Communications Society Virtual Distinguished Lecture | Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Communications, Sensing and their Integration by Dr George Alexandropoulos, PhD, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Greece

This is a virtual event jointly organised by ComSoc Spain and ComSoc UK & Ireland.

The advent of the connected things paradigm within 5G wireless communications enabled various sophisticated applications, whose evolution paves the way for the notion of the connected intelligence of everything in 6G networks.

Recent speculation about this upcoming new generation pushes the 5G performance indicators to unprecedented levels, envisioning THz frequency bands, devices with embedded sensing capabilities, and native AI. All these are expected to become a reality around 2030 and with a strong green footprint.

This presentation will elaborate on the emerging technology of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) which are proposed as the enabler of smart wireless environments, offering a highly scalable, low-cost, hardware-efficient, and almost energy-neutral solution for the dynamic control of the propagation of electromagnetic signals.

Their evolution from programmable reflecting metamaterials to connected computational – and power – autonomous hybrid metasurfaces will be discussed, emphasising the state-of-the-art approaches for RIS-empowered communications, localisation, and sensing.