6th NEWTON Forum

Date: December 25–26, 2020 Venue: Multi-Function Hall, 11th Floor, Rohm Building, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University

Background

In recent years, wireless communications and networking technologies have advanced rapidly, fundamentally transforming the way people communicate and their everyday lives. These technologies have also begun to permeate nearly every aspect of society, including intelligent transportation, smart manufacturing, and telemedicine. With further advances in emerging mobile communication technologies such as 5G/6G, artificial intelligence, and edge computing, we can expect future society to become smarter, more reliable, and more secure.

At the same time, wireless communications and networks are becoming increasingly complex, consuming ever-greater temporal, spatial, frequency, and energy resources. These demands directly or indirectly constrain the further deployment and development of networks. Addressing these challenges requires exploring new dimensions of resource utilization through interdisciplinary collaboration and incorporating theories and methods from related fields to reduce network complexity and improve service reliability.

The NEWTON (National Forum on Emerging Wireless Technologies and Open INnovations) Forum was established in response to these challenges. By bringing together outstanding young scholars and industry leaders from China and abroad in wireless communications and related fields, the forum explores cutting-edge technologies, systems, and standardization in wireless communications and networking, while highlighting recent advances in related disciplines. Its aim is to inspire new concepts, methods, and perspectives. As a small-scale seminar centered on panel discussions, the forum focuses on envisioning future developments, with particular emphasis on interdisciplinary advances and emerging trends in wireless communications.

The forum was jointly organized by the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University and the Key Laboratory of Intelligent Connected Networks at the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, with Journal of Communications and Information Networks (JCIN) as a supporting journal. The one-and-a-half-day event featured a keynote presentation by Academician Yu Quan entitled “Swarm Democratic Decision-Making and Brain-Inspired Computing,” along with three panel discussions on Intelligent Connectivity and Connected Intelligence, Green Information and Energy Informatics, and Intelligent Sensing and Collaboration. The discussions were lively, and the participating students gained valuable insights.