Keynotes
Keynote #1:
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
Bio: TBA
Keynote #2:
Title: Goal-oriented Semantic Communication
Abstract: This talk presents recent advances in goal-oriented and semantics-aware communications, an emerging paradigm that shifts the focus of wireless networks from reliably delivering bits to delivering information that is most useful for accomplishing a task. As communication systems increasingly support autonomous agents, digital twins, and real-time control applications, classical performance metrics such as throughput, latency, and reliability become necessary but insufficient to capture task effectiveness. The talk is organized into two parts. The first introduces the motivation for semantics-aware and goal-oriented communications and reviews representative frameworks, including the Age of Information (AoI) and Value of Information (VoI). Building on these foundations, we discuss how communication design evolves when the objective is accurate remote tracking, timely decision making, and actuation. The second part presents recent research results demonstrating how semantic and task-aware metrics can guide sampling, scheduling, transmission, and resource allocation decisions to significantly improve system performance. The talk concludes by outlining open research challenges and future directions toward intelligent wireless networks.
Nikolaos Pappas
(Senior Associate Professor at Linköping University, Sweden)
Bio: NIKOLAOS PAPPAS (Senior Member, IEEE) is currently a Senior Associate Professor with the Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden. His main research interests include the field of wireless communication networks, with an emphasis on semantics-aware goal-oriented communications. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Crete, Greece in 2012. He was a Visiting Scholar with the Institute of Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. From 2012 to 2014, he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the Department of Telecommunications, CentraleSupelec, France. He has served as the Symposium Co-Chair for the IEEE ICC 2022, IEEE WCNC 2022, IEEE GLOBECOM 2026, and the IEEE PIMRC 2027. He was the General Chair of the 23rd International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2025). He is an Area Editor of IEEE OPEN JOURNAL OF THE COMMUNICATIONS SOCIETY and IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING. He is Section Editor-in-Chief for the Entropy. He has served as guest editor in