As rush hour settles over Abu Dhabi, wireless signals bounce off glass, steel, concrete, and people, tracing invisible paths through the city.
In the world envisioned by Marwa Chafii, those signals do more than carry calls and video streams. They also reveal information about the physical environment itself, helping construct a live digital layer of the city, one that can signal air quality along a school route, the load on a bridge, the buildup of crowds in a busy square, and the early signs of a public health incident.
"It is like having real-time Google Maps for the world around you," she says. "Not just for roads, but also for motion, activity, and environmental conditions, so people become more aware of their surroundings and can make better, more informed decisions."
As an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NYU Abu Dhabi, Chafii is turning everyday wireless traffic into a tool for sensing, prediction, and real-time insight into the dynamics of the physical world.
The aim is not constant surveillance for its own sake, but situational awareness: understanding how environments behave in real time and using this knowledge to improve safety, resilience, and quality of life.
Chafii’s research suggests that future generations of wireless networks could enhance the situational awareness of existing alert systems.
“While today’s systems primarily disseminate information, sensing-enabled networks could also help authorities understand changing conditions on the ground, including crowd movement, reduced visibility, environmental hazards, or stress on critical infrastructure,” she says. “By combining reliable alerts with richer real-time information, these technologies could support faster decisions, more targeted responses, and greater public safety.”
Building something from scratch
After her PhD, Chafii joined the Technical University of Dresden in Germany as a research group leader in 2018, then moved to ENSEA in France as an associate professor in 2019, where she held a Chair of Excellence on Artificial Intelligence from the CY Initiative.
Drawn by the prestige of NYU WIRELESS at NYU Tandon, a leading wireless research center globally, Chafii landed in Abu Dhabi in 2021 for the opportunity to build a new wireless center in the UAE. “Helping shape a new research cluster on the future of wireless systems was incredibly exciting,” she says.
From Communication to Perception
Chafii focuses on integrating wireless communication and sensing, enabling machines to perceive their physical environment and communicate it simultaneously.
This technology is expected to be one of the defining features of 6G, the next generation of wireless networks, which is projected to begin deployment around 2030.
Every wireless device is already transmitting and receiving signals. Traditionally, engineers focus on mitigating reflections and interference to improve communication. Chafii’s work instead treats those reflections as valuable information to read the environment itself.
In a world already saturated with invisible signals, this presents a powerful possibility: that the networks connecting us could also help us better understand the environments we share.
“We’re using the invisible signals that are already everywhere,” she says. “Wi-Fi, cellular, connected devices. Instead of viewing the environment as an obstacle to communication, we use it as a source of information to see the world and reconstruct it.”
The result, when fully realized, is what researchers call a digital twin: a dynamic, data-driven representation of the physical world.
In practice, that could enable cities to simulate infrastructure stress, monitor crowd flow patterns, support continuous health monitoring, assist autonomous systems in complex environments, or empower search-and-rescue teams to locate survivors when visibility is limited.
"It makes everyday life easier because it gives more awareness of the environment, and it’s not just for emergencies, it’s about empowering people with better information," she adds.
“Navigation tools can guide elderly residents or people with limited mobility along accessible routes tailored to their needs."
Currently, 6G is expected to begin rolling out within the next four years. While sensing-enabled wireless networks are a key ambition for 6G, Chafii believes their full potential would only be fully realized in the next generations of wireless technologies.
The groundwork, however, is being laid now, and for her, NYUAD is the right place to do it.
Supporting the move towards commericial use
The NYUAD Wireless Center contributed modeling and analysis to published research showing that the upper 6 GHz (U6GHz) band can carry significantly more traffic than today’s mid-band spectrum using existing cell sites. The findings provide engineering evidence to support the UAE’s move from trials toward commercial use of U6GHz, helping lay the foundation for future 6G services.
“If you can create a digital representation of the world, you can test scenarios and predict outcomes across almost every part of life. It’s turning signals into foresight,” she says.
“That kind of capability is incredibly powerful, and it’s closer than people think.”
