COVID-19 is a wake-up call for public health and safety. Since the pandemic began, the ultraviolet (UV) technologies have been widely employed in numerous places to contain and eliminate the viruses. Although UV light is nonchemical and does not contaminate the environment, however, most of the UV light today comes from the toxic mercury lamps. In our lab and many institutions in the world, researchers are developing semiconductor-based UV technologies that are compact, reliable, and nontoxic. This seminar shows the research background and briefly discusses the research progress made by our team in a few key areas including material growth, physics, and device fabrication for UV lasers, LEDs, and photodetectors.

First Speaker: Megumi Kaneko, National Institute of Informatics, Japan. Talk Title: Resource Allocation in NOMA-Based Fog Radio Access Networks. In this talk, I will first describe the potential benefits offered by the integration of NOMA in an FRAN architecture for achieving the specific objectives of use cases envisioned in B5G, in terms of throughput, latency, reliability and energy efficiency. Second Speaker: Bruno Clerckx, Imperial College London, United Kingdom. Talk Title: Rate-Splitting Multiple Access and its Applications to Cloud-Enabled Platforms. This talk argues that to efficiently cope with the high throughput, reliability, heterogeneity of Quality-of-Service (QoS), and massive connectivity requirements of future multi-antenna wireless networks, multiple access and multiuser communication system design need to depart from the two extreme interference management strategies, namely fully treat interference as noise (as commonly used in 5G, MU-MIMO, CoMP, Massive MIMO, millimetre wave MIMO) and fully decode interference (as in NOMA).

This talk will give an overview of the research of III-nitride based visible light-emitting diodes (LEDs) from the KAUST Energy Conversion Devices and Materials (ECO Devices) Laboratory (https://ecodevices.kaust.edu.sa/Pages/Overview.aspx). III-nitride based visible LEDs have achieved tremendous success in the field of solid-state lighting and dominated the lighting markets in the past decades. This technique becomes mature, and the luminous efficacy of LED devices approaches the theoretical maximum limit.

Aerospace Engineering is the source of much dreaming and worrying in most people's imagination. As such, it constitutes a marvelous support for the development and application of numerous disciplines, chief among them are aerodynamics, structures, flight and orbital mechanics. With time however, information technologies are progressively becoming the costliest activity within the aerospace engineering systems design phase. Indeed, they stand as the core elements of avionics systems, airline operations, air traffic control, spacecraft engineering, and planetary exploration, among others. Such subjects have been bringing much joy and teaching many lessons to your speaker for the past 30 years and will keep doing so, hopefully, for the next three decades.

In this webinar we will give an overview of several key technologies related to our special issues in Frontiers of Communications and Networks; (1) visible light communications (VLC) and (2) applications of machine learning in optical and wireless communication systems.

Billions of IoT devices will need to communicate with each other in a wireless fashion in the future. Thus, new antenna designs, which perform irrespective of their orientation and position, and can be mass manufactured at lower costs are required. This work presents the theory and design of antennas with near isotropic radiation performance which can be additively manufactured on the packaging of the circuits.

Digital health solutions improve healthcare services and help achieve sustainable and higher standards of health and well-being. These solutions are mainly based on Digital Signal Processing (DSP) to record, interpret, and diagnose bio-signals such as Electrocardiogram (ECG) or Magnetoencephalography (MEG). In my thesis, a novel signal/image post-processing algorithm is proposed based on the Semi-Classical Signal Analysis method (SCSA) to enhance biomedical data quality. In addition, new feature extraction algorithms are proposed, based on the SCSA and the new Quantization-based Position Weight Matrix (QuPWM), which opens new tracks toward smart biomedical diagnosis and decision-making assistance in different fields such as predicting true Poly(A) regions in a DNA sequence, multiple hand gesture prediction.

In this talk, we review the main backhauling techniques, and present the main motivations/standardization agreements on IAB. Moreover, we present comparisons between the IAB networks and the cases where all or part of the small access points are fiber-connected.

This talk will focus on the device applications of MXenes and MXene-derived functional materials. Our group has been developing device concepts that capitalize on the rich and promising properties of MXenes. For example, the excellent electrical conductivity of MXenes makes them good candidates as contact materials electronics (printed, wearable, and stretchable electronics) both as local and global contacts. We have demonstrated that MXenes can be used as electrical contacts in thin-film electronics, CMOS devices, quantum-dot transistors, LEDs, and solar cells.

The aim of this talk is to provide an overview of the latest research results and innovations in NOMA technologies as well as their emerging applications. Future research challenges regarding NOMA in B5G and 6G are also presented.

Here, I will talk about recent advances in the field of QD lasers with a focus on direct growth on Si. Si photonics has found widespread application, particularly for high volume applications and for co-integration with CMOS electronics. I will start with an overview of the field, followed with a summary of device performance and fundamental physics basis for the improved response.

In this talk we will discuss the work conducted at KAUST sensors lab and KAUST sensor initiative

Abstract

Extensive research has already started on 6G and beyond wireless technologies of 2030 due

With the advent of commercial products, such as Apple iWatch and Samsung Galaxy Gear, body-centric communication has increasingly garnered the public attention and smoothly translated state-of-the-art research work into reality. However, challenges still remains and these are often fundamental physical hurdles that need to be further explored and investigated to come up with efficient and scalable solutions applicable to many fields and areas. This becomes an important research area when you look at the scale or rather the multiple scales it needs to work at from body-size or larger networks to the nano-scale where there have been lots of interest recently on how to get nano-devices inside tissues and even inside intelligent materials around us.  The talk will present recent development in the area of antennas, RF devices and electromagnetic solutions for applications such as healthcare, biomedical engineering and next generation wireless communications. It will look at the challenges from theoretical, numerical and experimental prospective to ensure that proposed concepts and outcomes are of benefit not only to those domains but other beyond such as agricultural technology and smart home and cities. 

Visible light communication (VLC or LiFi) has been a topic of intense research after the idea was proposed in 2011. To date, a data rate of multiple 100s Mbps has been demonstrated using LED as light source. At KAUST, we are developing the next generation of SSL lighting using visible laser diodes (LDs) and superluminescent diodes (SLDs). Laser diodes and SLDs do not suffer efficiency droop at high current densities. This allows for the design of lamps using a single, small footprint, light-emitting chip operating at high current densities. Using a single chip reduces system costs compared with LEDs because the system uses less material per chip, requires fewer chips, and employs simplified optics and a simplified heat-sink. The chip area required for LED technologies will be significantly reduced using LD/SLD-based solid-state lighting. This technology will also enable highly controllable beams in term of tunable throw distance, tunable color temperature and rendering index. Multiple Gbit/s VLC links have been demonstrated using LD/SLD as transmitters. In this talk, I will focus on the recent progress of visible diode LD/SLD-based lighting technology and high-speed transmitters and receivers for multiple-Gbps VLC and underwater wireless optical communication.

Gallium nitride (GaN) is a semiconductor material highly regarded for visible light generation since it provides the most efficient platform for compact violet, blue, and green light emitters, and in turn, high-quality and ubiquitous white lighting. Despite this fact, the potential of the GaN platform has not been fully exploited. This potential must enable the precise control in the various properties of light, realizing functions beyond the conventional. Simultaneously, the field of the telecommunications is looking for candidate technologies fit for wireless transmission in the next generations of communication. Visible light communication (VLC) may play a significant role in the future of the last mile of the network by providing both a fast internet connection and a high-quality illumination.

In this talk, I will give an overview of research done in the Image and Video Understanding Lab (IVUL) at KAUST. At IVUL, we work on topics that are important to the computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML) communities, with emphasis on three research themes: Theme 1 (Video Understanding): We aim to extract meaningful semantic information from large-scale video data by tackling research problems such as object tracking, activity detection, moment retrieval, and language grounding in video. Theme 2 (Visual Computing for Automated Navigation): We develop methodology to enable more accurate, reliable, and robust perception of the visual world for automated navigation applications (e.g. self-driving cars and UAVs). In this theme, we tackle research problems such as object tracking, segmentation, and detection in 3D data, as well as transfer learning from simulation (sim2real). Theme 3 (Fundamentals/Foundations): In this theme, we tackle fundamental research problems in CV and ML that transcend specific applications with focus on deep network theory/analysis (e.g. robustness, certification, and interpretability) and structured optimization methods for large-scale CV/ML problems. Throughout the talk, I will highlight some of the interesting projects at IVUL to encourage students to get interested in the research field.

With the advent of wearable sensors and internet of things (IoT), there is a new focus on electronics which can be bent so that they can be worn or mounted on non-planar objects. Due to large volume (billions of devices), there is a requirement that the cost is extremely low, to the extent that they become disposable. The flexible and low-cost aspects can be addressed through additive manufacturing technologies such as inkjet, screen and 3D printing. This talk introduces additive manufacturing as an emerging technique to realize low cost, flexible and wearable wireless communication and sensing systems. The ability to print electronics on unconventional mediums such as plastics, papers, and textiles has opened up a plethora of new applications. In this talk, various innovative antenna and sensor designs will be shown which have been realized through additive manufacturing. A multilayer process will be presented where dielectrics are also printed in addition to the metallic parts, thus demonstrating fully printed components. Many new functional inks and their use in tunable and reconfigurable components will be shown. In the end, many system level examples of wireless sensing applications will be shown. The promising results of these designs indicate that the day when electronics can be printed like newspapers and magazines through roll-to-roll and reel-to-reel printing is not far away.

Abstract

The notion of mechanical computation has been revived in the past few years, with the adv

Advances in power electronics have enabled many renewable energy applications. Wind energy harnessing is very promising and offshore farm installations have grown considerably in the past years. In this seminar we will go through some of the fundamentals of these enabling technologies and their applications. We will also present a simple, reliable, efficient and cost-effective concept applied to parallel connection of offshore wind turbines.

In this seminar, the approaches for improving the efficiency of AlGaN based DUV emitters will be presented. The high-temperature metal organic chemical vapor deposition system has been used to grow high-quality AlGaN based epi-layers and nanostructure on the sapphire substrate.

Frequency-reconfigurable RF components are highly desired in a wireless system because a single frequency-reconfigurable RF component can replace multiple RF components to reduce the size, cost, and weight. Typically, the reconfigurable RF components are realized using capacitive varactors, PIN diodes, or MEMS switches, which are expensive, require tedious soldering steps, and are rigid and thus non-compatible with futuristic applications of flexible and wearable electronics. In this work, we have demonstrated vanadium dioxide (VO₂) based RF switches that have been realized through additive manufacturing technologies (inkjet printing and screen printing), which dramatically brings the cost down to a few cents. Also, no soldering or additional attachment step is required as the switch can be simply printed on the RF component. The printed VO₂ switches are configured in two types (shunt configuration and series configuration) where both types have been characterized with two activation mechanisms (thermal activation and electrical activation) up to 40 GHz. The measured insertion loss of 1-3 dB, isolation of 20-30 dB, and switching speed of 400 ns is comparable to other non-printed and expensive RF switches. Moreover, as an application for the printed VO₂ switches, a fully printed frequency reconfigurable filter has also been designed in this work.

Katharina Lorenz's main research interests are the doping of WBS with optically active ions and the study of radiation effects in WBS materials for radiation detectors and radiation resistant electronics.

Brief Biography

Education:

In this thesis, we present a pragmatic heterogeneous integration strategy to obtain high-performance 3D electronic systems using existing CMOS technology. Critical challenges addressed during the process are; reliable flexible interconnects, maximum area efficiency, soft-polymeric packaging, and heterogeneous integration compatible with current CMOS technology. First, a modular LEGO approach presents a novel method to obtain flexible electronics in a lock-and-key (plug and play) manner with reliable interconnects. It includes a process to convert standard rigid IC into flexible LEGO without any performance degradation with a high-yield. For the majority of healthcare and environmental monitoring applications, a sensory array is essential for continuous spatiotemporal activity recording. Here we present an ultra- high-density sensory solution (1 million sensors) as an epitome of density and address each of the associated challenges. A generic heterogeneous integration scheme is devised to obtain a physically flexible standalone electronic system using 3D-coin architecture. Lastly, a feather-light non-invasive ‘Marine-Skin’ platform to monitor deep-ocean monitoring is presented using the heterogeneous integration scheme. Electrical and mechanical characterization establish the reliability, integrity, robustness, and ruggedness of the processes, sensors, and multisensory flexible system.