Keynote

Deep Learning in the 6G Air Interface

Although 5G is still ramping up, the 6G era is approaching fast. I first provide a viewpoint on the state of 5G and what the key new directions will be in 6G, including deeply embedded machine learning, pervasive sensing, and new spectrum and topologies. 6G cellular networks will be extremely complex systems that must meet many competing requirements in a huge variety of environments and use cases. A key enabling 6G technology will be deep learning, which can provide important advances at many layers of the stack. I will present a short summary of two our recent discoveries with deep learning (DL) that demonstrate the impact it can have in 6G. The first is a novel approach for millimeter wave systems that can achieve a phenomenal speed up for initial beam alignment — 10x or more — by sensing and learning unique aspects of the environment, while preserving the current 5G beam alignment framework and avoiding the pitfalls of other proposed DL techniques. The second is a novel approach to estimating millimeter wave and Sub-Terahertz channels using deep generative networks. The deep generative estimator is able to achieve considerably better channel estimates with far fewer pilot symbols than current benchmarks.

Speaker Biography

Jeffrey Andrews is the Cockrell Family Endowed Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin where is Director of 6G@UT. He received the B.S. in Engineering with High Distinction from Harvey Mudd College, and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Dr. Andrews is an IEEE Fellow and ISI Highly Cited Researcher and has been co-recipient of 15 best paper awards including the 2016 IEEE Communications Society & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, the 2014 IEEE Stephen O. Rice Prize, the 2014 and 2018 IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize, the 2011 and 2016 IEEE Heinrich Hertz Prize, and the 2010 IEEE ComSoc Best Tutorial Paper Award. His other major awards include the 2015 Terman Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the 2021 Gordon Lepley Memorial Teaching Award, the 2021 IEEE ComSoc Joe LoCicero Service Award, the IEEE ComSoc Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award, and the 2019 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu technical field award.

Invited Talks

Radio Technology Evolution for Beyond 5G and 6G

With the recent history and experience on 5G as the guide, we will shed some light on the state of the art for 5G as well as the initial 6G vision of bringing the hyper-connected experience to every corner of life. We will provide a holistic view from an industry perspective that includes megatrends driving technology evolution towards 6G, new services envisioned and enabled, as well as technical requirements to realize these new services. The expected technical requirement on throughput, architecture, and security will likely be a major step up compared to 5G requirements, and it is therefore critical for the research community to start early and develop technologies to overcome these challenges. While 6G technologies are still in their early days, a few emerging directions are taking shape and gaining momentum in academia and industry alike, including the support of a new spectrum such as Terahertz (THz) band, novel antenna technologies, the evolution of duplex technology and network topology, spectrum sharing, AI as a native part of the protocol design, etc.

Speaker Biography

Charlie Zhang is SVP and head of the Standards and Mobility Innovation Team at Samsung Research America, where he leads research, prototyping, and standards for 5G and future multimedia networks. He is also serving as the Chairman of the Board with FiRa Consortium, which is dedicated to the development of seamless user experiences using the secured fine ranging and positioning capabilities of interoperable UWB technologies. From 2009 to 2013, he served as the Vice-Chairman of the 3GPP RAN1 working group and led the development of LTE and LTE-Advanced technologies such as 3D channel modeling, UL-MIMO, CoMP, Carrier Aggregation for TD-LTE. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Zhang is a Fellow of IEEE.

Invited Talks

5G Evolution and 6G

Study and development for technologies toward the evolution of 5G are ongoing, taking into account issues in early 5G services and emerging market needs. In parallel, research focused on technologies and services for 5G evolution and 6G is accelerating throughout the world. NTT DOCOMO published a white paper on 5G evolution and 6G in January 2020 and updated. This presentation will explain NTT DOCOMO's views described in the white paper as well as our latest activities on 5G evolution and 6G.

Speaker Biography

Mr. Takehiro Nakamura joined NTT Laboratories in 1990. He is now SVP and General Manager of the 6G-IOWN Promotion Department in NTT DOCOMO, Inc. Mr. Nakamura has been engaged in R&D and the standardization activities for advanced radio and network technologies of W-CDMA, HSPA, LTE/LTE-Advanced, 5G and 6G. He has been the Acting Chairman of Strategy & Planning Committee of 5G Mobile Communications Promotion Forum(5GMF) since October 2014 and the leader of White Paper Subcommittee in Beyond 5G Promotion Consortium in Japan since February 2021. Mr. Nakamura has also been contributing to standardization activities in 3GPP since 1999, including as chairman of 3GPP TSG-RAN from April 2009 to March 2013.

Invited Talks

Driving Air Interface Innovation Toward 6G

As 5G is being widely deployed across all regions of the world, the 5G technology evolution continues with 5G Advanced starting with 3GPP Release 18. 5G Advanced marks the beginning of the second phase of 5G and is bringing a new wave of wireless innovations that will fully deliver on the 5G promise. At the same time, the vision for 6G is already starting to formulate, and it is envisioned to become the wireless innovation platform for the next decade (2030+). To enable the path towards 6G, we are conducting advanced wireless research and development along multiple vectors that will bring disruptive innovations, pushing technology boundaries to enable new and enhanced user experiences.

Speaker Biography

John Smee is Senior VP of Engineering and Global Head of Wireless Research at Qualcomm. He oversees all 5G/6G and Wi-Fi R&D projects including systems design, standards contributions, and advanced radio, hardware, and software research testbeds and technology trials with industry partners. He joined Qualcomm in 2000, holds over 175 U.S. Patents, and has focused on the innovation and commercial launches of wireless communications across5G NR, 4G LTE, 3G CDMA, and IEEE 802.11. John also leads Qualcomm’s companywide academic collaboration program across wireless, semiconductor, automotive, multimedia, security, and machine learning. He was chosen to participate in the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering program, and is currently serving on the National Academy of Medicine Committee on Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University and also holds an M.A. from Princeton and an M.Sc. and B.Sc. from Queen's University.

Keynote

6G Networking – The Journey Towards a Novel Vision of “Service of Services”

The architectures of mobile networks have seen an unprecedented techno-economic transformation, fusing the telco world within the cloud world, adding the spices of Software Engineering to the overall system design, and ultimately yielding the concept of Telco Cloud. This has brought significant benefits in terms of reducing expenditure and operational costs, flexibility in deployment, and faster time to market. The key enablers are Network Function Virtualization, Software-Defined Networking, and Edge/Cloud Computing. Artificial Intelligence is also kicking in this arena. When all these technologies are well integrated, the creation and lifecycle management of fully programmable, flexible, service-tailored, and automated end-to-end network slices/services become possible. This will support diverse 5G and beyond 5G services, spanning from Tactile IoT to Pervasive Robotics and Immersive Services. This talk will show the journey that 6G will be likely taking towards enabling a new breeze of cloud-native mobile networking; whereby the old-fashioned concept of “network of networks” would be simply replaced by a new vision of “service of services.”

Speaker Biography

Prof. Tarik Taleb is currently a Professor at the Center of Wireless Communications, The University of Oulu, Finland. He is the founder and director of the MOSA!C Lab (www.mosaic-lab.org). Between Oct. 2014 and Dec. 2021, he was a Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University, Finland. Prior to that, he was working as Senior Researcher and 3GPP Standards Expert at NEC Europe Ltd, Heidelberg, Germany. Before joining NEC and till Mar. 2009, he worked as assistant professor at the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Japan, in a lab fully funded by KDDI, the second largest mobile operator in Japan. From Oct. 2005 till Mar. 2006, he worked as research fellow at the Intelligent Cosmos Research Institute, Sendai, Japan. He received his B. E degree in Information Engineering with distinction, M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Information Sciences from Tohoku Univ., in 2001, 2003, and 2005, respectively. Prof. Taleb’s research interests lie in the field of telco cloud, network softwarization & network slicing, AI-based software defined security, immersive communications, mobile multimedia streaming, & next generation mobile networking. Prof. Taleb has been also directly engaged in the development and standardization of the Evolved Packet System as a member of 3GPP’s System Architecture working group 2. Prof. Taleb served on the IEEE Communications Society Standardization Program Development Board. Prof. Taleb served as the general chair of the 2019 edition of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC’19) held in Marrakech, Morocco. He was the guest editor in chief of the IEEE JSAC Series on Network Softwarization & Enablers. He was on the editorial board of different IEEE journals and magazines. Till Dec. 2016, he served as chair of the Wireless Communications Technical Committee, the largest in IEEE ComSoC. Prof. Taleb is the recipient of the 2021 IEEE ComSoc Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award (Dec. 2021), the 2017 IEEE ComSoc Communications Software Technical Achievement Award (Dec. 2017) for his outstanding contributions to network softwarization. He is also the (co-) recipient of the 2017 IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize (May 2017), the 2009 IEEE ComSoc Asia-Pacific Best Young Researcher award (Jun. 2009), the 2008 TELECOM System Technology Award from the Telecommunications Advancement Foundation (Mar. 2008), the 2007 Funai Foundation Science Promotion Award (Apr. 2007), the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Japan Chapter Young Author Award (Dec. 2006), the Niwa Yasujirou Memorial Award (Feb. 2005), and the Young Researcher's Encouragement Award from the Japan chapter of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) (Oct. 2003). Some of Prof. Taleb’s research work have been also awarded best paper awards at prestigious IEEE-flagged conferences.

Invited Talks

Challenges in applying AI/ML technology to improve performance of mobile communication systems

As wireless mobile communication standards have evolved from 4G to 5G, and to 6G, many functions and services have been added and the number of frequencies and bandwidth supported have also been increased. As a result, the performance of wireless mobile communication system has been greatly improved, but not only the correlation between functions but also complexity has increased significantly. AI/ML can be the best solution to solve the problems of these complex systems. However, there are still many challenges in applying AI/ML to improve the performance of wireless mobile communication systems. In this talk, I'm going to talk about what challenges are and how we can solve them.

Speaker Biography

Seungjoo Maeng is a Master of Samsung Electronics. He joined Samsung Electronics in 1998 and developed his career in the telecommunication domain for more than 20 years. He led the development of resource management functions for all generations of mobile communication systems, and contributed to the standardization of 3GPP and IEEE, especially WiMAX standardization. He also took the lead in developing a massive MIMO system, one of the core functions of 5G technology. His main interests include scheduler design, advanced algorithm design, and performance analysis using AI / ML. He received a Ph.D. degree in electronics engineering from Seoul National University in 1998.

Invited Talks

Deep Learning-aided mobile detection and beamforming for mmWave and THz communications

As a means to support the future wireless services including AR, VR, XR, and autonomous machines and vehicles, communications over millimeter wave (mmWave) band and terahertz (THz) band have received much attention in recent years. These frequency bands offer colossal spectrum but THz waves suffer high attenuation due to the atmospheric attenuation and molecular absorption. In this talk, we present the new paradigm to control mmWave and THz communications based on deep learning (DL). We discuss the beam sweeping, DL-based object detection using camera-acquired image, mobile object localization, and feedback-less beam generation.

Speaker Biography

Byonghyo Shim received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in control and instrumentation engineering from Seoul National University (SNU), South Korea, in 1995 and 1997, respectively, and the M.S. degree in mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), USA, in 2004 and 2005, respectively. His past academic and industry experiences include Korean Air Force Academy, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung Electronics, and Korea University. Since 2014, he has been with SNU, where he is currently a Vice Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests include wireless communications, statistical signal processing, and machine learning. Dr. Shim is an editorial board member on a number of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) journals and conferences.

Invited Talks

Deep Learning-based CSI Feedback in Massive MIMO Systems

The performance gains achieved by massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) are based on the knowledge of accurate downlink channel state information (CSI). The overhead of CSI feedback occupies precious uplink bandwidth resources. Deep learning (DL) based CSI feedback refers to the idea of realizing CSI compression and reconstruction by a DL-based auto-encoder and has been regarded as a potential technique to greatly reduce feedback overhead. In this talk, we present a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research on this topic. We begin with an introduction of basic DL concepts widely used in DL-based CSI feedback to guide beginners, and then we garner and categorize the existing DL-based feedback works. We particularly focus on the ways to improve CSI feedback accuracy by introducing novel neural network architectures and communication expert knowledge. We also demonstrate the works that focus on bit-level CSI feedback and joint design of CSI feedback with other communication modules, and introduce the attempts to solve the practical problems in deploying DL-based CSI feedback, mainly including training dataset collection, online training, complexity, generalization, and standardization effects. Finally, challenges and potential research directions associated with implementing DL-based CSI feedback in future wireless communication systems are discussed.

Speaker Biography

Shi Jin received the Ph.D. degree in information and communications engineering from the Southeast University, Nanjing, in 2007. From June 2007 to October 2009, he was a Research Fellow with the Adastral Park Research Campus, University College London, London, U.K. He is currently with the faculty of the National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University. His research interests include space time wireless communications, random matrix theory, and information theory. He serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Communications Letters, and IET Communications. Dr. Jin and his co-authors have been awarded the 2011 IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in the field of communication theory and a 2010 Young Author Best Paper Award by the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

Speaker Biography

Sebastian Seung, a world-renowned neuroscience-based AI expert, is the Head of Samsung Research, the advanced research & development hub of Samsung’s Device eXperience (DX) Division. Under his leadership, Samsung Research develops future innovative technology and identifies new growth possibilities for Samsung Electronics through a global effort spanning 16 R&D centers and 7 AI centers worldwide. Samsung Research's main focus is Artificial Intelligence, data intelligence, next generation communication/media, robot, security, Tizen etc. but is constantly expanding its research areas to new fields to realize a new lifestyle based on AI technologies. 

Speaker Biography

Eddy (Hwan-Joon) Kwon is currently a Corporate EVP at Samsung Electronics, where he is heading Samsung’s 6G research. He was at Qualcomm from 2020 to 2022 where he led system design and standardization in a flagship 5G & 6G research program. From 2013 to 2019, he was leading 3GPP RAN research & standardization and industry coalition at Intel. From 2000 to 2013, he worked for Samsung with emphasis on 3G and 4G system design, performance evaluation, and standardization of 3GPP, 3GPP2, and DVB-T2 systems. He served as the chairman of Technology Working Group in North American Next Generation Alliance (NGA) from 2021 to 2022. He received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from University of California, San Diego in 2013. 

Speaker Biography

Juho Lee is currently a Fellow at Samsung Electronics, where he is leading research and standardization for mobile communications. He joined Samsung Electronics in 2000 and has worked on multiple generations of mobile communications, i.e., WCDMA and HSPA in 3G, LTE, LTE-Advanced, and LTE-Advanced Pro in 4G, and 5G NR technologies. His current research focus is on preparation of future technologies such as 5G evolution (e.g., 5G-Advanced in 3GPP) and 6G. He was a vice chairman of 3GPP RAN WG1 from February 2003 to August 2009 and chaired LTE/LTE-Advanced MIMO sessions. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea, in 2000. Dr. Lee is a Fellow of IEEE. 

Speaker Biography

Sunghyun Choi is an Executive Vice President and Head of the Advanced Communications Research Center at Samsung Research, Samsung Electronics, Seoul, Korea. He was a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea from Sept. 2002 to Aug. 2019, and served as a Vice Dean for Academic Affairs, College of Engineering during the last two years at SNU. Before joining SNU, he was with Philips Research USA, Briarcliff Manor, New York, USA, as a Senior Member Research Staff for three years. He was also a visiting associate professor at the Electrical Engineering department, Stanford University, USA, from June 2009 to June 2010. He received his B.S. (summa cum laude) and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and received Ph.D. at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in September 1999. He is currently heading researches and standardization for 6G, B5G, and IoT connectivity at Samsung Research. He co-authored over 250 technical papers and holds over 160 patents. He has received numerous awards including KICS Dr. Irwin Jacobs Award (2013), Presidential Young Scientist Award (2008), and IEEK/IEEE Joint Award for Young IT Engineer (2007). He was named IEEE fellow in 2014.