Chicago Section

In this talk, I will present a high-level snapshot of current R&D challenges in the “wireless communications” landscape, informed by a recent NSF-NIST report (2023) on R&D gaps as well as recent and ongoing developments in the wireless ecosystem (industry, academia, national labs). The R&D snapshots reflect the challenges and opportunities in our continuing quest to harness the electromagnetic spectrum in space, time and frequency, including:

1. High frequency operation and large bandwidths

2. Massive MIMO arrays and multi-beamforming

3. New time-frequency waveforms for high mobility

4. Predictive and computationally tractable modeling of wireless propagation environments

These seemingly distinct R&D topics are connected through a unique personal perspective spanning mathematics, physics, information, computation and technology that I will share in this presentation with the hope of spurring further discussion and collaboration.