Northeastern University is part of a team, led by the Ohio State University, that was awarded $20 million over five years for the NSF AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence (AI-EDGE). William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia and Associate Professor Stratis Ioannidis of electrical and computer engineering, are responsible for $1.8 million of the award.
AI-EDGE will leverage the synergies between networking and AI to design future generations of wireless edge networks that are highly efficient, reliable, robust, and secure, and facilitate solving longstanding distributed AI challenges. The focus will be on edge networks since most of the growth is expected to happen with wireless devices, services, and applications at the network edge rather than the traditional network core. These edge networks will encompass mobile and stationary end devices, wireless and wired access, and computing and data servers.
New AI tools and techniques will be developed to ensure that these networks are self-healing and self-optimized. Collaboration over these adaptive networks will help solve long-standing distributed AI challenges making AI more efficient, interactive, and privacy preserving for applications in sectors such as intelligent transportation, remote health care, distributed robotics, and smart aerospace. It will create a research, education, knowledge transfer, and workforce development environment that will help establish U.S. leadership in next-generation edge networks and distributed AI for many decades to come. AI-EDGE is also partially funded by DHS.
Apart from contributing to theoretical research that advances applied machine learning in distributed wireless edge networks, Northeastern University College of Engineering PIs will also help to demonstrate these outcomes within practical use-cases and community-scale experiential platforms. Specifically, Northeastern will lead two use-cases. The first is called “Ubiquitous and Immersive Sensing and Networking in 6G+ Systems.” It will generate, deliver, and process data from pervasively deployed multimodal sensors, enabling AI agents to become cognizant of the environment. The second is called “End-to-End Programmable and Virtualized 6G+ Cellular Networks,” which will lead to an unprecedented ability to control the entire network infrastructure end-to-end by AI.
AI-EDGE collaborators with the Ohio State University in addition to Northeastern University include Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Michigan, University of Texas-Austin, University of Washington, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign and University of Illinois-Chicago. It will also work with its industrial partners including AT&T, IBM, Microsoft and Qualcomm and the Air Force Research Lab, Army Research Lab and Naval Research Lab to translate the research so that it is widely adopted.
