KEYNOTES

Henk Wymeersch (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)

Radio localization and sensing towards 6G: The carrier pendulum swing

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.

Sundeep Rangan (New York University, USA)

Understanding power consumption in next-generation wireless receivers

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.

Angela Sara Cacciapuoti (University of Naples Federico II, Italy)

Towards the Quantum internet: Entanglement meets classical communications

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.

Aylin Yener (Ohio State University, USA)

Semantic communication networks: The next frontier for 6G and beyond

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.

Gesualdo Scutari (Purdue University, USA)

Statistical inference over networks: Decentralized optimization meets high-dimensional statistics

Gesualdo Scutari is a Professor with the School of Industrial Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering (by courtesy) at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, and he is a Purdue Faculty Scholar. His research interests include continuous 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 IEEE Fellow.

Sharad Sambhwani (Apple Inc., USA)

Wireless renaissance: AI’s transformative role in PHY

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.