Wireless connectivity is becoming as essential as electricity in our modern world. Although we would like to deliver wireless broadband services everywhere, the underlying physics makes it inherently complicated: the signal power vanishes very quickly with the propagation distance and is absorbed or scattered when interacting with objects in the way. Even when we have a “strong" signal, only one in a million parts of the signal energy is being received, thus, there is a huge room for improvements! What if we could tune the propagation environment to our needs? This is the main goal of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, which is an emerging concept for beyond-5G communications. The idea is to support the transmission from a source to a destination by deploying so-called metasurfaces that can reconfigure how incident signal waves are scattered. These surfaces can be electronically configured to interact with the wireless signals as if they had different shapes. For example, it can be configured to behave as a parabolic reflector that is rotated to gather signal energy and re-radiates it as a beam focused on the receiver. This feature makes use of a new design dimension: we can not only optimize the transmitter and receiver but also control the channel. This might be a game-changer when communicating at mmWave and THz frequencies, where the traditional propagation conditions are particularly cumbersome. This might sound like science fiction but is theoretically possible. In this talk, Dr. Emil will explain the fundamentals of this new technology from a signal processing perspective. By deriving a signals-and-systems description, we can look beyond the initial hype and understand what is actually happening when using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. Dr. Emil will also describe recent experimental validations of the fundamentals. The talk will culminate in a description of the main research challenges that need to be tackled in the coming years. The virtual platform information will be sent to registrants a couple of hours ahead of starting the event. Contact: IEEE Young Professionals Montreal Speaker: Emil Björnson Biography: Emil Björnson received the M.S. degree in engineering mathematics from Lund University, Sweden, in 2007, and the Ph.D. degree in telecommunications from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, in 2011. From 2012 to 2014, he held a joint post-doctoral position at the Alcatel-Lucent Chair on Flexible Radio, SUPELEC, France, and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He joined Linköping University, Sweden, in 2014, where he is currently an Associate Professor. In September 2020, he became a part-time Visiting Full Professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He has authored the textbooks Optimal Resource Allocation in Coordinated Multi-Cell Systems (2013), Massive MIMO Networks: Spectral, Energy, and Hardware Efficiency (2017), and Foundations of User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO (2021). He is dedicated to reproducible research and has made a large amount of simulation code publicly available. He performs research on MIMO communications, radio resource allocation, machine learning for communications, and energy efficiency. He has been on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Communications since 2017. He has been a member of the Online Editorial Team of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications since 2020. He has been an Area Editor in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine since 2021. He has performed MIMO research for over 14 years, his papers have received more than 12000 citations, and he has filed more than twenty patent applications. He is a host of the podcast Wireless Future and has a popular YouTube channel. He has received the 2014 Outstanding Young Researcher Award from IEEE ComSoc EMEA, the 2015 Ingvar Carlsson Award, the 2016 Best Ph.D. Award from EURASIP, the 2018 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications, the 2019 EURASIP Early Career Award, the 2019 IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize, the 2019 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Column Award, the 2020 Pierre-Simon Laplace Early Career Technical Achievement Award, and the 2020 CTTC Early Achievement Award. He also co-authored papers that received Best Paper Awards at the conferences, including WCSP 2009, the IEEE CAMSAP 2011, the IEEE SAM 2014, the IEEE WCNC 2014, the IEEE ICC 2015, and WCSP 2017.

IEEE Young Professionals Affinity Groups of the Montreal Section, Ottawa Section, Toronto Section, Turkey Section, and the IEEE Vancouver Joint Communications Chapter bring bright minds from the flagship research groups across the globe to give the community technical lectures on cutting-edge areas in wireless communications. This event will cover broad arrays of topics along with fundamental research results targeting a variety of applications in 5G/B5G/6G. Day & Time: Monday, December 14, 2020 11:45 a.m. – 3:15 p.m. Speakers: Walid Saad, Mehdi Bennis, Halim Yanikomeroglu, Wei Yu, Vincent Wong Organizers: IEEE Montreal Section YP, Vancouver Jt Chpt VT06/COM19/PHO36/BT02/IT12/ITS38, Ottawa Section YP, Turkey Section YP, Toronto Section YP Location: Virtual Contact & Register: Please visit https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/241334 for contact information and to register. Agenda: 11:45 PM – 12:00 PM Opening and Welcome Mansour Naslcheraghi, Chair of IEEE YP Montreal 12:00 PM – 12:30 PM Talk Walid Saad 12:30 PM – 12:35 PM Q&A Walid Saad 12:35 PM – 01:05 PM Talk Halim Yanikomeroglu 01:05 PM – 01:10 PM Q&A Halim Yanikomeroglu 01:10 PM – 01:40 PM Talk Vincent Wong 01:40 PM – 01:45 PM Q&A Vincent Wong 01:45 PM – 02:15 PM Talk Mehdi Bennis 02:15 PM – 02:20 PM Q&A Mehdi Bennis 02:20 PM – 02:50 PM Talk Wei Yu 02:50 PM – 02:55 PM Q&A Wei Yu 02:55 PM – 3:10 PM Q&A All speakers Topics and Abstracts: Walid Saad, ECE Department, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA Professor, Fellow of IEEE Title: Can Terahertz Communications Provide High-Rate Highly Reliable Low Latency Communications in 6G Networks? Abstract: Communication at high-frequency terahertz (THz) bands is seen as a staple of the sixth generation (6G) of wireless cellular networks, due to the large amount of available bandwidth. However, 6G systems will have to support, not only high data rates, but also highly reliable communication links for emerging applications such as advanced wireless virtual reality (VR) systems. In particular, advanced wireless VR applications will impose new visual and haptic requirements that are directly linked to the quality-of-experience (QoE) of VR users. These QoE requirements can only be met by wireless 6G connectivity that offers high-rate and high-reliability low latency communications (HRLLC), unlike the low rates usually considered in vanilla 5G ultra-reliable low latency communication scenarios.  Guaranteeing HRLLC in THz-enabled 6G systems requires dealing with the uncertainty that is specific to the THz channel. Therefore, in this talk, after a brief overview on our vision of 6G systems, we will explore the potential of THz for meeting HRLLC requirements. In this regard, we first quantify the risk for an unreliable VR performance through a novel and rigorous characterization of the tail of the end-to-end (E2E) delay. Then, we perform a thorough analysis of the tail-value-at-risk (TVaR)  to concretely characterize the behavior of extreme wireless events crucial to the real-time VR experience. We use this analysis to derive system reliability for scenarios with guaranteed line-of-sight (LoS)  as a function of THz network parameters. We then present simulation results that show how abundant bandwidth and low molecular absorption are necessary to improve the reliability, although their effect remains secondary compared to the availability of LoS, which significantly affects the THz HRLLC performance. We conclude our talk with an overview on other key open problems in the realms of THz communications and 6G systems. Halim Yanikomeroglu, ECE Department, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada Professor, Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering, Fellow of Engineering Institute of Canada Title: Wireless Access Architecture: The Next 20+ Years Abstract: Communication at high-frequency terahertz (THz) bands is seen as a staple of the sixth generation (6G) of wireless cellular networks, due to the large amount of available bandwidth. However, 6G systems will have to support, not only high data rates, but also highly reliable communication links for emerging applications such as advanced wireless virtual reality (VR) systems. In particular, advanced wireless VR applications will impose new visual and haptic requirements that are directly linked to the quality-of-experience (QoE) of VR users. These QoE requirements can only be met by wireless 6G connectivity that offers high-rate and high-reliability low latency communications (HRLLC), unlike the low rates usually considered in vanilla 5G ultra-reliable low latency communication scenarios.  Guaranteeing HRLLC in THz-enabled 6G systems requires dealing with the uncertainty that is specific to the THz channel. Therefore, in this talk, after a brief overview on our vision of 6G systems, we will explore the potential of THz for meeting HRLLC requirements. In this regard, we first quantify the risk for an unreliable VR performance through a novel and rigorous characterization of the tail of the end-to-end (E2E) delay. Then, we perform a thorough analysis of the tail-value-at-risk (TVaR)  to concretely characterize the behavior of extreme wireless events crucial to the real-time VR experience. We use this analysis to derive system reliability for scenarios with guaranteed line-of-sight (LoS)  as a function of THz network parameters. We then present simulation results that show how abundant bandwidth and low molecular absorption are necessary to improve the reliability, although their effect remains secondary compared to the availability of LoS, which significantly affects the THz HRLLC performance. We conclude our talk with an overview on other key open problems in the realms of THz communications and 6G systems. Vincent Wong, ECE Department, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Professor, Fellow of IEEE Title: Throughput Optimization for Grant-Free Multiple Access with Multiagent Deep Reinforcement Learning Abstract: Grant-free multiple access (GFMA) is a promising paradigm to efficiently support uplink access of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In this talk, we present a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based pilot sequence selection scheme for GFMA systems to mitigate potential pilot sequence collisions. We formulate a pilot sequence selection problem for aggregate throughput maximization in GFMA systems with specific throughput constraints as a Markov decision process (MDP). By exploiting multiagent DRL, we train deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn near-optimal pilot sequence selection policies from the transition history of the underlying MDP without requiring information exchange between the users. While the training process takes advantage of global information, we leverage the technique of factorization to ensure that the policies learned by the DNNs can be executed in a distributed manner. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve an average aggregate throughput that is close to the optimum, and has a better performance than several heuristic algorithms. Mehdi Bennis, ECE Department, University of Oulu, Finland Professor, IEEE Fellow Abstract: This talk will break down the vision of wireless network edge intelligence at scale in terms of theoretical and algorithmic principles in addition to a number of applications in beyond 5G/6G. Wei Yu, ECE Department, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering Title: Data-Driven Approaches to Wireless Communication System Design Abstract: In this talk, I will illustrate how machine learning can significantly improve the design of wireless communication systems. I will draw examples from scheduling and power control problems for wireless cellular networks to show that a data-driven approach can circumvent the need for accurate channel estimation and provide near optimal solutions to system-level optimization problems in wireless system design. I will also show how deep neural network (DNN) can be used for efficient and distributed channel estimation, quantization, feedback, and multiuser precoding for massive MIMO systems, thereby providing an efficient solution to a distributed source coding problem. I will conclude by showing the benefit of data-driven design in term of robustness. Biographies: Walid Saad of Virginia Tech Walid Saad received his Ph.D degree from the University of Oslo in 2010. He is currently a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he leads the Network sciEnce, Wireless, and Security (NEWS) laboratory. His research interests include wireless networks, machine learning, game theory, security, unmanned aerial vehicles, cyber-physical systems, and network science. Dr. Saad is a Fellow of the IEEE and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. He is also the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2013, the AFOSR summer faculty fellowship in 2014, and the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in 2015. He was the author/co-author of nine conference best paper awards at WiOpt in 2009, ICIMP in 2010, IEEE WCNC in 2012, IEEE PIMRC in 2015, IEEE SmartGridComm in 2015, EuCNC in 2017, IEEE GLOBECOM in 2018, IFIP NTMS in 2019, and IEEE ICC in 2020. He is the recipient of the 2015 Fred W. Ellersick Prize from the IEEE Communications Society, of the 2017 IEEE ComSoc Best Young Professional in Academia award, of the 2018 IEEE ComSoc Radio Communications Committee Early Achievement Award, and of the 2019 IEEE ComSoc Communication Theory Technical Committee. He was also a co-author of the 2019 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper. From 2015-2017, Dr. Saad was named the Stephen O. Lane Junior Faculty Fellow at Virginia Tech and, in 2017, he was named College of Engineering Faculty Fellow. He received the Dean’s award for Research Excellence from Virginia Tech in 2019. He currently serves as an editor for major IEEE Transactions. Halim Yanikomeroglu Dr. Halim Yanikomeroglu is a Professor in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University, Canada. His extensive collaboration with industry on 4G & 5G wireless technologies resulted in 37 granted patents. During 2012-2016, he led one of the largest academic-industrial collaborative research programs on pre-standards 5G wireless. In Summer 2019, he started a new large-scale project on the 6G wireless network architecture. He supervised 26 PhD students (all completed with theses). He is a Fellow of IEEE, EIC (Engineering Institute of Canada), and CAE (Canadian Academy of Engineering), and a Distinguished Speaker for both IEEE Communications Society and IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. He served as the General Chair and Technical Program Chair of several major IEEE conferences; he also served in the Editorial Boards of several IEEE periodicals. He served as the Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Personal Communications, and he is currently chairing the Steering Committee of IEEE’s flagship Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC). Dr. Yanikomeroglu received several awards for his research, teaching, and service, including the IEEE Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award in 2018 and the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society Stuart Meyer Memorial Award in 2020. Vincent Wong Vincent Wong is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His research areas include protocol design, optimization, and resource management of communication networks, with applications to the Internet, wireless networks, smart grid, fog computing, and Internet of Things. Currently, he is an executive editorial committee member of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, an Area Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society, and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Dr. Wong is a Fellow of the IEEE and an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer (2019 – 2020). Mehdi Bennis Dr Mehdi Bennis is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, Finland, Academy of Finland Research Fellow and head of the intelligent connectivity and networks/systems group (ICON). His main research interests are in radio resource management, heterogeneous networks, game theory and distributed machine learning in 5G networks and beyond. He has published more than 200 research papers in international conferences, journals and book chapters. He has been the recipient of several prestigious awards including the 2015 Fred W. Ellersick Prize from the IEEE Communications Society, the 2016 Best Tutorial Prize from the IEEE Communications Society, the 2017 EURASIP Best paper Award for the Journal of Wireless Communications and Networks, the all-University of Oulu award for research and the 2019 IEEE ComSoc Radio Communications Committee Early Achievement Award. Dr Bennis is an editor of IEEE TCOM and Specialty Chief Editor for Data Science for Communications in the Frontiers in Communications and Networks journal. Wei Yu Wei Yu received the B.A.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1997 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. Since 2002, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he is now Professor and holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Information Theory and Wireless Communications. Prof. Wei Yu is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. Prof. Wei Yu was an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2015-16. 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 2017 and 2008, the Journal of Communications and Networks Best Paper Award in 2017, and the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 2015. Professor Wei Yu currently serves as Vice President of the IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc) and is the President-elect of the ITSoc for 2021.