At 13:30 on July 19, 2022, the second lecture of the lecture series on cutting-edge technologies in information communication and control was successfully held on Tencent platform. Professor Rui Zhang, Fellow of Academy of Engineering, Singapore and X.Q. Deng Presidential Chair Professor of the School of Science and Engineering of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, was invited to conduct an online academic exchange entitled “Accessing From the Sky: UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond” with teachers and students of our College of Communications Engineering. The exchange session was hosted by Professor Fengye Hu and attended by nearly 100 teachers and students.
At first, Professor Hu expressed gratitude to Professor Rui Zhang for his long-term support and help to the College of Communications Engineering. He introduced in detail Professor Rui Zhang’s academic background, work experience, research direction and honorary awards.
Professor Rui Zhang’s report mainly introduced the application of UAV in the field of communication and relevant issues. He talked about the integration of UAV and cellular networks, the main challenges in the application of UAV in the field of communication, and future research directions, and shared the general research framework and landmark achievements in this field.
Firstly, Professor Zhang expounded on several typical applications of combined UAV and cellular communication, and pointed out that UAV as terminal or base station are two main directions for its integration into cellular network.
Secondly, Professor Zhang shared recent research achievements on and solutions to two major challenges facing UAV communication, namely, joint design of trajectory and communication, and aerial-ground interference in cellular-connected UAV.
Finally, Professor Rui Zhang summarized the application of UAV in 5G/6G and the research direction in the future.
After the report, teachers and students from the College of Communications Engineering posed questions about spectrum, interference, energy consumption, path planning, and the combination with emerging applications in UAV communication, and got detailed and constructive answers from Professor Rui Zhang. Finally, Professor Fengye Hu and Professor Rui Zhang discussed the difficulty of UAV collaborative communication in the current research.
This lecture, as the second in the lecture series on cutting-edge technologies in information communication and control, made full use of the advantages of digital platform for information exchange. It is based on our university and college, and is targeted at all teachers and students, so that they can have access to cutting-edge scientific and technological resources and discuss with the world’s leading experts without going abroad. Such an experience would inspire their scientific research and enrich their academic vision, thereby playing an active role in the development of “Double First-Class” disciplines.
Attachment: Brief Introduction to Rui Zhang
Rui Zhang is X.Q. Deng Presidential Chair Professor of the School of Science and Engineering of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 2007, and served as a researcher/senior researcher at the Institute for Infocomm Research, ASTAR, Singapore from 2007 to 2010. Then, he worked as an Assistant Professor/Dean’s Chair Associate Professor/Professor/Provost’s Chair Professor at the National University of Singapore from 2010 to 2022.
Currently, he is a Fellow of Academy of Engineering, Singapore and IEEE, a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Communications Society and Signal Processing Society, and a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics (since 2015). He has long been engaging in pioneering research on wireless communication, focusing on intelligent communication, UAV/satellite communication, wireless power transfer, intelligent reflecting surface and reconfigurable MIMO.
He has published more than 450 papers in top international journals and conferences, which have been cited more than 60,000 times in Google Scholar, with the h-index over 120. He was the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Region Best Young Researcher Award in 2011, the Young Researcher Award of National University of Singapore in 2015, the Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award in 2020, and the IEEE Signal Processing and Computing for Communications (SPCC) Technical Recognition Award in 2021.
He received 14 IEEE Best Paper Awards, including the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications (twice), the IEEE Communications Society Heinrich Hertz Prize Paper Award (three times), the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Outstanding Paper Award, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award, etc.
He served for over 30 international conferences as the TPC Co-Chair, and worked for many top journals as guest editor (IEEE JSTSP/JSAC) and editor (IEEE TWC/TSP/JSAC/TCOM/TGCN, etc).
