Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speakers at ICCCN 2024


July 29, 2024
Keynote Talk:
Title: Practical Integrated Sensing and Communication for 6G
Speaker: Dr. Joerg Widmer, IMDEA Networks


Abstract: The high bandwidth available with new mobile and wireless communication technologies allows for very high data rates, and at the same time enables highly accurate localization and environment sensing. This keynote highlights the practical design aspects of localization and sensing systems, and in particular the challenges of integrated sensing and communication. We discuss how to achieve decimeter-level location accuracy with simple commercial millimeter-wave off-the-shelf communication devices and how sub-6 GHz information can help to further improve the reliability of the system. We also discuss how to use communication hardware to perform zero-cost monitoring of human movement and activities in indoor spaces (rather than using dedicated radars). To this end, access points can be retrofitted to perform radar-like extraction of the tiny micro-Doppler effects caused by the human motion. Such systems can then be used to enable fine-grained sensing applications such as simultaneous activity recognition and person identification of multiple human subjects. Besides the underlying concepts, the keynote will specifically focus on the practical implementation aspects, testbed design and experimental results with such systems.

Biography:

Joerg Widmer is Research Professor and Research Director of IMDEA Networks in Madrid, Spain. Before, he held positions at DOCOMO Euro-Labs in Munich, Germany and EPFL, Switzerland. He was a visiting researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, USA, University College London, UK, and TU Darmstadt, Germany. His research focuses on wireless networks, ranging from extremely high frequency millimeter-wave communication and MAC layer design to mobile network architectures. Joerg Widmer authored more than 200 conference and journal papers and three IETF RFCs, and holds 14 patents. He was awarded an ERC consolidator grant, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Mercator Fellowship of the German Research Foundation, a Spanish Ramon y Cajal grant, as well as thirteen best paper awards. He is an IEEE Fellow and Distinguished Member of the ACM.

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July 30, 2024
Keynote Talk:
Title: TBD
Speaker: Dr. Minlan Yu, Harvard


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July 31, 2024
Keynote Talk:
Title: Neural Feature Learning for Engineering Problem
Speaker: Dr. Lizhong Zheng, MIT


Abstract: Using deep neural networks as elements of engineering solutions can potentially enhance the overall performance of the system. Engineering problems are often more complex than the currently popular applications of DNNs, such as image or natural language problems, in that 1) we often have domain knowledge in various forms, including constraints, preference, and loss metrics; 2) we often look for parameterized solutions for a collection of scenarios, which are all different from the one where the training data is collected; 3) we often need to process multi-modal inputs with different time scales, resolutions, or qualities; and 4) because of the tight resource constraints, we often employ more complex sample management techniques such as the use of contrastive negative samples or augmentation. Facing these fundamentally more complex situations, we argue that the existing practices that use DNNs as black boxes can be insufficient.
In this talk, we discuss a new analysis method based on an information theoretic approach to study multivariate dependence. We define a new metric to measure the semantics of the information contents carried by features learned in a DNN and, based on that, a new architecture to separate the contributions of the different variables to the multivariate dependence. We demonstrate how to use this architecture to allow domain knowledge to be incorporated in the learning process. We use the example of symbol detection in wireless fading interference channels to discuss some of the key issues and steps in such solutions.

Biography:

Lizhong Zheng received the B.S and M.S. degrees, in 1994 and 1997 respectively, from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, China, and the Ph.D. degree, in 2002, from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley. Since 2002, he has been working at MIT, where he is currently a professor of Electrical Engineering. His research interests include information theory, statistical inference, communications, and networks theory. He is an IEEE fellow and a member of the IEEE Information Theory Society, where he served as conference chair, TPC co-chair, editor and area editor for the Transactions.