Title of the Keynote: The post Shannon Era: Towards Semantic, Goal-Oriented and Reconfigurable Intelligent Environments aided 6G communications
Abstract: This keynote promotes the idea that including semantic and goal-oriented aspects in future 6G networks can produce a significant leap forward in terms of system effectiveness and sustainability. Semantic communication goes beyond the common Shannon paradigm of guaranteeing the correct reception of each single transmitted packet, irrespective of the meaning conveyed by the packet. The idea is that, whenever communication occurs to convey meaning or to accomplish a goal, what really matters is the impact that the correct reception/interpretation of a packet is going to have on the goal accomplishment. Focusing on semantic and goal-oriented aspects and possibly combining them with the reconfigurable and intelligent wireless environments paradigm, help to identify the relevant information, i.e. the information strictly necessary to recover the meaning intended by the transmitter or to accomplish a goal. With this keynote, after a short presentation of most recent state of the art approaches, we present our most recent results and cover in detail challenges and opportunities associated with the evolution towards semantic, goal-oriented and reconfigurable intelligent environments aided 6G communications.
Bio: Dr. Emilio Calvanese Strinati obtained his Engineering Master degree in 2001 from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and his Ph.D in Engineering Science in 2005 from Paris Telecom. He then started working at Motorola Labs in Paris in 2002. Then in 2006 he joint CEA LETI as a research engineer. From 2007, he becomes a PhD supervisor. From 2010 to 2012, he has been the co-chair of the wireless working group in GreenTouch Initiative, which deals with design of future energy efficient communication networks. From 2011 to 2016 he was the Smart Devices & Telecommunications strategic programs Director, then, until January 2020 he was the Smart Devices & Telecommunications Scientific and Innovation Director. Since February 2020 he is the Nanotechnologies and Wireless for 6G (New-6G) Program Director focusing on future 6G technologies. He has published around 200 papers in journals, international conferences, and books chapters, and he has given more than 200 international invited talks, keynotes and tutorials. He is the main inventor of more than 80 patents. His current research interests are on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces, Semantic communications, Goal-oriented communications AI-native technologies in the contest of 6G.
Title of the Keynote: “Mega Constellations – Trends, Technologies and Vision”
Abstract: Large LEO constellations and multi-orbit satellite systems have recently emerged as complex network architectures that provide and enhance a range of satellite services e.g. ubiquitous broadband internet, direct to handheld, satellite IoT etc. The current talk reviews the current capabilities of such systems from a communication perspective and describes the challenges of applying key technological enablers in space. In addition, we present a vision about future research topics of long-term importance in the area of Satellite Communications and Non-Terrestrial Networks
Bio: Symeon Chatzinotas (MEng, MSc, PhD, FIEEE) is currently Full Professor / Chief Scientist I and Head of the research group SIGCOM in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, University of Luxembourg. In the past, he has lectured as Visiting Professor at the University of Parma, Italy and contributed in numerous R&D projects for the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications, National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos,” the Institute of Telematics and Informatics, Center of Research and Technology Hellas and Mobile Communications Research Group, Center of Communication Systems Research, University of Surrey. He has received the M.Eng. in Telecommunications from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering from University of Surrey, UK in 2003, 2006 and 2009 respectively. He has authored more than 700 technical papers in refereed international journals, conferences and scientific books and has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the IEEE Fellowship and an IEEE Distinguished Contributions Award. He is currently in the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Open Journal of Vehicular Technology and the International Journal of Satellite Communications and Networking.
Title of the Keynote: “Generative Modeling for Wireless Communication Algorithms”
Abstract: First, generative modeling is introduced to promote the perspective of learning the radio propagation environment (“radio-compatible digital twin”) of wireless communication scenarios, with the goal of providing advance channel state information that is used to improve various types of physical layer functions in wireless communication systems. It is shown that recently proposed techniques, which include, for example, Variational Autoencoding (VAE) techniques, are AI versions of a well-known conceptual methodology. The selected variants are ideally suited for modeling the distribution of channel state information (CSI) of an underlying propagation environment as conditional distributions close to the usual models of wireless radio channels and allow the derivation of the corresponding prior information. In a further part of the presentation, it will therefore be shown how this prior information can be used to estimate CSI as a first application example. In the second application part, feedback generation of CSI using shared generative models is presented, as well as its use as a substitute for adaptive codebooks based entirely on exploiting prior information from the generative models.
Bio: Wolfgang Utschick (Fellow, IEEE) received the diploma and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering with distinction from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, in 1993 and 1998, respectively. Prior to that, he completed several years of certified industrial training programs. Since 2002, he is Professor for Methods of Signal Processing and since 2011, he is a TUM Asia faculty member in Singapore and a regular guest Professor with Singapore Institute of Technology. In 2021, he became a core member of the newly founded Munich Data Science Institute. From 2017 to 2022, he served two terms of office as the dean of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at TUM. He is a member of the VDE, where he is deputy head of the specialist group KT 1 for Information and System Theory of the German Information Technology Society (ITG). He also served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems and for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and was a Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committee on Signal Processing for Communications and Networking. From 2016 till 2022 he was chairing the German Chapter of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and since 2016, he has been director of the special research group Mobility & Transport of the Bavarian Science Forum BayWISS. Wolfgang Utschick teaches courses on signal processing, stochastic processes, optimization theory, and machine learning in the field of wireless communications and various other application areas of signal processing, he holds several patents in the field of multiantenna signal processing and has authored and coauthored a large number of technical articles in international journals and conference proceedings. He has edited several books and is the founder and the editor of the Springer book series Foundations in Signal Processing, Communications and Networking. He has been involved as principal investigator in several research projects funded by the German Research Fund (DFG) and coordinated a German DFG priority program on Communications Over Interference Limited Networks. He is currently principal investigator of the 6G Future Lab of the Free State of Bavaria and the 6G-labs consortium of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Title of the Keynote: Quantum ThermoMechanics in Future Information Processing Systems
Bio: Damian Dudek is the managing director of the Information Technology Society in Germany. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2009 for the research on DC driven Plasma Sources at Atmospheric Pressure. Most recently he was group leader at the Chair of Electronic Components at RWTH Aachen University and, in his role, also executive manager of the project “NeuroSys – Neuromorphic Hardware for Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Systems” – a future cluster funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with 45 million euros. As electrical engineer, he looks back on a long career at various research institutions including the Research Center for Materials Science in Seville (ICMS) as Diploma Student, the Research Center for Microstructure Technology (fmt) as well as the Ruhr University Bochum as Doctorate Student, the Research Center for Nanotechnology in Barcelona as Post Doctoral Researcher, the German Research Foundation (DFG) as Program Director, the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and now as the Managing Director of the Information Technology Society (ITG) in the Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies (VDE).