KEYNOTES

Ravishankar K. Iyer is George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, in the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. He is also faculty Research Affiliate at the Mayo Clinic, and Yeoh Ghin Seng Distinguished Visiting Professor of the National University Health System, Singapore.

Professor Iyer leads the DEPEND Group at CSL, with a multidisciplinary focus on systems and software that combine deep measurement driven analytics and machine learning with applications in two important domains: i) trust (that spans resilience and the security of critical infrastructures) and ii) health (that spans computational genomics and health analytics focused on personalized medicine). The Depend Group has developed a rich AI analytics framework that has been deployed on real-world applications in collaborations with industry, health providers, and government agencies including NSF, NIH, and DoD. Iyer directs the Illinois/Mayo NSF Center for Computational Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine (CCBGM).

Professor Iyer is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He has received several awards, including the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, and the 2011 Outstanding Contributions award by the Association of Computing Machinery. Professor Iyer is also the recipient of the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from Toulouse Sabatier University in France.

Hans-Jürgen Zepernick received the Dipl.-Ing. degree from the University of Siegen, Germany, in 1987 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from the University of Hagen, Germany, in 1994. From 1987 to 1989, he was with Siemens AG, Germany. He was a Professor of wireless communications at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia, the Deputy Director of the Australian Telecommunications Research Institute, and an Associate Director of the Australian Telecommunications Cooperative Research Centre. Since 2004, he has been a Professor of radio communications with the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden. He also held visiting professorships at the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; Duy Tan University, Danang, Vietnam; and Gunadarma University, Jakarta, Indonesia. His research interests include advanced radio communications, immersive mobile multimedia, and perceptual multimedia quality assessment. He is the author or a coauthor of some 310 technical papers and 12 book chapters on these research topics. He is the lead author of the textbook Pseudo Random Signal Processing: Theory and Application (Wiley, 2005). He has been regularly serving as a technical program committee member for international conferences such as IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE PIMRC, IEEE VTC, and IEEE WCNC. He served as the Chair of the track Cognitive Radio and Spectrum Management of IEEE VTC-Spring 2016. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Immersive Mobile Media: From Extended Reality to the Metaverse

Immersive mobile media systems and services have become increasingly popular. Extended reality (XR) systems capture all real-and-virtual combined environments generated by computers ranging from 360-degree videos to virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), augmented virtuality (AV), and mixed reality (MR). The different levels of computer-generated virtual worlds that are offered by XR systems rely on novel human-machine interfaces and advanced head-mounted displays. In this context, the metaverse is one of the latest innovations aiming to offer seamless transitions between the physical world and digital content. As such, the metaverse is foreseen to accommodate XR, the Internet-of-Things, and communication technologies. As far as connectivity is concerned, current 5G and future 6G mobile networks are considered as essential enablers that can cope with the high bandwidth demands of related ultra-reliable low-latency communications, massive machine-type communications, and the emerging Internet-of-Everything. This keynote discusses major components, opportunities, and challenges of immersive mobile media applications and systems. It includes an overview of the ecosystem of interconnected immersive mobile media with focus on the roadmap from XR to the metaverse, review of key performance indicators of such systems, and standardization activities.