P02: 6G Strategic Evolution

Luis M. Correia is a Professor in Telecommunications, with his work focused on Wireless & Mobile Communications, at IST (Univ. Lisbon), with the research activities developed in INESC INOV-Lab.  He has acted as a consultant for the Portuguese telecommunications operators and regulator, besides other public and private entities, and has been in the Board of Directors of a telecommunications company.  He has participated in 34 projects within European frameworks, having coordinated 6 and taken leadership responsibilities at various levels in many others, besides national ones.  He has lectured 81 advanced training courses for industry and academia at the national and international levels.  He has supervised over 240 M.Sc./Ph.D. students, having edited 6 books, contribute to European strategic documents, and authored over 550 papers in international and national journals and conferences, for which served also as a reviewer, editor and board member.  Internationally, he was part of 43 Ph.D. juries, and 101 research projects and institutions evaluation committees for funding agencies in 13 countries, and the European Commission and COST. He has been the Chairman of Conference, of the Technical Programme Committee and of the Steering Committee of 25 major conferences, besides other several duties.  He was a National Delegate to the COST Domain Committee on ICT. He has launched and served as Chairman of the IEEE Communications Society Portugal Chapter, besides being involved in several other duties in this society at the global level.  He is an Honorary Professor of the Gdańsk University of Technology (Poland) and a recipient of the 2021 EurAAP Propagation Award “for leadership in the field of propagation for wireless and mobile communications”.

Dr. Xu is the Vice President of Engineering, Head of Qualcomm Research China and IEEE Fellow. Since 2003, he has been working at Qualcomm R&D, where he has led many research and standardization projects from 3G to 5G. His current research focus is 6G, AI and robotics. Prior to Qualcomm, he worked at Bell Lab’s Wireless Communication Research Lab. In 2003, he received the Bell-Labs President Gold Metal Award for his contributions to MIMO technology, including the early near field MIMO research.  

Dr. Xu has 870+ US issued patents, numerous journal publications and over 22000 citations. In 2018, he received the Top Ten 5G Leading Figures Awards in China. He also won numerous industry awards for various 5G trials. He is currently the Director of IEEE Communications Society Standards Development Board, and serves on Award Technical Committee, Industry Advisory Board, Emerging Technology Board, and Industry Communities Board. He is also on the technical advisory board for HKUST ECE department. 

Dr. Xu received his B.S and M.S. from Moscow Power Engineering Institute and Technical University, Russia, in 1994 and 1996. He received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in 2000. During his Ph.D., he pioneered the millimeter-wave propagation research at 38 GHz and 60 GHz with Dr. Rappaport. In 1999, he received the IEEE Communications Society Steve Rice Award.

(Kit) Kai-Kit Wong was born in Hong Kong and received the BEng, the MPhil, and the PhD degrees, all in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, in 1996, 1998, and 2001, respectively. He is Chair Professor of Wireless Communications at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College London after taking appointments at University of Hong Kong and University of Hull and visiting positions at Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs and Stanford University. His current research centers around 6G and beyond mobile communications. He is one of the early researchers who proposed multiuser MIMO. His first paper on multiuser MIMO was published in WCNC 2000 which appeared to be the first ever research paper on this topic. He is Fellow of CIC, IEEE and IET. He served as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Wireless Communications Letters between 2020 and 2023. 

Wen Tong is the CTO, Huawei Wireless, he is the chief scientist for Huawei 5G/6G. He is a Huawei Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. Prior to joining Huawei in 2009, Dr. Tong was the Nortel Fellow and head of the Network Technology Labs at Nortel. He joined the Wireless Technology Labs at Bell Northern Research in 1995 in Canada. For the past three decades, he had pioneered fundamental technologies from 1G to 6G wireless and WiFi. His current research focus is AI-Wireless. He is a Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow Royal Society of Canada.

Gerhard P. Fettweis, F’09, earned a Ph.D. under H. Meyr at RWTH Aachen (Germany) in 1990. After a postdoc at IBM Research, San Jose, he joined TCSI, Berkeley, USA. Since 1994 he is Vodafone Chair Professor at TU Dresden, Germany. Since 2018 he is also founding Scientific Director & CEO of the Barkhausen Institute. He researches wireless communications and chip design, coordinates 5G++Lab Germany and the German Cluster-for-Future SEMECO. His team spun-out 30 tech startups, and he initiated 6 platform entities. Gerhard is member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), the German Academy of Engineering (Acatech), and Fellow of IEEE, VDE/ITG, National Academy of Inventors, EURASIP, WWRF, and DATE. He is active in organizing IEEE conferences.

Reinaldo Valenzuela, Fellow IEEE. IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award. Bell Labs Fellow. B.Sc. U. of Chile, Ph.D. Imperial College. Director, Wireless Communications Research Department, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Bell Laboratories. Engaged in propagation measurements and models, MIMO/space time systems achieving high capacities using transmit and receive antenna arrays, HetNets, small cells and next generation air interface techniques and architectures. He has published 190 papers and 44 patents. He has over 21,300 Google Scholar citations and is a 'Highly Cited Author' In Thomson ISI and a Fulbright Senior Specialist.

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".