Semantic Communications: Principles and Challenges

In past decades, conventional communication primarily focused on how to accurately and effectively transmit symbols, which is categorized as the first level of communications by Shannon and Weaver. With the developments of cellular communication systems, the achieved transmission rate is gradually approaching to the Shannon limit. Inspired by the power of deep learning, the semantic communication has been regarded as a promising solution to further improve the system efficiency, which is categorized as the second level of communications. Semantic communications aim to realize the successful semantic information exchange rather than receive the transmitted bit sequences or symbols accurately. In this talk, I will introduce the basis of semantic communications first. Our recent work on deep learning has enabled semantic communications will be presented. Research challenges are discussed at the end of the talk.