On January 24th, SCET kicked-off the first class of the Innovation Engineering 5G/AI course. In this advanced project course, students will be developing new data and AI related services that will be interesting for mobile communication companies and consumers.
The class will collaborate with Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA), who hosts the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Projects developed in this course are being watched by the telecom industry, either for ideas for existing firms or for new ventures that could be developed. In other cases, these projects may lead to new research projects that could be funded and continued at Berkeley.
The course kicked off with guest Laurie Bigler, AVP at AT&T who spoke about what 5G would offer and some of the challenges, including network deployment in the 5G world. One example was that complexity of network planning is increasing because of the greater number of cells in the network and the frequency of changes which affect the requirements on the line of sight.
According to the course instructor, Ikhlaq Sidhu, “Our objective is to mix people, skills and perspectives to come up with the new concepts and technical prototypes that go beyond the traditional operator’s perspective. Many new possibilities, such as new forms of customer engagement, new service models, and collaborations for massive IoT are all possible.”