CONVERGE organised an industry panel at IEEE 2023 Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), that took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 4th to 8th December 2023. The panel entitled “Convergence of wireless communications and computer vision: a new paradigm created by the CONVERGE project” had the goal of discussing new potential opportunities and challenges that can be anticipated by the usage of tools combining radio with computer vision, including potential contributions to science, standards, and industry verticals.

The panel highlighted the transformative power of vision and multimodal data in shaping the future of wireless communications:

1.  Empowering 6G wireless communications with vision and multimodal sensing: Vision and multimodal data together with AI as a catalyst for device-free user tracking, beam management, and intelligent control of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS).
2. Paving the way for ISAC architectures: Emphasised the pivotal role of vision data in multi-modal Sensing and Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) 6G architectures, enabling new applications such as semantic communications, holographic/haptic communications and digital twins.

The panel specifically addressed the following questions:

1. Why is it important to create scientific/instrumentation tools for the vision-communications convergence field and what should be their main characteristics?
2. What are the main research questions that these tools will help scientific community to answer?
3.  What new applications can be enabled by this vision-communications convergence field and what will be their impact in vertical markets?
4. How to open the tools and produced datasets, including video, to the community and how to deal with ethics and GDPR?
5. Which standardisation impacts are expected?

The panel was moderated by Manuel Ricardo (INESC TEC), and counted with the following panelists: Youssef Nasser (Greenerwave), Ivan Seskar (Rutgers University), Hamed Rezazadegan Tavakoli (Nokia) and Luis Pessoa (INESC TEC).

IEEE GLOBECOM is one of the IEEE Communications Society flagship conferences. It couted with over 2000 attendees from 70 countries. The program consisted of 1,262 symposium papers, 361 workshop papers, 20 Tutorials, 25 Industry Sessions, 7 Keynotes, and 2 Executive Forums.