Network and Information Sciences seminar series

Machine learning will play an important role in the optimization of future-generation physical-layer wireless communication systems, for the following two reasons. First, traditional wireless communication design always relies on the channel model, but models are only an approximation to reality. In wireless environments where the modelling task is complex and the channels are costly to estimate, a learning-based approach can significantly outperform the traditional model-based approaches. Second, modern wireless communication design often involves optimization problems that are high-dimensional, nonconvex, and difficult to solve efficiently. By exploring the availability of training data, a neural network may be able to learn the solution of an optimization problem directly, which can lead to a more efficient way to solve nonconvex optimization problems. In this talk, I will use examples from the active sensing and localization problems for the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) system and the initial beam alignment problem for the mmWave massive MIMO system to illustrate the benefit of learning-based physical-layer communication system design. 

Biography

Wei Yu is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Toronto, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Information Theory and Wireless Communications. He received the B.A.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He received the Steacie Memorial Fellowship in 2015, the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications in 2019, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication in 2019, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2008, 2017 and 2021, and the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 2015. Prof. Wei Yu served as the President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2021.