Keynote 1

Speaker: Petar Popovski

Time: Tuesday at 9:00

Location: Amphitheater

Title: Real-Time Wireless: Computing, Communication, and Intelligence

Abstract: With the advent of 5G technology, the notion of latency got a prominent role in wireless connectivity, serving as a proxy term for addressing the requirements for real-time communication. As wireless systems evolve toward 6G and embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI), the ambition to immerse the digital into physical reality will increase. This talk will present the general concept of timing in wireless communication systems and its relation to effective information generation, processing, transmission, and reconstruction at senders and receivers with increasing levels of intelligence. It starts by discussing latency and its components in systems that involve wireless communication and computing. Next, it will present other timing measures beyond latency, such as Age of Information (AoI) and its derivatives. Based on the real-time AI-powered Digital Twin, a case will be built for differentiating between push and pull-based communication, followed by a discussion on the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols accommodating both types. Inspired by multisensory perception in humans, the talk will introduce Temporal Windows of Integration (TWI) for wireless systems that combine sensing and communication and show their role in determining causality and simultaneity in perceptive wireless networks. One of the takeaways is that the future Base Stations and Access Points will have a timestamping functionality that determines the chronology of the events, simultaneity, and causality, ensuring trustworthiness of the mapping between the physical world and the digital world.

Bio: Petar Popovski is a Professor at Aalborg University, where he is the director of the Center of Excellence CLASSIQUE (Classical Communication in the Quantum Era). He also holds a position of a Visiting Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen. He received his Dipl.-Ing (1997) and M.Sc. (2000) degrees in communication engineering from the University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje and the Ph.D. degree (2005) from Aalborg University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He received an ERC Consolidator Grant (2015), the Danish Elite Researcher award (2016), IEEE Fred W. Ellersick prize (2016), IEEE Stephen O. Rice prize (2018), Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Technical Committee on Smart Grid Communications (2019), the Danish Telecommunication Prize (2020) and Villum Investigator Grant (2021). He was a Member at Large at the Board of Governors in IEEE Communication Society, Chair of the IEEE Communication Theory Technical Committee, as well as the General Chair for IEEE SmartGridComm 2018 and IEEE Communication Theory Workshop 2019. His research interests are in the area of wireless communication and communication theory. He authored the book “Wireless Connectivity: An Intuitive and Fundamental Guide'”, published by Wiley in 2020. He is currently an Editor-in-Chief of IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS.

Keynote 2

Speaker: Jakob Hoydis

Time: Tuesday at 13:30

Location: Amphitheater

Title: From Vision to Verification: Next-Generation Tools for 6G

Bio: Jakob Hoydis is a Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA working on the intersection of machine learning and wireless communications. Prior to this, he was Head of a research department at Nokia Bell Labs, France, and co-founder of the social network SPRAED. He obtained the diploma degree in electrical engineering from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and the Ph.D. degree from Supéléc, France. From 2019-2021, he was chair of the IEEE COMSOC Emerging Technology Initiative on Machine Learning as well as Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He is recipient of the 2019 VTG IDE Johann-Philipp-Reis Prize, the 2019 IEEE SEE Glavieux Prize, the 2018 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award, the 2015 IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize, the IEEE WCNC 2014 Best Paper Award, the 2013 VDE ITG Förderpreis Award, and the 2012 Publication Prize of the Supéléc Foundation. 

He has received the 2018 Nokia AI Innovation Award, as well as the 2018 and 2019 Nokia France Top Inventor Awards. He is a co-author of the textbook “Massive MIMO Networks: Spectral, Energy, and Hardware Efficiency” (2017). He is a 2023 Distinguished Industry Speaker of the IEEE Signal Processing Society as well as an IEEE Fellow. 

He is one of the maintainers and core developers of Sionna, a GPU-accelerated open-source link-level simulator for next-generation communication systems.

Keynote 3 

Speaker: Bruno Clerckx

Time: Wednesday at 9:00

Location: Amphitheater

Title: Analog Computing for Communications and Signal Processing

Abstract: Modern systems rely on digital circuits, computing, and signal processors that operate on binary values, offering advantages such as precision, versatility, robustness. Yet, digital processors face major limitations as high power consumption and limited speed. Despite digital signal processing being widely adopted today, analog computing is attracting a renewed interest thanks to its ability to perform energy-efficient and massively parallelized computations.

The talk shows some promising avenues to devise new, faster, and more sustainable communication and signal processing architectures that marry the communication theoretic principles of modern digital communications with analog domain processing and computing paradigms such that information transmission, processing and computing are conducted faster with much lower computational complexity.

We introduce the concept of Microwave Linear Analog Computer (MiLAC) as a very general model of a computer exploiting the propagation of analog signals in a microwave network, offering exceptionally low computational complexity - unimaginable with conventional digital computers. We show that MiLAC can perform computation, e.g. matrix inversion and linear minimum mean square error estimation, with low complexity directly in the analog domain and enable new future MIMO communications with orders of magnitude lower computational complexity than digital processing.

The increasing research interest in this area is reflected by the recently established Special Interest Group on Analog Computing https://sites.google.com/view/sig-analog-computing in the IEEE Communications Society.

Bio: Bruno Clerckx is a (Full) Professor, the Head of the Communications and Signal Processing Group, and the Head of the Wireless Communications and Signal Processing Lab, within the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College London, London, U.K. He received the MSc and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, and the Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from Imperial College London, U.K. He spent many years in industry with Silicon Austria Labs (SAL), Austria, where he was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) responsible for all research areas of Austria's top research center for electronic based systems and with Samsung Electronics, South Korea, where he actively contributed to 4G (3GPP LTE/LTE-A and IEEE 802.16m). He has authored two books on “MIMO Wireless Communications” and “MIMO Wireless Networks”, over 350 peer-reviewed international research papers, and 150 standards contributions, and is the inventor of 80 issued or pending patents among which several have been adopted in the specifications of 4G standards and are used by billions of devices worldwide. His research spans the general area of wireless communications and signal processing for wireless networks. He received the prestigious Blondel Medal 2021 from France for exceptional work contributing to the progress of Science and Electrical and Electronic Industries, the 2021 Adolphe Wetrems Prize in mathematical and physical sciences from Royal Academy of Belgium, multiple awards from Samsung, IEEE best student paper award, and the EURASIP (European Association for Signal Processing) best paper award 2022. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the IET. He is the vice-chair of ETSI Industry Specification Group (ISG) on Multiple Access Techniques (MAT).

Keynote 4

Speaker: Jean-Claude Belfiore

Time: Wednesday at 13:30

Location: Amphitheater

Title: AI for communication engineers: the LLM case

Abstract: AI will probably shape 6G wireless networks. LLM/LRM-based agents will be at the core of the management of 6G networks and, conversely, 6G will be the enabler of vast networks of AI agents. Wireless AI has popped out as a new paradigm, being a kind of bridge between AI and wireless communication. During this talk, I will show that wireless AI is not only a “joint venture” between AI and wireless communication but is a new area to be considered. I will show how to interpret LLM inference as well as LLM communications using the tools of communication systems (information theory and coding) as well as some topological tools. This new point of view should allow to develop new algorithms in order to improve reasoning capabilities of language models and pave the way to a theoretical framework for building networks of agents.

Bio: Jean-Claude Belfiore graduated from Supelec, got his PhD from Telecom Paris and the "Habilitation à diriger des Recherches" (HdR) from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC). Until 2015, he has been with Telecom Paris as a full Professor in the Communications & Electronics department. In 2015, he joined Huawei France Research Center and is, since 2021, the director of the Advanced Wireless Technology Lab in Huawei Paris.

Jean-Claude Belfiore has made pioneering contributions in modulation and coding for wireless systems (especially space-time coding) by using tools of number theory. He is also one of the co-inventors of the celebrated Golden Code of the Wi-Max standard. Jean-Claude Belfiore is author or co-author of more than 200 technical papers and communications and has served as a supervisor for more than 30 Ph.D. students. He has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory for Coding Theory and the recipient of the 2007 Blondel Medal.

Within Huawei, he has been involved in the 5G standardization process, essentially in Channel Coding (Polar Codes for 5G) and is now working for future wireless communications systems, on wireless AI and future wireless networking for intelligent machines as a promoter of semantic information and communication as well as structural learning.