Events

Date: 25 February 2026   Time: 14:00 - 15:00     

Location: People's Palace PP2 + Online

Online Seminar Link

Synopsis

A physical neural network is a type of artificial neural network in which an electrically adjustable material is used to emulate the function of a neural neuron model. The term "physical" neural network is used to emphasize the reliance on physical hardware utilized to emulate neurons as opposed to software-based approaches. In this talk, we discuss the role of physical neural networks in the context of wave-domain information processing for wireless communications. We will focus our attention on implementations based on reconfigurable metasurfaces, by considering the case of the recently proposed stacked intelligent metasurface technology.

Biography

Marco Di Renzo received the Laurea (cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of L'Aquila, Italy, in 2003 and 2007, respectively, and the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (Doctor of Science) degree from University Paris-Sud (currently Paris-Saclay Uni-versity), France, in 2013. Currently, he is Chair Professor of Telecommu-nications Engineering, the Director of the Centre for Telecommunications Research, and the Head of the Telecommunications Group, Department of Engineering, King's College London, London, United Kingdom. He is also a CNRS Research Director (Professor) with the Laboratory of Signals and Systems at CNRS-CentraleSupélec, Paris-Saclay University, Paris, France. He was a France-Nokia Chair of Excellence in ICT at the University of Oulu (Finland), a Tan Chin Tuan Exchange Fellow in Engineering at Nanyang Technological Uni-versity (Singapore), a Fulbright Fellow at The City University of New York (USA), a Nokia Founda-tion Visiting Professor at Aalto University (Finland), and a Royal Academy of Engineering Distin-guished Visiting Fellow at Queen's University Belfast (U.K.). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, IET, EUR-ASIP, and AAIA; an Academician of AIIA; an Ordinary Member of the European Academy of Sci-ences and Arts, an Ordinary Member of the Academia Europaea, and an Ordinary Member of the Italian Academy of Technology and Engineering; an Ambassador of the European Association on Antennas and Propagation; and a Highly Cited Researcher. He has received several distinctions, including the Michel Monpetit Prize conferred by the French Academy of Sciences, the IEEE Com-munications Society Heinrich Hertz Award, and the IEEE Communications Society Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications. Also, he is a principal investigator of an ERC Synergy grant on metasurface-based information processing. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Communications Letters from 2019 to 2023, and as the Director of Journals and Chair of the Publications Misconduct Ad Hoc Committee of the IEEE Communications Society from 2024 to 2025. Currently, he sits on the IEEE-COMSOC Fellow Evaluation Standing Committee and on the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the IEEE.