Speaker: Prof. Merouane Debbah, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Title: Can We Chat with the Air? How RF Becomes the Next Language of AI
Abstract: AI has mastered language, learned to see, and learned to hear, yet it still cannot natively understand the electromagnetic world that powers connectivity. This keynote introduces a new frontier: treating RF as a first-class modality for foundation models. Using our recent foundational RF-GPT AI model, we will demonstrate how RF grounded multimodal models can bridge physical-layer observations and language-level reasoning. Instead of isolated RF tools trained for one label and one task, we can build interactive models that explain coexistence patterns, detect overlap structures, identify technologies, extract protocol-level clues, and support operator decisions through natural-language dialogue.
We will also discuss why this matters now: 6G ambitions around AI-native operation, joint communication-sensing, and autonomous network control require models that reason from the spectrum up, not only from logs and KPIs down. The keynote will close with open research challenges on real-data adaptation, robustness to impairments, trustworthiness, and standardization.
Biography: Merouane Debbah is professor at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and founding senior director of the Khalifa University Research Institute for Digital Future. His research has been lying at the interface of fundamental mathematics, algorithms, statistics, information and communication sciences with a special focus on random matrix theory and learning algorithms. In the AI field, he is known for his work on large language models, distributed AI systems for networks and semantic communications. In the communication field, he has been at the heart of the development of small cells (4G), massive MIMO (5G) and large intelligent surfaces (6G) technologies. He received more than 50 IEEE best-paper awards and 100 patents for his contributions to both fields. He was named in 2025 as one of the "50 Leaders at the Forefront of an AI-Driven Future in the Middle East" and "Arab's Most Influential Leaders in Tech".