Date: Friday, September 18, 2026
Time: 8:30 AM – 4:40 PM
Location: WINLAB, Rutgers University, 671 Route 1 South, North Brunswick, NJ 08902
Attendance: In person. Free, but registration is required. Breakfast and lunch provided.
Register: eventbrite.com/e/1998936130777
Wireless for AI (W4AI)
Making AI applications wireless-native — and redesigning wireless to carry AI-based services.
This is the second workshop in the STAIRWAI to COSMOS series. The first, AI for Wireless (AI4W), ran at WINLAB on January 30, 2026 with speakers from Ericsson, NVIDIA, AT&T and Qualcomm, and asked how AI methods can improve the operation and performance of wireless systems.
This one turns the question around: if AI applications become the dominant traffic and the dominant workload, what do wireless networks — and the testbeds we prototype them on — have to become? A full day of keynotes from industry, a poster session, and breakout discussions to help prioritize the development of an “AI-Ready” COSMOS testbed platform.
Draft program
| Time | Session | Presenter / Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 8:30 – 9:00 | Registration, light breakfast, poster set-up | |
| 9:00 – 9:10 | Welcoming remarks | Narayan Mandayam, Director, WINLAB |
| 9:10 – 10:00 | Keynote 1 — the vendor and operator view | Mikael Prytz, Ericsson |
| 10:00 – 11:10 | Poster session and coffee — student, postdoc and industry posters (open call below) | |
| 11:10 – 12:00 | Keynote 2 — AI Glasses: Building Technology for Human Connection | Arpit Mehta, Meta |
| 12:00 – 1:20 | Lunch | |
| 1:20 – 2:10 | Keynote 3 — AI in the field, over real networks: agriculture as the proving ground for wireless-native AI, and the prototyping infrastructure it demands | Ranveer Chandra, Microsoft |
| 2:10 – 3:00 | Keynote 4 — Building Trust in Industrial AI at the Wireless Edge | Charif Mahmoudi, Siemens |
| 3:00 – 3:10 | Framing the breakouts — what we want the breakouts to produce | Jorge Ortiz, Rutgers |
| 3:10 – 4:20 | Parallel breakouts and coffee | |
| 4:20 – 4:40 | Summary, priorities, and the road to a full center proposal — closing remarks | Jorge Ortiz, Rutgers |
Breakout tracks
- A. Wireless-native AI — split inference, distributed and over-the-air learning, latency budgets.
- B. Verticals — what AgTech, manufacturing and XR actually need from the network.
- C. What makes a testbed AI-ready — datasets, benchmarks, reproducibility, tooling.
Verticals in focus
- Agriculture and the outdoor edge — intermittent connectivity, energy budgets, inference where backhaul is not an option.
- Advanced manufacturing — deterministic latency, closed-loop control, what a private network owes an AI controller.
- XR, wearables and AR glasses — splitting computation between a device that cannot get hot and an edge that cannot be far away.
- Smart streetscapes and mobility — multimodal street-level sensing, with the COSMOS West Harlem deployment as the live setting.
Call for posters and demos
The poster session is the heart of the morning and is open to students, postdocs and industry researchers. Send a title, authors and a short abstract to reserve a board — easels and posterboards are provided. Demos are welcome; tell us what you need and we will find you a table, power and spectrum. Registration is free but required, for catering and building access.
About STAIRWAI to COSMOS
STAIRWAI to COSMOS — Sensor-enabled Testbed for Advancing Innovative Research in Wireless+AI — is an NSF planning grant under the AI-Ready Test Beds program. Its job is to work out, with the research community, what a full center on Wireless and AI should build first: streamlined dataset collection, shared benchmarks, a framework for deploying and evaluating wireless-aware AI, and infrastructure for real-time acceleration at the edge. Project site: climbing-the-stairwai-to-cosmos.ghost.io
Arriving Thursday?
The COSMOS3 Community Workshop on Next-Generation Testbed Capabilities runs the afternoon before — Thursday, September 17, 12:00–5:00 PM, same venue — on FR3, the digital twin and street-level sensing, followed by a joint reception and an optional off-site dinner. Register: eventbrite.com/e/1998936074609
Draft agenda (PDF)
Wireless for AI (W4AI) — draft agenda (PDF)
Organizing committee — Anand D. Sarwate (PI, Rutgers), Jorge Ortiz (Rutgers), Bo Yuan (Rutgers), Yingying Chen (Rutgers), Ivan Seskar (Rutgers/WINLAB), Narayan Mandayam (Director, WINLAB). Coordination: Taqiya Ehsan (Rutgers). Supported by NSF award 2509233, Planning: AI Ready: STAIRWAI to COSMOS, hosted on the NSF PAWR COSMOS / COSMOS3 platform.