In this talk, I will start by providing our vision for next-generation networks. Throughout the talk, I will highlight several challenges in existing communication technologies that could have the potential of shaping new research and deployment directions of future wireless networks, including, (i) review our recent advances in non-terrestrial networks, which includes both UAVs and satellite (ii) show satellite systems are essential for today’s traffic-intensive applications while maintaining an accepted end-to-end latency for delay-sensitive applications and (iii) show how we integrated both existing Wi-Fi technology with optics to extend the Internet as we use it today to the underwater environments via Aqua-fi.

Raman spectroscopy has been used extensively to characterize the strain, defect density, and doping levels in semiconductors. We will introduce Raman spectroscopy in Nitride materials to estimate the crystal quality, and carrier concentration, which is determined by vibration modes.

In a nutshell, Resilient Computing is a new paradigm based on modelling, architecting and designing computer systems so that: they have built-in baseline defences; such defences cope with virtually any quality of threat, be it accidental faults, design errors, cyber-attacks, or unexpected operating conditions; provide incremental protection of, and automatically adapt to, a dynamic range of threat severity; provide sustainable operation.

The Compound Semiconductor Weekend will focus on some of the most important research areas on the beautiful KAUST campus by the Red Sea. It features 18 invited and contributed oral talks and a poster competition. Semiconductor technology is a major foundation of the third and fourth Industrial Revolutions as well as the modern society. While silicon remains as the widest-employed semiconductor, compound semiconductors have emerged from lab research to becoming the second most widely used within a short period of time. This is because compound semiconductors could possess multiple superior key properties simultaneously. They include high speed, high power, and efficient light emission and absorption, as well as that they can be produced in large scale at low cost and are highly robust. As a result, they have become cornerstones of many crucial technologies including lighting, display, communication, space exploration, and electric vehicles. While semiconductor researchers are plowing deeper for those technologies, compound semiconductors attract increasing attention for future computing, memory, and quantum information science as the pursuit of Moore’s Law has slowed down dramatically when the size of silicon transistors is approaching the physical limit of a few atoms.

The remainder of the talk will focus on an ongoing effort to assess a city’s ecological impact through city scale digital twins.

This talk will first discuss the communications, computation, and security challenges for the IoT era and motivate a systematic methodology to address them.  The talk will then overview some relevant problems and their potential solutions. Future research direction will also be highlighted.

In this talk, we discuss a recently proposed mathematical framework that enables tractable analysis of LEO satellite-enabled communication systems while capturing the influence of satellites’ numbers and altitudes as well as the spatial distribution of earth stations. Firstly, we describe how the stochastic geometry-based framework is modeled and discuss its accuracy. Next, we provide a detailed example of where this framework can be used for coverage analysis. Furthermore, we discuss how this framework can be used to study routing and end-to-end latency analysis in such networks. Realistic values from existing constellations, such as OneWeb and Starlink, are further used as case studies in this talk.

In this dissertation, the development of novel practical resistive and capacitive-type inertial sensors using liquid metal as a functional proof mass material is presented. Utilizing the unique electromechanical properties of liquid metal, the novel inertial sensor design confines a graphene-coated liquid metal droplet inside tubular and 3D architectures, enabling motion sensing in single and multiple directions. Combining the graphene-coated liquid metal droplet with printed sensing elements offers a robust fatigue-free alternative material for rigid, proof mass-based accelerometers. Resistive and capacitive sensing mechanisms were both developed, characterized, and evaluated. Emerging rapid fabrication technologies such as direct laser writing and 3D printing were mainly adopted, offering a scalable fabrication strategy independent of advanced microfabrication facilities. The developed inertial sensor was integrated with a programmable system on a chip (PSoC) to function as a stand-alone system and demonstrate its application for real-time- monitoring of human health/ physical activity and for soft human-machine interfaces. The developed inertial sensor architecture and materials in this work offer a new paradigm for manufacturing these widely used sensors that have the potential to complement the performance of their silicon counterparts and extend their applications.

In this talk, I will speak on a novel antenna technology, referred to as fluid antenna, that adopts a software-controlled, position-flexible antenna to operate on the best signal envelope within a given space. This talk presents some early results on fluid antenna systems, which shows its potential for improving wireless communication performance.

This talk will be focused on Integrated Photonics technology, which demands strong and robust confinement of light in order to attain the maximum possible integration of photonics devices on a single chip. Keeping this in mind, three applications based on LEMAC’s recent developments will be presented in this talk.

Metaverse is the next-generation Internet after the web and the mobile network revolutions, in which humans (acting as digital avatars) can interact with other people and software applications in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual world. In this presentation, we first briefly introduce major concepts of Metaverse and the virtual service management. Then, we discuss applications of game theory in the virtual service management.

With the transition from traditional to LED light sources, the lighting industry has changed completely. Lighting systems have become intelligent and connected.

One of the key drivers for next-generation mobile communications is the support of the Internet of Things (IoT), with billions of objects connected to the Internet and very low latency. The 5G technology will support the realization of smart cities, smart environments, and big data applications.

In this talk, Dr. Sarkar will introduce the history and concepts of power semiconductor devices. A special emphasis will be laid on understanding the power semiconductor device-design keeping the applications in perspective. Apart from covering traditional power electronic devices, Dr. Sarkar will also introduce emerging (ultra)wide power semiconductor devices that are expected to occupy a large market share, and their challenges. The core concepts will be thoroughly discussed with the help of examples and interactive discussions.

In this talk, Dr. Sarkar will introduce the history and concepts of power semiconductor devices. A special emphasis will be laid on understanding the power semiconductor device-design keeping the applications in perspective. Apart from covering traditional power electronic devices, Dr. Sarkar will also introduce emerging (ultra)wide power semiconductor devices that are expected to occupy a large market share, and their challenges. The core concepts will be thoroughly discussed with the help of examples and interactive discussions.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are now considered among the key enabling technologies for 6G systems. Empowered by the recent advances in meta-material, RISs are equipped with a large number of low-cost passive elements that allow for the modification of the radio waves in that they reflect, refract, and scatter radio signals in a controllable fashion to counteract the destructive effect of multipath fading. These features can be leveraged to transform the propagation environment into a smart space that can be programmable for the benefit of the communication application. Throughout this proposal, we study RIS-assisted systems from different perspectives, including performance analysis, system optimization, and channel estimation, to analyze and enhance the operation of such systems in different setups. Some possible future research directions to be considered are also highlighted.

In this talk, I will first explain low-complexity, non-iterative, and near-optimal RIS (eflecting intelligent surface) joint active and passive beamformer designs for both narrowband and wideband assuming full channel information. Then, I will explain several practical channel estimation techniques for RIS systems. Lastly, I will introduce WiThRay, a versatile 3D wireless communication simulator based on ray-tracing developed by our lab, that can be used to evaluate different RIS techniques for various environments.

The Internet of Underwater Things technology can be established using various underwater wireless communications technologies, including acoustic, radio frequency (RF), magnetic induction, and optical. Each of these technologies has its pros and cons; for example, acoustic technology reaches longer distances but is bandwidth limited, while underwater optical wireless communications (UOWCs) can support higher data rates at the cost of short ranges. Besides establishing communication links using these technologies, geographic data tagging of the underwater IoT nodes is also crucial and challenging for several applications. Hence, this talk will provide an overview of the rapidly evolving positioning systems and algorithms for different underwater technologies for location estimation of the underwater IoT nodes and their applications.

In this seminar, we first give background and present the framework of the modern SemCom. Then, we discuss the general semantic extraction methods and semantic metrics used in the existing studies.

This talk will present our recent research works related to the application of data science in the environment, healthcare, and social media.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have gained great popularity in recent years due to their decreasing cost and increasing functionality. In wireless communications, they are mainly used as aerial platforms to enable information delivery or power transfer. In this talk, applications of UAV in wireless communications are discussed.

We aim to depict a couple of digital technologies-based applications that tackle population health as well efficient mobility for fishermen and breeders. For sustainable livestock farming in Senegal,  transhumance is still performed and plays a very important role in the regulation of macroeconomic balances and social cohesion. According to climate change and fishing opportunities between Senegal, other countries fishes are far away from Senegalese coastal.

In this talk, a distributed beam tracking scheme for millimeter-wave unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)- assisted communication systems is presented. In the considered systems, aerial node base (aNB) connects the ground vehicles (GV) through directive beams to mitigate the path loss. However, line-of-sight (LoS) blockage may result in the link disconnection, which leads to the corruption of observations. To solve this issue, we extend the one-to-one beam tracking into the multi-node cooperative beam tracking scheme.

In this talk, we will consider an alternative approach for future networks: serve the users by antennas that are distributed over the coverage area. By shifting from a world where base stations are surrounded by users, to a world where each user is surrounded by antennas, we can deliver almost uniformly good data rates wherever the user is. This concept has recently been called Cell-Free Massive MIMO. A core practical challenge is to deploy such a distributed MIMO array affordably. One potential approach is to use radio stripes, which are cables with integrated antennas. We will take a close look at how these can be implemented and recent results on how communications algorithms can be designed to exploit their special characteristics.

Noting that the trend of development and utilization of small satellite technologies is a global phenomenon, and it is expected to bring benefits to the entire world, including both developed and developing economies, this talk goes over different spectrum & orbit access issues related to the development and deployment of these small satellite networks.