NETWIN

NETWIN (Network Intelligence) is a structural project supported by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) funded by Next Generation EU program. NETWIN is a structural project, coordinated by Prof. Sergio Barbarossa, included in the national project RESTART (RESearch and innovation on future Telecommunications systems and networks, to make Italy more smART), which started on January 1st, 2023 and it has a duration of three years.

The goal of NETWIN is to leverage the synergism between artificial intelligence and networks in two directions: 

i) design machine learning strategies that will guide the design of autonomous networks able to efficiently handle the complexity of the telecommunications of the future with minimum human intervention; 

ii) design network architectures able to promote the pervasive deployment of delay-sensitive and energy-constrained intelligent services. 

The project promotes a paradigm shift from conventional Shannon-based approach, fundamentally concerned about the reliable recovery of the transmitted bit, to a semantic and goal-oriented approach, where what matters is the meaning conveyed by the bits or to fulfillment of the goal underlying the exchange of information. 

Special attention is posed on distributed machine learning strategies, running in the edge cloud, to provide delay-sensitive services with minimum energy consumption. A further focus is the delivery of intelligent services on demand, so that learning mechanisms are brought closer to the end users where and when needed, using aerial-assisted vehicles or enabling a cost-efficient interaction between moving vehicles and edge servers. The project includes the application of the developed novel methodologies to three use cases: aerial-assisted intelligent services, coordination of a set of moving robots having intelligent capabilities, and AI-aided extended reality.