Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz of Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Although the past several decades have seen significant progress in the development of multimedia sensor networks, the multimedia only stimulates sight and hearing, neglecting three other fundamental human senses, namely, touch, smell, and taste. In recent years, the emergence of extended reality (XR), digital twins, digital currency, holographic-type communication systems, and Metaverse, requires all five human senses must be addressed and stimulated to create a fully immersive experience for users. Thus, Multi-Sensory media (MulSemedia) capturing all five senses will play a critical role for next generation sensor networks research in the next decade.  This talk provides an overview of the history, background, use cases, existing research, devices, and standards of mulsemedia. Additionally, the challenges in mulsemedia research from the perspective of wireless sensor networking are discussed. In particular, the research challenges, such as, integrated communication/sensing, mulsemedia streaming, scheduling, intra- and inter mulsimedia synchronization, AI/ML algorithms with LLM (Large Language Models), semantic communication, are presented which will facilitate the design and commercialization of next generation mulsemedia sensor networks. The potential of 6G wireless systems to address these challenges is highlighted, and several research directions that can advance mulsemedia communications are identified.

Biography:

Dr. I.F. Akyildiz (Life Fellow, IEEE and Fellow of ACM) received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Erlangen–Nürnberg, Germany, in 1978, 1981, and 1984, respectively. He served as the Ken Byers Chair Professor in Telecommunications, the Past Chair of the Telecom Group at the ECE, and the Director of the Broadband Wireless Networking Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology, from 1985 to 2020. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, since June 2020. He is the Founder and President of the Truva Inc, a consulting company based in Atlanta, GA, USA) since 1989. He is the Founder and the Editor-in-Chief of the newly established of International Telecommunication Union Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies (ITU J-FET) since August 2020.  Currently he is an Adjunct Professor with the University of Helsinki, Finland and University of Iceland since 2020. He had many other international affiliations during his career and established research centers in Spain, South Africa, Finland, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India. Dr. Akyildiz is an IEEE Fellow since 1996, and ACM Fellow since 1997. He received numerous awards from IEEE, ACM, and other professional organizations, including ACM Sigmobile Award (2003), Humboldt Award (2014-2016 and 2023) from Germany and Tubitak Award (2011) from Turkey. In September 2023, according to Google Scholar his h-index is 137 and the total number of citations to his articles is more than 143+K. His current research interests include Mulsemedia Communication, Networking 2030, Metaverse, Hologram and Extended Reality Communication, 6G/7G wireless systems, TeraHertz Communication, Underwater Communication.

Email:

Address:Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, , Georgia