As artificial intelligence continues to advance and becomes seemingly more sophisticated by the day, it presents new possibilities across many fields and industries, particularly within the telecommunications industry. However, despite its vast potential benefits, operators at major network providers remain skeptical of its reliability and hesitant to adopt it in practice.
Qiang Liu, assistant professor in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's School of Computing, aims to solve this issue with a new research endeavor that will help make AI-based technology tools more trustworthy. His project will be funded by a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, which supports pre-tenure faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research.
Liu's CAREER award research will specifically focus on developing safer and more reliable AI-native solutions for next-generation mobile networks while creating new educational opportunities for students and bridging the digital divide across Nebraska.
Companies like NVIDIA and Nokia are making major investments in the development of AI-driven solutions and infrastructures, recognizing that existing AI techniques show promising ability to optimize network performance by improving throughput, latency, robustness and efficiency, particularly in larger networks that can be difficult to manage manually. However, the risk of algorithms failing to safely adapt under unpredictable and evolving network dynamics still continues to prevent the telecommunications industry from fully embracing AI-assisted network automation.
