Prof. Andrew Zhang to Speak on Semantic Sensing at CommIT on July 13, 2026

Talk by Prof. Andrew Zhang

Speaker: Prof. J. Andrew Zhang, School of Electrical and Data Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Date: Monday, July 13, 2026, 10:00 a.m.

Location: HFT building, 6th floor, room HFT-TA 617, Einsteinufer 25, 10587 Berlin

Title: Semantic Sensing: A Task-Oriented Paradigm

Abstract: The emergence of semantic communications has shifted communication system design from delivering bits to delivering meaning. A similar transformation is now needed in sensing. Conventional sensing focuses on estimating physical parameters such as distance, velocity, and angle, whereas many emerging applications ultimately require semantic information, such as object categories, activities, and environmental understanding. This motivates semantic sensing, a new task-oriented sensing paradigm that directly extracts high-level semantic information from wireless observations. By shifting the objective from parameter reconstruction to task effectiveness, semantic sensing enables sensing resources to be focused on acquiring the most relevant information for the intended task.

In this talk, I will first introduce the concept of semantic sensing and discuss its relationship to semantic communications, ISAC, and conventional sensing. I will then present an information-theoretic framework based on the information bottleneck principle, together with a semantic sensing architecture and an end-to-end optimization framework that jointly designs waveform sensing and semantic inference. A practical OFDM-based implementation for target classification will be used to demonstrate the concept. Finally, I will present representative results and discuss future directions toward semantic ISAC and intelligent wireless sensing systems.