IEEE JSAC Special Issue on "Beyond Transmitting Bits: Context, Semantics and Task-Oriented Communications"
IEEE JSAC special issue call for papers on exploring the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of semantic and goal-oriented communications. Deadline: 1 April 2022
Feb 13, 2022

Traditional communication systems focus on accurately transmitting bits over a noisy communication channel. Shannon theory provides a fundamental theoretical limit on the rate of reliable communications, where bits are treated equally, and the communication system is oblivious to what meaning the bits convey or how they would be used. While this approach has successfully served content delivery oriented wireless networks for decades, many emerging applications, from autonomous driving, to healthcare and Internet of everything, will involve connecting machines, where the goal is often not to reconstruct the underlying message, but to enable the receiver to make the right inference or to take the right action at the right time and context. Similarly, human-machine interactions will be an important component, where humans will simultaneously interact with multiple devices using text, speech, or image commands. These applications motivate the development of semantic and task-oriented communications. Recent advances in artificial intelligence technologies and their applications have boosted the interest and the potentials of semantics and task-oriented communications. However, our understanding of this concept is still nascent with many fundamental problems yet to be investigated in sufficient depth.

This Special Issue aims to focus on the theoretical analysis and practical design for semantic compression, context-dependent and task-oriented communication system design. Prospective authors are invited to submit original manuscripts on topics including but not limited to:

  • Novel theories of context, semantics and task in relation to communication systems
  • Semantic and task-oriented compression for various sources, e.g., video, text, speech
  • Semantic information pursuit for multimodal data
  • Coding and signal processing for context, semantics, and task-oriented communications
  • End-to-end context, semantics and task-oriented communications
  • Multi-agent reinforcement learning for context, semantics and task-oriented communications
  • Federated learning enabled context, semantics and task-oriented communications
  • Ultra-low latency in context, semantics and task-oriented communications
  • Semantic interference control
  • Computation and communication resource management for task-oriented communications
  • Network architectures and protocols for context, semantics and task-oriented communications
  • Privacy and security issues in context, semantics and task-oriented communications
  • Age-of-information and its connections to context, semantics and task-oriented communications
  • Experiments and testbeds on context, semantics and task-oriented communications
  • Semantic communications in emerging wireless networks, i.e., virtual reality, autonomous driving, unmanned aerial vehicle, etc.

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should submit their manuscripts following the IEEE JSAC guidelines. Authors should submit a PDF version of their complete manuscript to EDAS.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 1 April 2022
First Notification: 1 June 2022
Acceptance Notification: 1 August 2022
Final Manuscript Due: 1 September 2022
Publication Date: Fourth Quarter 2022

Guest Editors

Deniz Gündüz (Lead)
Imperial College London, UK

Iñaki Estella Aguerri
Amazon, Spain

Chan-Byoung Chae
Yonsei University, South Korea

Harpreet S. Dhillon
Virginia Tech, USA

Zhijin Qin
Queen Mary University of London, UK

Kai-Kit Wong
University College London, UK

Zhaohui Yang
Zhejiang University, China

Aylin Yener
The Ohio State University, USA

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