Speaker’s Biography: Prof. Kin-Fai (Kenneth) Tong is a Full Professor of Antennas and Applied Electromagnetics at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering (EEE) in UCL. During his PhD research, he has been credited to be one of the first who introduced the idea of embedding microstrip patch antennas into mobile phone handsets. He was an Expert Researcher in the Photonic and Millimetre-wave Devices Group of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan. Prof. Tong is a Fellow of IEEE, Chartered Engineer of UK Engineering Council, Fellow of Electromagnetic Academy US and Fellow of Higher Education Academy UK. His Innovate UK project was graded as “OUTSTANDING”, i.e., the top 5%, amongst all the funded projects. Recently, his AgriTech Internet-of-Thing (IoT) Hub project supported by EPSRC IAA (EP/K503745/1) has resulted in two start-up companies and winning the UCL Provost’s Spirit of Enterprise Award. Prof Tong was the general chairman of the IEEE iWEM 2017 held in UK, the Lead Guest Editor of the IEEE OJAP Special Section, the Subject Editor of IET Electronics Letters, Associate Editor of IEEE AWPL.

Speech title: Recent Advancement of Position Versatile Fluid Antenna Systems

Abstract: With research efforts gearing up to build the sixth-generation (6G) mobile communications, it is only logical to seek new mobile technologies that can provide the next generational leap for much better performance under harsher environments. To this end, one interesting concept is fluid antenna system (FAS) which utilizes flexible antenna architectures such as liquid-based antennas, reconfigurable RF pixel-based antennas, stepper motor-based antennas, etc., to enable dynamically relocatable antenna positions (i.e, port). In so doing, tremendous space diversity can be obtained in a novel way. The possibility of accessing seemingly a continuous fading envelope in the spatial domain also means that multiple access can be realized in a simple manner without complex optimization and processing.  In the talk, we will share with you the recent advancement in theoretical and experimental research.