University of Oulu and NICT held third joint 6G workshop

Speakers covered ground from integrated circuits and wireless communications through AI and cybersecurity to software research and the business of 6G networks. NICT was joined by researchers from Tokyo University of Science, Shinshu University, Kyushu Institute of Technology and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR).

The meeting carried weight on both sides. Hideo Ohno, who became President of NICT in April, gave the opening address from Tokyo. Jukka Riekki, Dean of Oulu’s Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, opened the meeting in Oulu. Marja Matinmikko-Blue, Director of Sustainability and Regulation at 6G Flagship, convened the two days. Professor Petri Ahokangas and Postdoctoral Researcher Oxana Gisca joined the workshop and advanced the collaboration efforts on behalf of the Martti Ahtisaari Institute, Oulu Business School.

Professor Petri Ahokangas.

What ties the partnership together already now is local 6G — networks operated by a single organisation for a campus, factory, port or hospital, rather than by a national operator. Both sides have been working the same ground from different ends. Oulu has built up a body of research on the engineering, spectrum, business models and regulation of local networks, much of it within the national 6G Bridge programme.

NICT has done parallel work on reliable services through efficient spectrum use in private 5G in Japan. The second day of the workshop was given over entirely to that shared agenda, and ended with Matinmikko-Blue and NICT’s Takeshi Matsumura, Research Executive Director of the Network Research Institute, brainstorming concrete collaboration topics to work on.

This is the third such workshop since the partnership began, and the first since the underlying memorandum of understanding was renewed earlier in 2026 to run to 2028. The original MoU dates from August 2022. The renewal covers exchange of researchers, information and joint projects, with beyond-5G and 6G as the primary field.

“We’ve moved past the introductions. Three years in, we know each other’s work, we have running collaboration on local 6G, and the renewed MoU gives us until 2028 to take it further into new areas of collaboration”, says Marja Matinmikko-Blue.

Beyond local networks, the agenda surfaced a broader set of overlapping interests: AI and the software engineering needed to ship it reliably; the security of AI systems and of quantum computing, an area where Kimmo Halunen‘s group has just released a new evaluation framework; non-terrestrial networks; wireless communications research, including ATR’s latest work on wireless systems; semantic communication; and cybernetic avatar teleoperation, where NICT demonstrated a robot system in Japan being operated live from the workshop in Oulu.

The University of Oulu’s 6G Flagship programme, which provides the institutional home for much of Oulu’s beyond-5G research, is in its second phase.