Abstract: The future global cellular infrastructure will underpin a variety of applications, such as smart city solutions, urban security, infrastructure monitoring, and smart mobility, among others. These emerging applications require new network functionalities that go beyond traditional communication. Key network KPIs for 6G include Gb/s data rates, cm-level localization, μs-level latency, and Tb/Joule energy efficiency. Additionally, future networks must support the UN's Sustainable Development Goals to ensure sustainability, net-zero emissions, resilience, and inclusivity.

The multifunctionality and net-zero emissions agenda call for a redesign of multi-access technologies for 6G and beyond. In this talk, I focus on enabling multifunctionality in signals and wireless transmissions as a means of reducing hardware redundancy and minimizing carbon footprint.

We will explore the emerging field of integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), which represents a paradigm shift towards combining sensing and communication functionalities within a single transmission, utilizing a single spectrum and ultimately sharing a common infrastructure. In this talk I briefly present the opportunities of ISAC as a natural evolution of the two technologies, with obvious gains in energy-, hardware- and cost- efficiency through the use of dual-functional hardware. I further explain that their co-design also offers opportunities in flexible trade-offs and new synergies between sensing and communication, both at the link level and at the network level. I then discuss unprecedented security vulnerabilities that ISAC brings about, that need to be urgently addressed before its large scale deployment. I present some results from my team’s work in the area, that underline the benefits of the co-design in offering a graceful trade-off between the communications, sensing and security, and some prototyping results. I conclude with some thoughts on research opportunities and the road ahead. 

Bio: Christos Masouros (FIEEE, FIET) received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, in 2004, and MSc by research and PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Manchester, UK in 2006 and 2009 respectively. In 2008 he was a research intern at Philips Research Labs, UK, working on the LTE standards. Between 2009-2010 he was a Research Associate in the University of Manchester and between 2010-2012 a Research Fellow in Queen's University Belfast. In 2012 he joined University College London as a Lecturer. He has held a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship between 2011-2016.

Since 2019 he is a Full Professor of Signal Processing and Wireless Communications in the Information and Communication Engineering research group, Dept. Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and affiliated with the Institute for Communications and Connected Systems, University College London. His research interests lie in the field of wireless communications and signal processing with particular focus on Green Communications, Large Scale Antenna Systems, Integrated Sensing and Communications, interference mitigation techniques for MIMO and multicarrier communications. Between 2018-22 he was the Project Coordinator of the €4.2m  EU H2020 ITN project PAINLESS, involving 12 EU partner universities and industries, towards energy-autonomous networks. Between 2024-28 he will be the Scientific Coordinator of the €2.7m EU H2020 DN project ISLANDS, involving 19 EU partner universities and industries, towards next generation vehicular networks. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the Insitute of Electronic Engineers (IET), the Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance (AIIA) and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA). He was the recipient of the 2024 IEEE SPS Best Paper Award, the 2024 IEEE SPS Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award, the 2023 IEEE ComSoc Stephen O. Rice Prize, co-recipient of the 2021 IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award and the recipient of the Best Paper Awards in the IEEE GlobeCom 2015 and IEEE WCNC 2019 conferences.  He is an IEEE ComSoc Distinguished lecturer 2024-2025,  and his work on ISAC has been featured in the World Economic Forum’s report on the top 10 emerging technologies. He has been recognised as an Exemplary Editor for the IEEE Communications Letters, and as an Exemplary Reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He is an Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and Editor-at-Large for IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society. He has been an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, the IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing, Associate Editor for IEEE Communications Letters, and a Guest Editor for a number of IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing issues. He is a founding member and Vice-Chair of the IEEE Emerging Technology Initiative on Integrated Sensing and Communications (SAC), Chair of the IEEE SPS ISAC Technical Working Group, and Chair of the IEEE Green Communications & Computing Technical Committee, Special Interest Group on Green ISAC.  He is a member of the IEEE Standards Association Working Group on ISAC performance metrics, and a founding member of the ETSI ISG on ISAC. He is the TPC chair for the IEEE ICC 2024 Selected Areas in Communications (SAC) Track on ISAC, Chair of the IEEE PIMRC2024 Track 1 on PHY and Fundamentals, Chair of the "Integrated Imaging and Communications" stream in IEEE CISA 2024, and TPC Co-Chair of IEEE VTC 2025.

Abstract: We consider a multi-armed bandit setting with finitely many arms, in which each arm yields an M-dimensional vector reward upon selection. We assume that the reward of each dimension (a.k.a. objective) is generated independently of the others. The best arm of any given objective is the arm with the largest component of mean corresponding to the objective. The end goal is to identify the best arm of every objective in the shortest (expected) time subject to an upper bound on the probability of error (i.e., fixed-confidence regime). We establish a problem-dependent lower bound on the limiting growth rate of the expected stopping time, in the limit of vanishing error probabilities. This lower bound, we show, is characterised by a max-min optimisation problem that is computationally expensive to solve at each time step. We propose an algorithm that uses the novel idea of surrogate proportions to sample the arms at each time step, eliminating the need to solve the max-min optimisation problem at each step. We demonstrate theoretically that our algorithm is asymptotically optimal. We provide extensive empirical studies to substantiate the efficiency of our algorithm. Finally, applications of best arm identification to the problem of fast beam alignment in wireless communications will be discussed. 

This is joint work with Zhirui Chen (National University of Singapore), P. N. Karthik (IIT Hyderabad), Yeow Meng Chee (National University of Singapore), Yi Wei (Zhejiang University) and Zixin Zhong (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Guangzhou). 

Bio: Vincent Y. F. Tan received the B.A. and M.Eng. degrees in electrical and information science from Cambridge University in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2011. He is currently a Professor with the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), National University of Singapore (NUS). His research interests include information theory, machine learning, and statistical signal processing.

Bio: D. Manjunath received his BE from Mysore University, MS from Indian Institute  of Technology, Madras and PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst, Troy NY in  1986, 1989  and 1993 respectively. He has worked in the  Corporate R & D center  of General Electric in  Scehenctady NY during the summer of 1990. He was a  Visiting Faculty in the Comuter and Information Sciences Dept of the University of Delaware and a Post Doctoral  Fellow in the Computer Science  Dept of the University of  Toronto. He was on the Electrical Engineering  faculty of the Indian Inst of Technology, Kanpur during December  1994 - July 1998.  He has been with the Deptt of Electrical Engineering of IIT, Bombay since July 1998.  

Abstract: The basic information-bearing carrier in Zak-OTFS is a pulse in the DD domain which is a quasi-periodic localized function. The Zak-OTFS performance is influenced by how well these pulses are localized in the DD domain. A DD filter matched to the transmit filter is used at the receiver. The 'effective' channel in Zak-OTFS includes the cascade of the transmit DD filter, the physical channel, and the receive DD filter. Consequently, the choice of the pulse shaping filter influences the DD spread of the effective channel. Estimating the DD domain input-output (I/O) relation in Zak-OTFS amounts to estimating the coefficients of the effective channel. The estimated I/O relation is used for subsequent equalization/detection in the DD domain. Therefore, the pulse shape influences the performance of the two important receiver functions, namely, I/O relation estimation and equalization/detection. The pulse shape also influences the localization performance in radar sensing using Zak-OTFS. This talk will focus on the choice of the pulse shaping filter and its effect on the I/O relation estimation and equalization performance in Zak-OTFS.

Bio: A. Chockalingam is a professor in the department of ECE, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He obtained the Ph.D. degree from the same department in 1993. He was a postdoctoral fellow and an assistant project scientist in the department of ECE, UC San Diego from 1993 to 1996. He was with Qualcomm, San Diego, as a Staff Engineer/Manager from 1996 to 1998. Since 1998 he has been a faculty at IISc, Bangalore. He has served as an editor/associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications, IEEE Trans. Vehicular Technology, IEEE JSAC, and IEEE JSTSP. He is an author of the book on “Large MIMO Systems” published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. He is also an author of the recent book on “OTFS Modulation – Theory and Applications” published by IEEE-Wiley in December 2024.