Keynote Speakers

Title: Covert Data Communications in Cell-Free Internet-of-Things Networks

Abstract: Cell-free wireless communications is a new paradigm within the future 6G networks towards implementation of the Internet of intelligence with connected people and things. In a cell-free network, a large number of distributed access points are connected to a central processing unit and serve a smaller number of users over the same time-frequency resources. The system has shown great potential in improving network performance in some perspectives compared to the co-located and conventional small-cell systems. The next-generation Internet-of-Things systems could be dispersed over large areas under a cell-free network setting. This has given rise to security concerns stemming from the exposure of wireless channels and the exponential growth of connected devices. In this talk, a novel covert downlink transmission scheme is presented that jointly optimizes beamforming and artificial noise vectors to obscure critical transmissions at an eavesdropper in CF IoT Networks.

Bio: Abbas Jamalipour is the Professor of Ubiquitous Mobile Networking at The University of Sydney and the Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Nagoya University, Japan; and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Institute of Electrical, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE), and the Institution of Engineers Australia (IEA), an ACM Professional Member, and an IEEE Distinguished Speaker. He has authored nine technical books, eleven book chapters, over 550 technical papers, and five patents, all in the field of wireless communications. Dr. Jamalipour was the President (2020-21), Executive Vice-President (2018-19), and has been an elected voting member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society since 2014. Previously, he served as the Editor-in-Chief IEEE Wireless Communications, Vice-President Conferences, and a member of Board of Governors of the IEEE Communications Society. He is an Editorial Board Member of the IEEE Access Journal, a member of the Advisory Board of IEEE Internet of Things Journal, and an editor for several other journals. He has been a General Chair or Technical Program Chair for several conferences, including IEEE ICC, GLOBECOM, VTC, WCNC and PIMRC. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards such as the 2019 IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Technical Achievement Award in Green Communications, the 2016 IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Technical Achievement Award in Communications Switching and Routing, the 2010 IEEE ComSoc Harold Sobol Award, the 2006 IEEE ComSoc Best Tutorial Paper Award, as well as over fifteen Best Paper Awards.

Title: Generative AI for rapid and scalable behaviour modelling in cities

Abstract: Understanding human behaviours is critical to improving operation efficiency, individual and organisational productivity, public health management, and quality of life in cities. The proliferation of sensors and Internet of Things leads to new opportunities and challenges for human behaviour modelling and forecasting behavioural patterns at scale.  Annotating behaviours of interest is expensive and often infeasible. This demands new ways for modelling behaviours at scale, moving away from fully-supervised learning approaches. Recent Generative AI approaches and Large Language Models has become a compelling choice for modelling mobility behaviours, especially in cases when training data is limited. I will present our self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches for multimodal sensor data, with different applications as examples, including human behaviour recognition and traffic flow forecasting. I will also talk about how we handle data heterogeneity and fusion of heterogenous time-series towards robust representation. I will also present a new versatile paradigm, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for time-series forecasting, including for mobility and energy domain, using natural language prompts.

Bio: Flora Salim is the inaugural Cisco Chair of Digital Transport, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. Her research is on ubiquitous computing, behaviour modelling, trustworthy and robust AI, and machine learning for multimodal sensor data. She is a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts, an Editor of Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), the Associate Editor-in-Chief (AEIC) of IEEE Pervasive Computing, and an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems. She is a Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision Making and Society (ADM+S), and the Co-Lead of the ADM+S Machines Program, and the Transport and Mobilities Focus area.

Title: OTFS and Delay Doppler Communications

Abstract: TBD

Bio: Yi Hong is an Associate Professor in the ECSE DEPT at Monash University. She served as a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts (2018-20) and she was the Director of Graduate Research (2016-18) of the ECSE Department at Monash University. She is a Senior Member of IEEE, the IET Fellow, and a member of IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Information Theory Soceity, and IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. She was the Tutorial Chair of 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Melbourne. She was the General co-Chair of 2014 IEEE Information Theory Workshop at Hobart, Tasmania; the Technical Program Committee Chair of the 2011 Australian Communication Theory workshop, Melbourne; the Publicity Chair of 2009 IEEE Information Theory Workshop at Taromina, Sicily; and Technical Program Committee Member of various IEEE leading conferences. She is currently the Associate Editor (AE) of IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking (TGCN). She served as the AE for IEEE Wireless Communications Letters (WCL) and Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies (ETT). She received the NICTA-ACoRN Early Career Researcher award at AUSCTW Adelaide 2007. She leads a group of research students and postdocs working on communications technology, wireless security, and coding techniques for wireless communications and networking as well as SSD storage.

Title: The implementation of machine learning enhanced next-generation optical access networks— rationale, challenges and emerging solutions

Abstract: Optical access networks are envisioned to become increasingly complex as they support more and more diverse and immersive services, each with a different capacity, latency, and reliability need. While machine learning has been touted as a silver bullet that will intelligently manage network operations and resources to meet these demands, as it had been anticipated for core and metro networks, there exist various challenges that need to be addressed to progress machine learning models from research to production. We first aim motivate the continued push to advance optical access networks and rationalize the use of machine learning in these networks. We then highlight the challenges that are especially amplified due to the traffic dynamicity and heterogeneity, data scarcity, and computation-resource constraints of optical access networks. We discuss emerging machine learning approaches that are being explored to address these challenges. Finally, we consider an example of an online reinforcement learning based bandwidth allocation scheme to address concept drift in machine learning enhanced optical access network.

Bio: Elaine Wong received her Ph.D. (2002) degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is currently an Associate Dean and Professor with the Melbourne School of Engineering. Her current research interests include low-latency communication networks and prescriptive analytics to facilitate human-to-machine applications over the Tactile Internet. She has co-authored 4 book chapters, 75 refereed international journals, 152 refereed international conferences (40 invited international conference publications) and 5 patents. Elaine has previously served as Associate Editor of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology, and OSA Journal of Optical Networking. She currently serves on the ECOC Technical Program Committee and the OFC Technical Program Committee.

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