with lecture topics on the Quantum Internet design and Quantum Communications, and she serves also as a Member of the TC on SPCOM within the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Her research interests are in Quantum Information Processing, Quantum Communications and Quantum Networks.
Emerging 6G wireless: Challenges and opportunities at base station and terminal sides
Abstract: 6G is envisioned to go far beyond just communications, aiming at merging digital, physical and virtual worlds. Additionally, owing to economical, reglementary, societal and technological trends, 6G design will be required to meet sustainability, trustworthiness and prosperity ambitions. This translates to very challenging performance requirements: the envisioned future wireless 6G systems will need to rely on innovative approaches in architecture designs for BTS radio products, on one hand, the terminal devices, on the other hand, and also for the complete network system as a whole, achieving end-to-end efficiency. These goals, while challenging, would be the engine for multiple innovations, in terms of hardware, architectures, air interface procedures, protocol stack, among others. Firstly, new hardware, e.g. low power ADC/DAC, high efficiency PA, metamaterial antennas and RF lenses, RIS, extreme MIMO, will be leveraged to i) improve achievable communication performance and ii) reduce the carbon footprint and increase energy efficiency of the whole system. Secondly, 6G architecture, air interface procedures and protocol stack will leverage the many lessons learned in 5G NR in order to simplify, address remaining issues, and enable the support of new kinds of applications with extreme performance requirements. 6G research is well underway in both academia and industrial circles, with enabling technologies including DMIMO, RIS, ELAA, ISAC, holographic MIMO, new waveforms, Native AI, Native NTN/TN integration, among others. The talk by Huawei Technologies Sweden AB will discuss practical considerations of these approaches and other aspects of the expected research directions related with wireless 6G.
Bio: Mattias Gustafsson is a wireless systems engineer with more than 25 years of industrial wireless experience. He received his MSc degree from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, in 1997. Since 2012 he has been working at Huawei Technologies Sweden, where he currently leads the BTS RF system architecture team. Before joining Huawei, he has worked in other Swedish companies on antennas and RF-related engineering. At Huawei, he has been recognized as contributor to the team award “Wake up call”, which kicked off the massive MIMO research at Huawei Technologies. During his years at Huawei Technologies Sweden, he worked on massive MIMO systems, wireless propagation modeling, antenna systems, hybrid beamforming systems, OTA test methods, passive intermodulation modeling, etc. He is contributor to 7 patents and has authored or co-authored more than 25 papers in IEEE and other technical proceedings.
Understanding power consumption in next-generation wireless receivers
Abstract: Power consumption is one of the most important considerations in designing wireless receivers. As systems are increasingly using very large numbers of antennas operating with wide bandwidths, power consumption has been soaring and techniques to operate more efficiently have become critical. In this talk, I will provide a communication theoretic framework for understanding the fundamental tradeoffs in power consumption, nonlinear distortion, and receiver performance. Several applications will be discussed including design and optimization of a energy efficient fully digital 140 GHz receiver; potential for ultra low-power short range systems; and power efficient protocols for spectrally agile systems in the upper mid-band.
Bio: Sundeep Rangan received the B.A.Sc. at the University of Waterloo, Canada and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, all in Electrical Engineering. He has held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Bell Labs. In 2000, he co-founded (with four others) Flarion Technologies, a spin off of Bell Labs, that developed Flash OFDM, one of the first cellular OFDM data systems and pre-cursor to 4G systems including LTE and WiMAX. In 2006, Flarion was acquired by Qualcomm Technologies where Dr. Rangan was a Senior Director of Engineering involved in OFDM infrastructure products. He joined the ECE department at NYU Tandon (formerly NYU Polytechnic) in 2010. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Associate Director of NYU Wireless, an academic-industry research center researching next-generation wireless systems.
Wireless renaissance: AI’s transformative role in PHY
Abstract: In recent years, we have seen AI heralding a new era of innovation for the PHY of wireless communications. AI provides a profound shift in the philosophy of PHY problem-solving, transitioning from model-driven approaches to data-driven and their combination. It intrigues us to ask “will AI empowered techniques instigate a ‘renaissance’ for wireless PHY?” In this keynote, we attempt to answer this question by exploring the transformative role of AI for PHY. We will delve into motivations and opportunities of AI for PHY, the view of PHY transitioning towards AI/ML, and the ongoing efforts to integrate AI to wireless communications. We envision native-AI integration is a way to propel PHY to a new level of performance, reliability and efficiency through our two preliminary examples, privacy modulation coding and end-to-end learning without back-propagation (forward-forward learning). Lastly, we conclude the talk by discussing a few challenges of this topic from the perspectives of compute, model and dataset.
Bio: Sharad Sambhwani is an experienced wireless systems engineer. He is currently part of Cellular Systems Engineering in Hardware Technologies department at Apple since 2019 working on cellular modem development while also leading a R&D team working on next generation wireless technologies. He is currently the Vice-Chair of pre-6G SDOs (ATIS NGA Technology, ETSI ISG THz) and rapporteur of ETSI ISG RIS MIMO work item. He actively participated in 3GPP RAN1/2/4 from 1998 to 2012 and was a founding member of TIP 5G ORAN project group and active member of TIP mmW project group. He also has extensive experience in the development of advanced cellular modem algorithms and features. Prior to joining Apple, Sharad began his career as Member of Technical Staff in the Advanced Technology department at Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ in 1996. He later had stints at a couple of startups, Algorex (acquired by National Semiconductors) and Quicksilver Technology followed by a 17 year tenure at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. He received his MS and Ph.D. degree in EE from Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY (now NYU) in 1992 and 1997 respectively and a MS in CS (AI/ML) from UIUC in 2020. He is a named inventor on over 200 granted patents and has authored 13 publications.
Statistical inference over networks: Decentralized optimization meets high-dimensional statistics
Abstract: The interest in solving large-scale statistical learning problems within decentralized networks is rapidly increasing, particularly in systems where data is distributed across network nodes without centralized coordination, often referred to as “mesh” networks. Inference from massive datasets presents critical challenges at the intersection of computational and statistical sciences, particularly ensuring the quality of the performed analytic when computational resources, like time and communication, are constrained. While the trade-offs between statistical accuracy and computational efficiency have been extensively studied in centralized settings, our comprehension in the context of mesh networks remains underdeveloped. Specifically, (i) distributed schemes that perform effectively in classical low-dimensional regimes can fail in high-dimensional scenarios, and (ii) existing convergence analyses may not accurately predict algorithmic behavior, with empirical tests often contradicting theoretical findings. This discrepancy arises primarily because most decentralized algorithms have been developed and analyzed primarily from an optimization perspective, neglecting the statistical aspects. This talk will present novel analyses and decentralized algorithm designs through various vignettes from high-dimensional statistical inference, aiming to integrate statistical considerations into decentralized optimization. By adopting this new perspective, some long-standing myths in the literature of distributed optimization will be demystified.
Bio: Gesualdo Scutari is a Chair Professor with the School of Industrial Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. His research interests include continuous (distributed, stochastic) optimization, equilibrium programming, and their applications to signal processing and statistical learning. Among others, he was a recipient of the 2013 NSF CAREER Award, the 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, and the 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award. He serves as an IEEE Signal Processing Distinguish Lecturer (2023-2024). He served on the editorial broad of several IEEE journals, and he is currently an Associate Editor of SIAM Journal on Optimization. He is a fellow of IEEE.
Radio localization and sensing towards 6G: The carrier pendulum swing
Abstract: The evolution of mobile communications systems, from 3G onwards, has consistently pushed the boundaries of technology into higher carrier frequencies to harness increased bandwidth and, consequently, greater data capacity. This progression has not only revolutionized communication but also significantly enhanced positioning technologies. Since the 3GPP’s 16th release, the integration of positioning services has become increasingly critical, evolving alongside each generation of mobile technology. As the world transitions from 4G to 5G, and now edges towards 6G, the quest for frequencies capable of meeting the rigorous demands of extreme positioning accuracy and innovative sensing capabilities intensifies. This talk delves into the exploration of these new frequency bands, evaluating their impact and utility from a positioning and sensing perspective. We will analyze the roles of various frequency bands—from below 10 GHz, traversing through the 28 GHz landmark of 5G, and venturing into the sub-THz bands anticipated (by some) in 6G—before circling back to reassess the value of lower frequencies. This presentation aims to shed light on the models, methods, and potential challenges that lie ahead in the pursuit of accuracy and resolution in radio localization and sensing technologies.
Bio: Henk Wymeersch obtained the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering/Applied Sciences in 2005 from Ghent University, Belgium. He is currently a Professor of Communication Systems with the Department of Electrical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Prior to joining Chalmers, he was a postdoctoral researcher from 2005 until 2009 with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prof. Wymeersch served as Associate Editor for IEEE Communication Letters (2009-2013), IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (since 2013), and IEEE Transactions on Communications (2016-2018) and is currently Senior Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Editorial Board. During 2019-2021, he was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer with the Vehicular Technology Society. Since 2024, he is a Fellow of the IEEE. His current research interests include the convergence of communication and sensing, in a 5G and Beyond 5G context.
Semantic communication networks: The next frontier for 6G and beyond
Abstract: 6G and beyond systems will rely heavily on ubiquitous wireless connectivity. The ever-increasing demand on wireless resources necessitates finding innovative ways for networked communications for the next generation applications. A recent direction in this realm is semantic communications. This new paradigm diverges from the classical communications in that, instead of requiring to reliably communicating messages sent from the transmitter, the requirement is to recover the meaning of the messages sent. This relaxation renders new design insights and allows for better resource management while ensuring that the goal of the transmission is met. In this talk, we will cover the basics of the semantic communications paradigm and demonstrate recent work that provide resource savings relying on pretrained models as well as new transceiver design architectures for semantic communication networks that are AI-native and are expected to be the building block for 6G and beyond. We will conclude with future directions in this area.
Bio: Aylin Yener is the Roy and Lois Chope Endowed Chair in Engineering at The Ohio State University since 2020, and a professor at the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, and Integrated Systems Engineering. Prior to this, she was a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Dean’s Fellow at Penn State, where she joined in 2002 as an assistant professor. In 2008-2009, she was a visiting associate professor in the electrical engineering department at Stanford University, CA and in 2016-2017 she was a visiting professor in the same department. She also held a visiting appointment at Telecom Paris Tech in Paris, France in 2016. She received her PhD and MS degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Wireless Information Networks Lab (WINLAB), Rutgers University, and her BS degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and in Physics from Bogazici University. Her expertise is in wireless communications, information theory, and AI, with recent focus on various pillars of 6G including new advances in physical layer designs, semantic communications, edge learning/computing/AI, system design for confluence of sensing, communications, distributed learning, energy conscious networked systems, and security and privacy. Yener received the 2020 IEEE Communication Theory Technical Achievement Award, 2019 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award, 2018 IEEE Women in Communications Engineering (WICE) Outstanding Achievement Award, 2014 IEEE Marconi Paper Award, and several other research and technical awards. She is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of the Science Academy of Turkey.
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Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications
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