Hossam Farag

Hossam Farag, Cedomir Stefanovic

Digital twins (DTs) are envisioned as a key enabler of the cyber-physical continuum in future wireless networks. However, efficient deployment and synchronization of DTs in dynamic multi-access edge computing (MEC) environments remains challenging due to time-varying communication and computational resources. This paper investigates the joint optimization of DT deployment and synchronization in dynamic MEC environments. A deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework is proposed for adaptive DT placement and association to minimize interaction latency between physical and digital entities. To ensure semantic freshness, an update scheduling policy is further designed to minimize the long-term weighted sum of the Age of Changed Information (AoCI) and the update cost. A relative policy iteration algorithm with a threshold-based structure is developed to derive the optimal policy. Simulation results show that the proposed methods achieve lower latency, enhanced information freshness, and reduced system cost compared with benchmark schemes

Samira Abdelrahman, Hossam Farag

6G In-body Subnetworks (IBSs) represent a key enabler for supporting standalone eXtended Reality (XR) applications. IBSs are expected to operate as an underlay to existing cellular networks, giving rise to coexistence challenges when sharing radio resources with other cellular users, such as enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) users. Such resource allocation problem is highly dynamic and inherently non-convex due to heterogeneous service demands and fluctuating channel conditions. In this paper, we propose an intelligent radio resource slicing strategy based on the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) deep reinforcement learning algorithm. The proposed SAC-based slicing method addresses the coexistence challenge between IBSs and eMBB users by optimizing a refined reward function that explicitly incorporates XR cross-modal delay alignment to ensure immersive experience while preserving eMBB service guarantees. Extensive system-level simulations are performed under realistic network conditions and the results demonstrate that the proposed method can enhance user experience by 12-85% under different network densities compared to baseline methods while maintaining the target data rate for eMBB users.

Samira Abdelrahman, Hossam Farag, Gilberto Berardinelli

6G industrial in-X subnetworks are expected to support highly time-critical alarm reporting in large-scale environments characterized by mobility, bursty event-driven traffic, and limited radio resources. In such settings, conventional medium access solutions are ill-suited to guarantee reliable delivery of critical traffic, e.g., emergency alarms, within strict deadlines, especially when multiple subnetworks become simultaneously active after a common alarm event, a scenario widely referred as medium access with a shared message. This paper proposes a distributed deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based medium access control protocol for timely alarm transmission in time-critical industrial subnetworks. The proposed method enables each local access point (LAP) to learn, in an online manner, to infer contention conditions from a broadcast contention-signature signal and to autonomously select a transmission pattern over the available channels using a lightweight deep neural network and an (ephsilon)-greedy policy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves a higher probability of in-time alarm delivery than benchmark random-access schemes, while exhibiting better scalability with increasing network density. For instance, the proposed method improves probability of in-time alarm delivery by at least 7% with a network size of 40 subnetworks, while the gain increases to 21% when the number of subnetworks increases to 60.

Aritra Roy, Kevin Shen, Andrew MacBride et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing how researchers in materials science and chemistry discover, organize, and act on scientific knowledge. This paper analyzes a broad set of community-developed LLM applications in an effort to identify emerging patterns in how these systems can be used across the scientific research lifecycle. We organize the projects into two complementary categories: Knowledge Infrastructure, systems that structure, retrieve, synthesize, and validate scientific information; and Action Systems, systems that execute, coordinate, or automate scientific work across computational and experimental environments. The submissions reveal a shift from single-purpose LLM tools toward integrated, multi-agent workflows that combine retrieval, reasoning, tool use, and domain-specific validation. Prominent themes include retrieval-augmented generation as grounding infrastructure, persistent structured knowledge representations, multimodal and multilingual scientific inputs, and early progress toward laboratory-integrated closed-loop systems. Together, these results suggest that LLMs are evolving from general-purpose assistants into composable infrastructure for scientific reasoning and action. This work provides a community snapshot of that transition and a practical taxonomy for understanding emerging LLM-enabled workflows in materials science and chemistry.