On August 25, 2026, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) finalized its latest amendment to award Principal Investigator Victor Lawrence & Co-Principal Investigator Yu-Dong Yao to explore how to build better communication technologies for next-generation wireless communication networks within the smart manufacturing field, although other critical applications can exist in the field.
The abstract for the research intends for the project to focus on improving the latency (a delay between a request and the resulting response) and improving workplace conditions (such as productivity, safety, and efficiency). When we use technologies such as artificial intelligence or sensor networks, a delay can occur between the request and the response. This is an inconvenience that could be left to resolve itself; however, if you take that delay and apply it to industrial applications, these technologies lose the data that it depends on and operations for the entire industrial systems stop as a whole.
Essentially, the aim is to make these technologies as reliable as the system itself. Integrating robots, sensors, and AI to the industrial side of the system can address safety concerns and handle high data volumes to keep the entire system running.
The project is expected to be done under a joint partnership with MIT, supported by NSF and Business Finland (BF). BF is known to fund projects related to Lawrence and Yao’s fields, such as the University of Oulu’s first 6G program in 2018, which further supported the university in becoming a leader in smart communication research for smart societies. This collaboration between the two areas at Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey, as well as Finnish research labs, would allow for the seamless development of semantic solutions within the U.S. in order to test them, while being able to test those prototyped in Finland without having to build a new lab facility from scratch.
This project officially began on September 1, 2026, and is expected to conclude on August 31, 2029. The NSF awarded Lawrence and Yao a total of $900,000, with $294,983 allocated during the current fiscal year.
