The Departmental Academic Advisor (DAA), Prof. Rui Zhang, paid a virtual visit to EIE from 11 to 13 April 2022. Prof. Zhang is a Professor and Provost’s Chair from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National University of Singapore. Prof. Zhang met with our academic staff, student representatives, Programme Leaders, Research Focus Areas’ Leaders, Departmental Research Committee, as well as the Departmental Learning and Teaching Committee to review our programmes and provided constructive advice for the development of the Department.
During his visit, Prof. Zhang also delivered a seminar on “Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) Empowered 6G: Fundamentals, Applications and Challenges” to introduce a new promising wireless technology, named Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS), which has been identified by the industry as a potential key technology to achieve the ambitious goals of 6G. In this talk, Prof. Zhang presented the fundamentals of IRS including its hardware architecture and communication model, its main applications in wireless networks, and its cost and performance advantages as compared to the existing wireless technologies. He focused the main design challenges in efficiently integrating IRSs into the future wireless networks such as 6G, including passive reflection optimization, IRS channel acquisition and IRS deployment, and overviewed their state-of-the-art solutions. Prof. Zhang then discussed open problems and pointed out directions worthy of further investigation in future work in the final part of the seminar.
