Speaker: Haris Gačanin, Professor, RWTH Aachen University
Title: Metaverse-ready wireless communications and computing systems
Summary: The ongoing efforts in the development of the metaverse worlds as the future Internet are driven by media and social platform industries (e.g., Meta, Microsoft, etc.) and mostly target consumer markets such as gaming, e-commerce, real estate, etc. The concept of metaverse seamlessly integrates extended reality (XR) digital service contents into scattered users' physical worlds to empower users to communicate with close-to-real and environment-aware experiences. The metaverse will redefine the utilization of digital and physical communication infrastructure to empower fully immersive digital services. With certain technology limits, the next-generation (6G) wireless communication systems will support the development of the future immersive Internet, e.g., XR-based digitalization of industrial services.
The next-generation Internet, as a foundation for communicating immersive user experiences, will include interdisciplinary research efforts in novel communications and computing infrastructure (i.e., Web 3.0), wireless XR devices, and techno-social development of metaverse worlds. This talk discusses research challenges and opportunities in the development of wireless systems as the next-generation communication and computing infrastructure. We will give an overview of the successful research of the 6GEM project, i.g., BMBF 6G Research Hub, related to the integration of wireless XR technologies, digital twins, and artificial intelligence in wireless systems. We will demonstrate an example of XR-based control and management of the wireless system. We summarize the research challenges of designing next-generation communications and computing infrastructure to support the future immersive Internet.
Biography: Haris Gačanin (IEEE F’20) received his Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical engineering from the University of Sarajevo in 2000. In 2005 and 2008, respectively, he received MSc and Ph.D. from Tohoku University in Japan. He was with Tohoku University from 2008 until 2010, first as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) postdoctoral fellow and later as an Assistant Professor. From 2010, he worked for the Customer Experience Division of Alcatel- Lucent Bell (now Nokia Bell) as a Physical-layer Expert and later as Research Director. He joined Nokia Bell Labs as Department Head in 2016. Since April 2020, he has joined RWTH Aachen University as the head of the Chair for Distributed Signal Processing and co-director of the Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems. His professional interests are related to broad areas of digital signal processing and artificial intelligence with applications in wireless communications. He is a fellow of IEEE and a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society with numerous scientific publications (journals, conferences, and patents) and invited/tutorial talks. He is a recipient of industrial innovation awards such as the Nokia Bell Patent Filings Award and Nokia Bell Granted Patents All Times Award in 2019, the Nokia Bell Patent Submissions Award in 2018, the IEICE Communications Society Best Paper Award in 2021, the IEICE Communication System Study Group Best Paper Award (joint 2014, 2015, 2017), The 2013 Alcatel-Lucent Award of Excellence, the 2012 KDDI Foundation Research Award, the 2009 KDDI Foundation Research Grant Award, the 2008 JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowships for Foreign Researchers, the 2005 Active Research Award in Radio Communications, 2005 Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2005-Fall) Student Paper Award from IEEE VTS Japan Chapter and the 2004 Institute of IEICE Society Young Researcher Award. Furthermore, he served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Communications Magazine, and associate editor of IEICE Transactions on Communications and IET Communications. In addition, he acted as a general chair and technical program committee member of numerous IEEE conferences.
