The 14th International Conference on Electronics, Communications and Networks (CECNet 2024)

Abstract: For all the fascination with the Metaverse, the term has no consensus definition or consistent description. Most industry leaders define it in the manner that fits their own worldviews and/or capabilities of their companies. Notwithstanding, it is fair to assume that there can be only one Metaverse – just as there is “the Internet,” not “an Internet” or “the Internets.” In virtual worlds, it is common practice to talk to strangers with no introduction whatsoever and invite them to join efforts in pursuit of a task, thereby creating a sense of shared community and an ideal community-individual relationship. In this keynote, we will report on our work on cyber-physical-social systems in the emerging Metaverse for integrating human, artificial, and natural intelligence with the help of digital twins and Web3 blockchain technologies. In particular, we outline our ideas on the virtual society’s symbiosis between Inter(net) and (human) being in the future Metaverse enabled by a stronger and more resilient nexus between real and virtual worlds for transferring the value created in these digital realms into our own real world, giving rise to the powerful concept of Interbeing, a word that is not in the dictionary yet.

Biography: Martin Maier is a full professor with the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Montréal, Canada. He was educated at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and received MSc and PhD degrees both with distinctions (summa cum laude) in 1998 and 2003, respectively. He was a recipient of the two-year Deutsche Telekom doctoral scholarship from 1999 through 2001. In 2003, he was a postdoc fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2006 through 2007. He was a co-recipient of the 2009 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award. Further, he was a Marie Curie IIF Fellow of the European Commission from 2014 through 2015. In 2017, he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation in recognition of his accomplishments in research on FiWi-enhanced mobile networks. In 2017, he was named one of the three most promising scientists in the category “Contribution to a better society” of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) 2017 Prize Award of the European Commission. In 2019/2020, he held a UC3M-Banco de Santander Excellence Chair at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Madrid, Spain. He is co-author of the book “Toward 6G: A New Era of Convergence” (Wiley-IEEE Press, January 2021) and author of the sequel book “6G and Onward to Next G: The Road to the Multiverse” (Wiley-IEEE Press, February 2023).