Stony Brook University President Andrea Goldsmith spoke on April 17 about the history and future of wireless technology during her Inauguration Week lecture, “How I Fell in Love with Wireless,” at the Charles B. Wang Center Theater.
Goldsmith’s talk focused on how she entered the field of wireless communications as an engineering math student at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. She said a mentor suggested communications for its mathematical foundation and practical impact, a decision that shaped her career. “That was a lesson in how a mentor can have a big impact on your life, because if he had not suggested that, I never would have had the incredible opportunities I’ve had to work in this amazing field,” Goldsmith said.
She described entering Silicon Valley after graduation when commercial wireless communication was just beginning. Despite industry challenges, she found opportunities at Maxim Technologies and became captivated by the possibilities of communicating wirelessly across the globe. “I fell in love with wireless communication,” she said. “The notion that you could communicate over wireless channels anywhere in the world and imagining what that might be just captivated me.”
Goldsmith addressed ongoing technological challenges such as spectrum limitations, signal power reduction, ultra-reliability, and low latency needed for applications like telemedicine and autonomous driving. Reflecting on industry promises around new standards like 5G and upcoming work on 6G, she quoted Jonathan Swift: ‘Promises and pie crust are made to be broken.’ She added: “That’s especially true in wireless standards, because those promises drive all the work that goes into the next generation of standards… Right now, there are a lot of people working on the 6G standard, and in 2030 we’ll have that.”
Discussing artificial intelligence (AI), Goldsmith traced its evolution from early computational approaches to modern deep learning methods influencing current research directions. She explained how AI will be central to optimizing future networks: “6G calls itself ‘AI-native,’ which means it will use AI to do a kind of optimization in the cloud to figure out user patterns… AI is really going to play a big role in wireless networking optimization.” Initially skeptical about AI’s relevance for communications research, Goldsmith said her own findings changed her perspective: “One of the things that taught me at a higher scale was that AI works really well when we don’t have good mathematical models or we have complexity constraints… This is where AI has demonstrated that it can play a big role…”
In closing remarks, Goldsmith compared Stony Brook’s efforts building quantum internet infrastructure with pioneering milestones like UCLA’s creation of ARPANET. She highlighted Stony Brook’s establishment of a quantum internet across Long Island—with plans for statewide expansion backed by $300 million from New York State—and concluded: “So you’ll see that the quantum internet started here at Stony Brook will eventually connect every quantum device throughout the country and around the world… This is an exciting time for wireless communication, maybe the most exciting time ever because of applications it will enable.”
