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6G@UT Forum

6GatUT-Forum-2024 Erik Ekudden
6GUTForum 2024 demo
6GUTForum 2024 demo floor
6GatUT-Forum-2024 Elena Fersman

April 3, 2025

Venue: The University of Texas at Austin, Mulva Auditorium

 

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6G takes shape

The 2025 6G@UT Forum will illuminate the key contours of 6G, which are starting to come into view as pre-standardization activities commence in 2025. Focus topics will include:

  • What features will define 6G?
  • 6G pre-standardization activities: what will be the key novelty and focus areas? 
  • 6G for everyone, everywhere: achieving 6G global coverage, especially direct satellite to handset communication
  • Native intelligence: Generative AI’s role in 6G
  • 6G Spectrum innovation: how to unleash new swaths of valuable spectrum?

The full program will be shared soon.

Speakers

Keynote speakers

Erik Dahlman

Erik Dahlman

Senior Expert, Radio Access, Ericsson

Coming soon.

Stefan Parkvall

Stefan Parkvall

Senior Expert, Cellular Radio Access, Ericsson

Coming soon.

Charlie Zhang

Charlie Zhang

Senior VP and Head of Global 6G Research, Samsung

Coming soon.

Huiwen Yao

Huiwen Yao

CTO, AST Spacemobile

Coming soon.

Event speakers and panelists

Mischa Dohler

Mischa Dohler

Vice President of Emerging Technologies, Ericsson

Mischa Dohler is now VP Emerging Technologies at Ericsson Inc. in Silicon Valley, working on cutting-edge topics of 6G, Metaverse, XR, Quantum and Blockchain. He serves on the Technical Advisory Committee of the FCC and on the Spectrum Advisory Board of Ofcom.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET); and a Distinguished Member of Harvard Square Leaders Excellence. He is a serial entrepreneur with 5 companies; composer & pianist with 5 albums on Spotify/iTunes; and fluent in several languages. He has had ample coverage by national and international press and media, and is featured on Amazon Prime.

Learn more

Sanjay Shakkottai

Sanjay Shakkottai

6G@UT and Director of the Center for Generative AI, UT Austin

Sanjay Shakkottai is the Cockrell Family Chair in Engineering # 15 in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.   He is the Director of the newly launched Center for Generative Artificial Intelligence, home to one of the most powerful GPU-based computing clusters in academia worldwide.

Sanjay Shakkottai received his Ph.D. from the ECE Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2004 and was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2014. He was a co-recipient of the IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize in 2021. His research interests lie at the intersection of algorithms for resource allocation, statistical learning and networks, with applications to wireless communication networks and online platforms.

Melike Erol-Kantarci

Melike Erol-Kantarci

Canada Research Chair, Univ. of Ottawa, Strategic Product Manager, AI in RAN, Ericsson

Dr. Melike (Mel) Erol-Kantarci is Strategic Product Manager for AI in RAN at Ericsson. In her role, she leads the AI-powered feature roadmaps, defines long-term vision and strategy for forward-looking AI-native solutions in Networks. She is also Canada Research Chair in AI-enabled Next-Generation Wireless Networks and Professor at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Dr. Erol-Kantarci is also the Vice-chair of IEEE ComSoc emerging technologies initiative on Machine Learning for Communications. She is an influential industry leader in AI in telecom with 70+ keynotes, tutorials, panels delivered around the globe, inventor of several patents and a highly cited prolific researcher with h-index 49. Throughout her 15+ years of career in telecommunications, she has received numerous awards and recognitions from technical societies; including a Women in AI award in 2023. She was an IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer between 2020-2023. Dr. Erol-Kantarci is an IEEE Fellow.

Professor Ted Rappaport

Professor Ted Rappaport

David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor at NYU

Ted Rappaport is a pioneer in radio wave propagation for cellular and personal communications, wireless communication system design, and broadband wireless communications circuits and systems at millimeter wave frequencies. His research has influenced many international wireless-standards bodies, and he and his students invented the technology of site-specific radio frequency (RF) channel modeling - a technology now used routinely throughout wireless communications.   He has pioneered the use of multiple new spectral bands through his innovative propagation measurements and models.  He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Rappaport is the founding director of NYU WIRELESS, the world's first academic research center to combine engineering, computer science, and medicine. Earlier, he founded two of the world's largest academic wireless research centers: The Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG) at the University of Texas at Austin in 2002, and the Mobile and Portable Radio Research Group (MPRG), now known as Wireless@ at Virginia Tech, in 1990.  Rappaport has served on the Technological Advisory Council of the Federal Communications Commission. He has over 100 U.S. or international patents issued or pending and has authored, co-authored, and co-edited 18 books, including the world's best-selling books on wireless communications, millimeter wave communications, and smart antennas.

Thomas Rondeau

Thomas Rondeau

Principal Director, Undersecretary of Defense, USA, Principal Director for the FutureG Office

Dr. Tom Rondeau is the Principal Director for FutureG for the US Department of Defense, serving in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)). In this role, Dr. Rondeau is responsible for guiding the Department on research, funding, and execution of programs around warfighting capabilities using future generation wireless technologies. As Principal Director, he continues to advance wireless networking concepts for national security.

Prior to this role, Dr. Rondeau spent more than six years as a DARPA program manager, working on numerous technology areas to improve wireless networking and communications. Some of the programs he managed include the Arrays at Commercial Timescales – Integration & Validation (ACT-IV), building software defined arrays; Hedgehog, driving towards more capable software defined radio; Domain-Specific System on Chip (DSSoC), inventing new edge and embedded processor architectures; and Data Protection in Virtual Environments (DPRIVE), enabling computing on encrypted data. Dr. Rondeau executed many other programs, ran a series of hackfests on software radio, and helped as a subject matter expert on numerous problems for the US Department of Defense and the intelligence community. His work at DARPA earned him the Distinguished Public Service Medal.

Prior to joining DARPA, Dr. Rondeau ran the GNU Radio project and consulted on wireless communications problems. In this role, Dr. Rondeau worked with many companies and organizations around the world to build solutions to difficult problems and emerging technologies and through this work helped build a large community of experts in software radio that has turned into a thriving ecosystem. He has also worked as a visiting researcher with the University of Pennsylvania and as an Adjunct with the IDA Center for Communications Research in Princeton, NJ.

Dr. Rondeau holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, and his dissertation won the Council of Graduate Schools’ 2007 Outstanding Dissertation Award in math, science, and engineering. Dr. Rondeau has spoken at numerous conferences and symposia, published extensively on software radio, and wrote one of the first books on cognitive radio.

Professor Andrea Goldsmith

Professor Andrea Goldsmith

Dean of Engineering, Princeton

Andrea Goldsmith is the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science and the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. She founded and served as Chief Technical Officer of Plume WiFi (formerly Accelera, Inc.) and of Quantenna (QTNA), Inc. Dr. Goldsmith is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the IEEE and of Stanford, and has received several awards for her work, including the IEEE Sumner Technical Field Award, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award, the ComSoc Armstrong Technical Achievement Award, the Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award, and most recently the 2024 IEEE James H. Mulligan Education Medal.

She is author of the book "Wireless Communications'' and co-author of the books "MIMO Wireless Communications'' and “Principles of Cognitive Radio,” all published by Cambridge University Press, as well as an inventor on 29 patents. She received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley.

Professor Nick Laneman

Professor Nick Laneman

Director of SpectrumX, Notre Dame

Dr. Nick Laneman is Director of SpectrumX - An NSF Spectrum Innovation Center, Founding Director and currently Co-Director of the Wireless Institute in the College of Engineering, and Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He joined the faculty in August 2002 shortly after earning a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research and teaching interests are in wireless system design, radio spectrum access, technology standards and intellectual property, and regulatory policy. Laneman is an IEEE Fellow, has received the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, the Presidential Early-Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the NSF CAREER Award, and has been recognized twice by Thomson Reuters as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher. He is author or co-author on over 145 publications and is co-inventor on 8 U.S. patents.

Professor Todd Humphreys

Professor Todd Humphreys

WNCG Director, UT Austin

Dr. Humphreys specializes in the application of optimal detection and estimation techniques to problems in satellite navigation, autonomous systems, and signal processing. He directs the Radionavigation Laboratory and is associate director of UT SAVES. His recent focus has been on assured perception for autonomous systems, including navigation, timing, and collision avoidance, and on centimeter-accurate location for the mass market.

Dr. Humphreys is also on the graduate study committee of the UT Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a faculty member of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG). He received the UT Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award in 2012, the NSF Career Award in 2015, the Institute of Navigation Thurlow Award in 2015, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, via National Science Foundation) in 2019. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation and of the Royal Institute of Navigation. Dr. Humphreys joined the faculty of the Cockrell School of Engineering in Fall 2009.

Peter Merz

Peter Merz

  VP, Head of Nokia Standards  

Peter is currently leading the Nokia Standards unit within Strategy and Technology at Nokia. This unit is tasked with developing comprehensive concepts and innovations for radio interface & access and core networks. Additionally, it focuses on automation breakthroughs in network and service domains, ensuring these innovations are effectively integrated into external standardization bodies and fora.

Peter received his Master of Science degree on Electrical Engineering in 1995 from the University of Stuttgart in Germany. In 1996, he joined Siemens Mobile Networks and started working on GSM technology. He has a strong background in wireless research and was instrumental in Siemens's pioneering activities in WCDMA and LTE.

In 2007, he took over as Head of Radio Systems Research at Nokia Siemens Networks and later at Nokia Networks. The research performed by this unit has contributed substantially to the evolution of WCDMA, HSPA, LTE/LTE-Advanced, and 5G/5G-Advanced technologies and systems that provide unparalleled connectivity on a global scale.

Peter is a proven technology and thought leader that can execute defined strategies by leading successfully projects and programs in multi-cultural global organizations. Peter initiated and founded the industry consortium on CPRI (Common Public Radio Interface) together with Ericsson, NEC, Nortel, Siemens and Huawei. He has been involved with the set-up of several collaborative research projects and creation of various mobile generations like 4G/LTE and 5G/5G-Advanced and now 6G. Moreover, he holds several international patents, is a member of the VDE board and in the board of “Münchner Kreis,” and is one of the creators of the landmark annual Brooklyn Summit event.

Peter also acts as industry speaker for the www.Thinknet-6G.de platform. He is frequently invited to share his insights on the transformational power of AI for 6G.

Event hosts

Pernilla Jonsson

Pernilla Jonsson

Research Director, Head of Ericsson Consumer & Industry Lab

Consumer & Industry Lab delivers world-class research, bold opinions and tangible concepts which illustrate the value of future connected technology and which effects it has on people, enterprises and a sustainable society.

Pernilla Jonsson joined Ericsson in 2015 and has over 20+ years of experience of researching & innovation for the future. Her Ph.D. is in consumer culture from Gothenburg School of economics and commercial law, Sweden. She is a member of the Swedish Royal academy of engineering as well as a board member of RISE - Research institutes of Sweden and WASP-HS of the Wallenberg foundation. 

Jeff Andrews

Professor Jeff Andrews

Director, 6G@UT; Professor, The University of Texas at Austin

Jeffrey Andrews is the Truchard Family Endowed Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin where is Director of 6G@UT. He received the B.S. in Engineering with High Distinction from Harvey Mudd College, and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Dr. Andrews is an IEEE Fellow and ISI Highly Cited Researcher and has been co-recipient of 15 best paper awards as well as the 2015 Terman Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the 2021 Gordon Lepley Memorial Teaching Award, the 2021 IEEE ComSoc Joe LoCicero Service Award, the IEEE ComSoc Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award, and the 2019 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu technical field award. His former students include five IEEE Fellows, 12 professors at top universities in the USA, Asia, and Europe, and industry leaders on LTE and 5G systems, on which they collectively hold over one thousand US patents.

Professor Kaushik Chowdhury

Professor Kaushik Chowdhury

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

Coming soon.

Agenda

 

Welcome Dr Pernilla Jonsson, Head of Consumer & Industry Lab, Ericsson
Professor Jeff Andrews, Director, 6G@UT
Opening keynote

Dr Erik Dahlman, Senior Expert, Radio Access, Ericsson

Dr Stefan Parkvall, Senior Expert, Cellular radio access, Ericsson

Panel
Spectrum in 6G: Own, Share, or Take?

Moderator: Ted Rappaport
NTN faculty talk Professor Todd Humphreys, UT Austin
NTN keynote Huiwen Yao, CTO, AST Spacemobile
6G@UT demo and poster session
Keynote Charlie Zhang, Senior VP and Head of Global 6G Research, Samsung.
Talk  
Panel
Generative AI: Creating New Opportunities for 6G
Moderator: Mischa Dohler, Vice President, Emerging Technologies, Ericsson

Past events