Rose Qingyang Hu, PhD
Department Head and Professor
Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Virginia Tech
Monday, October 13, 2025 | Seminar: 2pm | 230 A Davis Hall
6G will mark a major shift in wireless communication, moving beyond accurate data transmission to understanding and sharing meaning—known as semantic communication. This talk introduces the foundations of this emerging paradigm and explores key security challenges that come with it. We will focus on evolving threats like backdoor and adversarial attacks, including new forms that target how meaning is reconstructed rather than just classified. In response, we present novel defense strategies, such as feature-based detection and task-aware pruning. The talk concludes with a discussion on future directions toward building robust and secure semantic communication for the 6G era.
Rose Qingyang Hu [M’98, SM’06, F’20] (rose.hu@vt.edu) is currently Department Head of the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech.
Prior to joining Virginia Tech, she was a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering at Utah State University. She has over 17 years of academic research experience and more than a decade of industrial research and development experience with Nortel, BlackBerry, and Intel, working on 3G and 4G wireless research, technology development, and 3GPP/IEEE standardization. Her current research interests include next-generation wireless communications and networks, the Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, and the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into wireless networks.
She has made significant contributions to these fields, authoring 6 books, 4 book chapters, and over 350 papers in leading IEEE journals and conferences, and holding 29 patents. She is an IEEE Fellow, an AAAS fellow, a 2020 NIST Communication Technology Laboratory Innovator, an IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Distinguished Lecturer, and an IEEE Vehicular Technology Society Distinguished Lecturer. She is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE WICE Outstanding Achievement Award and has co-authored papers that received four IEEE Best Paper Awards (IEEE Globecom 2012, IEEE ICC 2015 and 2016, and IEEE VTC 2016). She has served on the editorial boards of nine journals and guest-edited numerous special issues in cutting-edge communications and networking areas. She has played key leadership roles in organizing major IEEE conferences, including serving as TPC Co-Chair for IEEE Globecom 2023 and ICC 2018.