icWCSN Invited Speakers

 

Invited Speakers

 

Prof. George C. Polyzos

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China

 

Speech Title: Data Spaces for controlled sharing of Data

Abstract: Data Spaces are an emerging paradigm enabling secure and trusted data sharing by focusing on interoperability, sovereignty, and trust. Unlike traditional data access methods, databases, data lakes, and the Web, Data Spaces provide a controlled environment where data can be accessed while maintaining privacy and regulatory compliance. They address the issues of interoperability and control and help overcome established and avoid creating new data silos. This is crucial for AI and ML, which rely on big data, including from sensors and the IoT, to function effectively. Data Spaces allow for interconnected data from different entities, enabling advanced data operations and decentralized control. Key technologies, such as Decentralized Identifiers, Verifiable Credentials, Federated Learning, Searchable Encryption, Digital Watermarks, support these capabilities. We discuss use cases and outline a roadmap for global Data Spaces development.

Biography: Professor George C. Polyzos is with the School of Data Science at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, on leave from the Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece, where he founded and directed for many years the Mobile Multimedia Laboratory (MMlab). Previously, he was Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he was co-director of the Computer Systems Laboratory, member of the Steering Committee of the Center for Wireless Communications and Senior Fellow of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University in Athens, Greece and his MASc in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Canada.
Under his leadership the MMlab has participated in a series of research projects funded by the European Commission (EC), the European Space Agency, and Greece that co-developed Publish-Subscribe Internetworking, an Information-Centric Networking architecture, with project PURSUIT receiving the Future Internet Award in 2013. He also led MMlab’s participation in EC-funded project SOFIE investigating Distributed Ledger and Interledger Technologies, including smart contracts, for Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems federation, focusing on openness, security, privacy, and business incentives, and more recently, EC-funded project “InterConnect,” on smart homes and energy grid evolution. In 2022 he co-founded “Internet Identity Security and Privacy Solutions” P.C. (ExcID), an MMlab spin-off, to advance and commercialize digital identity technologies and software supply chain security.
He was the founding chair of the Steering Committee of the ACM SIGCOMM conference on Information-Centric Networking and is now on the Steering Committee of the IFIP Wireless and Mobile Networking Conference. He has also been reviewer and panelist for the US NSF, the EC, and other research agencies. His current research interests focus on the IoT, security and privacy, energy informatics, and multi-agent AI systems.

Biography: Lei Liu (Senior Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree in Communication and Information Systems from Xidian University in 2017. From 2014 to 2016, he was an exchange Ph.D. student with Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. From 2016 to 2017, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Singapore. From 2017 to 2019, he was a Research Fellow with the City University of Hong Kong (CityU), Hong Kong. From 2019 to 2023, he was an Assistant Professor with the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Japan. He is currently a ZJU Young Professor with Zhejiang University. He is a senior member of IEEE and the China Institute of Communications (CIC), and a Youth Committee Member of China Institute of Electronics on Communications Society. He is serving as a Guest Editor for Entropy, a Associate Editor of the Electronics and Signal Processing, and a Youth Editor of the Chinese Journal of Electronics and the Radio communication technology. He served as the Publications Co-Chair of the 2021 IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Co-Chair of the Information Theory and Coding Session at the 2023 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Signal Processing, and Technical Co-Chair of the 2nd International Conference on Networks, Communications and Intelligent Computing. He received a Young Star Award and two Best Poster Awards at the Chinese Institute of Electronics Conference on Information Theory. He was an Exemplary Reviewer (fewer than 2%) of IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2020. From 2023 to 2026, he is supported by the Excellent Young Scientists Program (Overseas) of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Excellent Young Scholar Talent Program of Huawei. His current research interests include message passing, statistical signal processing, wireless communications, modern channel coding, and information theory.

Biography: Prof. Wenzhe Gu is a faculty member at Huizhou University in China, specializing in the research of 5G/6G/mm-wave antenna design and intelligent control algorithms. At the State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, his primary research focuses on wireless self-organized network routing algorithms and intelligent transportation, specifically group intelligent service computing.
Prof. Gu is also a Distinguished Researcher and Graduate Tutor at Shenzhen University, where he concentrates on smart antenna algorithms and smart IoT AIoT applications within the Wireless Communication and Antenna Propagation Laboratory.
In his previous roles, Prof. Gu was responsible for IT product development and management at ICBC (Head Office) and Ping An Bank (Head Office), where he handled the design of bank public business product systems, as well as major project planning, implementation, and operational commissioning.
He has also led forward-looking technology research, focusing on the application of emerging technologies such as AI (machine learning, natural language processing), IoT, and cloud computing in the banking sector. His work includes conducting feasibility studies, prototype designs, and project pilots for these innovative technologies in the field of public banking services.

Biography: Bingpeng Zhou is currently an Associate Professor with the School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, China. He received the Ph.D. degree from the Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China, in 2016. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, from 2016 to 2019. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher with Aalto University, Espoo, Finland, from 2019 to 2020. He was a Visiting Ph.D. Student with the 5G Innovation Centre, University of Surrey, Guildford, U.K., in 2015. He was selected for Major Talent Program of Guangdong Province for Distinguished Youth. His research interests include visible light-based positioning, integrated communication and sensing, Bayesian signal processing, and next-generation wireless network.

 

Speech Title: Outage-Based Beamforming Design for Integrated Sensing and Communications 6G Systems

Abstract: Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is emerging as a cornerstone technology for future 6G networks, enabling wireless environments that can support advanced communication and sensing. In this talk, we characterize SAC performance in by jointly optimizing the tradeoffs between sensing from a Bartlett perspective, and communication from outage SINR perspective. In particular, we formulate a framework that allows to achieve the aforementioned sensing and communication joint capabilities through beamforming. Our main results include the explicit dependencies of outage parameters on the SAC tradeoff. In particular, the correlation level between the steering vector towards the target and the channel between the dual functional radar-communication base station and the communication user directly impacts the ISAC trade-off.

Biography: Ahmad Bazzi was born in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France, in 2017, and the MSc degree (summa cum laude) in wireless communication systems (SAR) from Centrale Supélec, in 2014. He is the Research Scientist at the Wireless Research Lab of New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi, and NYU WIRELESS, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, contributing to integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). Prior to that, he was the Algorithm and Signal Processing Team Leader at CEVA-DSP, Sophia Antipolis, leading the work on Wi-Fi (802.11ax) and Bluetooth (5.xx BR/BLE/BTDM/LR) high-performant (HP) PHY modems, OFDMA MAC schedulers, and RF-related issues. He is an inventor with multiple patents involving intellectual property of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth products, all of which have been implemented and sold to key clients. Since 2018, he has been publishing lectures on the YouTube platform under his name “Ahmad Bazzi”, where his channel contains mathematical, algorithmic, and programming topics, with over 285,000 subscribers and more than 17 million views, as of January 2024. He was awarded a CIFRE Scholarship from Association Nationale Recherche Technologies (ANRT) France, in 2014, in collaboration with RivieraWaves (now CEVA-DSP). He was nominated for Best Student Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2016. He received the Silver Plate Creator Award from YouTube, in 2022, for his 100,000 subscriber milestone. He was awarded an exemplary reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Communications in 2022 and an exemplary reviewer for the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters in 2022. He served as technical program committee (TPC) member and a reviewer for many leading international conferences. He was selected amongst top 200 Top Arab creators for 2023. His research interests include signal processing, wireless communications, statistics, and optimization.

 

Speech Title: Joint Node Selection and Resource Allocation Optimization for Cooperative Sensing with a Shared Wireless Backhaul

Abstract: In this talk, we focus on a cooperative sensing framework in the context of future multi-functional network with both communication and sensing ability, where one base station (BS) serves as a sensing transmitter and several nearby BSs serve as sensing receivers. Each receiver receives the sensing signal reflected by the target and communicates with the fusion center (FC) through a wireless multiple access channel (MAC) for cooperative target localization. To improve the localization performance, we present a hybrid information-signal domain cooperative sensing (HISDCS) design, where each sensing receiver transmits both the estimated time delay/effective reflecting coefficient and the received sensing signal sampled around the estimated time delay to the FC. Then, we propose to minimize the number of channel uses by utilizing an efficient Karhunen-Loéve transformation (KLT) encoding scheme for signal quantization and proper node selection, under the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) constraint and the capacity limits of MAC. A novel matrix-inequality constrained successive convex approximation (MCSCA) algorithm is proposed to optimize the wireless backhaul resource allocation, together with a greedy strategy for node selection. Despite the high non-convexness of the considered problem, we prove that the proposed MCSCA algorithm is able to converge to the set of Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solutions of a relaxed problem obtained by relaxing the discrete variables. Besides, a low-complexity quantization bit reallocation algorithm is designed, which does not perform explicit node selection, and is able to harvest most of the performance gain brought by HISDCS. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to show that the proposed HISDCS design is able to significantly outperform the baseline schemes.

Biography: Ming-Min Zhao received the B.Eng. and the Ph.D. degrees in Information and Communication Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2012 and 2017, respectively. From Dec. 2015 to Aug. 2016, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, USA. From Jul. 2017 to Jul. 2018, he worked as a Research Engineer at Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. From May 2019 to Jun. 2020, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore. Since Aug. 2018, he has been working with Zhejiang University, where he is currently an Associate Professor with the College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering. His research interests include algorithm design and analysis for advanced MIMO, channel coding, cooperative communication and sensing, and machine learning for wireless communications. He was the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Katherine Johnson Young Author Best Paper Award in 2024.