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Title: Semantic Sensing: A Task-Oriented Paradigm

Time: 10:30am on 11th Jun., Thursday, 2026 

Location: 611 EEE Building, South Kensington Campus

Abstract: The emergence of semantic communications has shifted communication system design from delivering bits to delivering meaning. A similar transformation is now needed in sensing. Conventional sensing focuses on estimating physical parameters such as distance, velocity, and angle, whereas many emerging applications ultimately require semantic information, such as object categories, activities, and environmental understanding. This motivates semantic sensing, a new task-oriented sensing paradigm that directly extracts high-level semantic information from wireless observations. By shifting the objective from parameter reconstruction to task effectiveness, semantic sensing enables sensing resources to be focused on acquiring the most relevant information for the intended task.

In this talk, I will first introduce the concept of semantic sensing and discuss its relationship to semantic communications, ISAC, and conventional sensing. I will then present an information-theoretic framework based on the information bottleneck principle, together with a semantic sensing architecture and an end-to-end optimization framework that jointly designs waveform sensing and semantic inference. A practical OFDM-based implementation for target classification will be used to demonstrate the concept. Finally, I will present representative results and discuss future directions toward semantic ISAC and intelligent wireless sensing systems.

Bio: Dr J. Andrew Zhang (M'04-SM'11) is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Data Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His research interests are in the area of signal processing for wireless communications and sensing. Prof. Zhang has published more than 300 papers in leading Journals and conference proceedings, and has won 7 best paper awards. He is a recipient of CSIRO Chairman's Medal and the Australian Engineering Innovation Award for exceptional research achievements in multi-gigabit wireless communications.

Prof. Zhang is one of the pioneer researchers in ISAC. He initiated the concept of perceptive mobile networks in 2017. Since then, his team has published 75+ top-tier journal papers on ISAC, including several highly cited and review articles. In this field, he has led or participated in multiple research projects with a total value of over AUD 8 million, co-established a Joint Laboratory on Network Sensing with a mobile network operator, developed multiple real-time ISAC demonstration systems, and is currently advancing their commercialization. For details, please refer to .