CS&E Colloquium: Bring intelligence to next-generation wireless systems

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. This week's speaker, Zhenlin An (University of Pittsburgh), will be giving a talk titled "Bring intelligence to next-generation wireless systems."

Abstract

AI is transforming wireless systems from rule-based, manually optimized architectures into adaptive, self-learning networks. Leveraging machine learning algorithms, these networks can sense and interpret their environments through wireless signals, dynamically adjust to varying conditions, and optimize the network performance autonomously. However, traditional wireless AI models often face challenges with interoperability, limited learning efficiency, and generalizability in dynamic scenarios. In this talk, I will introduce my research on creating a physically interpretable AI framework designed to address these challenges in wireless communication, sensing, and localization. This approach fuses physics-based ray-object interaction models with neural networks to capture the intrinsic radio properties of objects. By embedding these models within a differentiable ray tracing framework, we can efficiently learn the complex interactions of wireless signals with objects, achieving precise channel predictions even with far less training data. Beyond improving channel prediction, this framework can generate high-fidelity synthetic datasets that significantly improve AI training for downstream applications like localization, sensing, and network optimization. This innovation paves the way for constructing highly accurate digital twins of radio environments, playing a crucial role in unlocking the full capabilities of NextG wireless networks.

Biography

Zhenlin An is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh and Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests span wireless systems and networking, sensing and localization, and wireless security and privacy. Dr. An has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the ACM China SIGBED Doctoral Dissertation Award, ACM MobiCom Best Paper Runner-Up in 2023, three Best Demo Runner-Up awards at ACM MobiCom, and two IEEE SECON Best Paper Awards. His work has been published in top-tier conferences and journals such as MobiCom, MobiSys, SIGCOMM, NSDI, INFOCOM, S&P, TNeT, and TMC. For more information about his work, visit his webpage at https://anplus.github.io.