A Network Evolution Story: From Communication to Content Distribution to Real-Time Computation

Antonia M. Tulino received the Dr. Engr. degree (summa cum laude) from the Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy, in 1995 and the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from the Seconda Universita degli Studi di Napoli, Napoli, Italy, in 1999. She held research positions at Princeton University, at the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC), Oulu, Finland, and at Universita degli Studi del Sannio, Benevento, Italy. In 2002 she joined the Faculty of the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II where she was Associate Professor with the Dipartmento di Ingegneria Elettronica e delle Telecomunicazioni and has become Full Professor in 2017. Since 2002, she has been collaborating with Nokia Bell Labs. Starting from October 2019, she is, also, Research Professor at the at Dep. of Electrical and Computer Engineering NYU Tandon School of Engineering, USA. In September 2020 she is appointed as teaching director of the 5G Academy jointly organized by the Università degli Studi di Napoli, Federico II in collaboration with Capgemini, Nokia and TIM.

Prof. Tulino’s research interests lay in the area of communication systems approached with the complementary tools provided by signal processing, information theory, and random matrix theory. Prof. Tulino has contributed extensively to the information theoretic understanding of the potential and ultimate limitations in MIMO systems with applications in multiantenna systems, spread spectrum and multiuser detection. An example of one of her outstanding original contributions carrying a wide impact is the mercury water-filling (2009 Stephen O. Rice Prize winning contribution) which facilitates the optimization of resources, under practical constraint on signaling. One of her prominent research
areas has been also the development and application of random matrix theory, free probability and related subjects to wireless communications where she has produced several fundamental results. Using random matrix tools, Prof. Tulino has solved several open problems in the capacity of fading channels as well as in the fundamental limits of compressed sensing technology.

From 2011 to 2013, Prof. Tulino has been a member of the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and in 2013, she was elevated to IEEE Fellow. From 2019, she is the chair of the Information Theory society Fellows Committee. She has received several paper awards and among the others the 2009 Stephen O. Rice Prize in the field of Communications Theory for the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Communications in 2008. She was a recipient of the UC3M-Santander Chair of Excellence from 2018 to 2019. She has been a principal investigator of several research projects sponsored by the European Union and the Italian National Council, and was selected by the National Academy of Engineering for the Frontiers of Engineering program in 2013.

Over the last decade, the communication industry has broken through some remarkable barriers pushing further and transforming the way how nowadays we communicate and access information. In this talk, I will follow the evolution of digital services in their capability to augment knowledge or cognition in real-time. Briefly touching on communication services, I will first focus on content distribution services, particularly on the role of the wireless edge to provide efficient content storage and delivery. I will then move to next generation resource intensive and latency sensitive services, with particular emphasis on the need to jointly optimize storage, computation and communication resources.