Annual 6G@UT Forum event

Speakers | Venue | Past events

April 9, 2026

Venue: The University of Texas at Austin, Mulva Auditorium

2501 Speedway, Austin TX 78712

The fifth annual 6G@UT Forum, hosted by 6G@UT and Ericsson.

Keynote speakers

More speakers will be added continuously

Erik Ekudden

Chief Technology Officer, Ericsson

His focus for the group is on strategic decisions and investments in 5G and 6G mobile systems, cloud, artificial intelligence, security and Internet of things. This builds on his decades-long career in technology strategies and industry activities with leading customers and partners. Ekudden first joined Ericsson in 1993 working on mobile systems, and rapidly moved into leadership within research and technology. He has served as research area director and vice president of technology strategy, standardization and industry.

He holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA).

John Smee

Senior VP Engineering, Global Head of Wireless Research at Qualcomm

Jakob Hoydis

Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA

Event hosts

Sorour Falahati

Principal Researcher, Ericsson. Vice Chair of 3GPP RAN Working Group 1.

Sorour Falahati is a Principal Researcher at Ericsson, specializing in physical-layer protocols and procedures within 3GPP Radio Access Network (RAN) standardization, the technical cornerstone of modern wireless communications. In August 2025, she began serving as Vice Chair of 3GPP RAN Working Group 1 (RAN1).

She has represented Ericsson in RAN1 since 2014, leading Ericsson RAN1 delegation as Vice Technical Coordinator and Technical Coordinator from 2018 to 2025. Before joining Ericsson Research in 2005, Sorour was a Senior Researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden.

She earned her B.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology (formerly Aryamehr), Tehran, Iran in 1994, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Digital and Wireless Communications from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden in 1997 and 2002, respectively.

In recognition of her contributions to innovation, Sorour received Ericsson’s Inventor of the Year award in 2021.

Professor Kaushik Chowdhury

6G@UT; Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, UT Austin

Kaushik Chowdhury holds the Chandra Family Endowed Distinguished Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering #2 in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his BEng from the VJTI Mumbai, MS from the University of Cincinnati, and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining UT Austin, he spent fifteen years as a professor at Northeastern University, Boston. His research interests center on systems aspects of applied machine learning for wireless, multimodal sensor fusion, networked robotics, spectrum sensing and sharing, and open radio access networks. Prof. Chowdhury has worked on several large-scale wireless community infrastructure projects that include the Colosseum RF/network emulator as well as the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research project office, a joint $100 million public-private partnership between the NSF and wireless industry consortium to create city-scale testing platforms. He is a member of the NSF AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence, led by The Ohio State University.

Prof. Chowdhury was a finalist for the 2023 US Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. He was also the winner of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2017, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award in 2017, the Office of Naval Research Director of Research Early Career Award in 2016, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2015. He is the recipient of best paper awards at IEEE GLOBECOM'19, DySPAN'19, INFOCOM'17, ICC'13,'12,'09, and ICNC'13.