Project Grant 2148583

The National Science Foundation awarded a $794,000 Project Grant to the University of Illinois under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program. The three-year award will support the development of machine learning frameworks to enable new communication and sensing capabilities for next-generation cellular networks. Specifically, the university will create autonomous systems using machine learning to maximize performance from novel hardware in networks with massive antenna arrays and multiple frequency bands. The frameworks will also extract fine-grained insights from wireless signals for environmental sensing and imaging. A key focus is building formal verification methods to provide guarantees on the robustness of machine learning models against both environmental and adversarial noise. This is crucial for adopting data-driven approaches in critical next-generation infrastructure. The grant reflects the NSF's mission to support merit-reviewed research and education advancing computing and information science and engineering.