6G researchers won international innovation challenge award

At the AI-RAN Alliance meeting in Boston, Dileepa Marasinghe accepted the Innovation Challenge Award on behalf of the team. The proposal builds on the team’s ongoing work multimodal sensing for enabling real-time digital twins. It was developed by Dileepa Marasinghe, Miguel Bordallo Lopez, and Praneeth Susarla, with contributions from the AI-RAN team at the 6GFlagship


The recognition came through the AI-RAN Alliance’s Innovation Challenge, which invited cutting-edge proposals demonstrating the transformative potential of AI in Radio Access Networks. The Oulu team’s submission was among the ten granted awards, focused on developing a platform that closes the loop between the physical environment and its radio-aware digital twin.

“This recognition reflects the growing importance of sensing and real-time digital twins for building the networks of tomorrow,” said Dileepa Marasinghe, AI-RAN research manager at the 6GFlagship at University of Oulu. “By utilizing multimodal sensing for real-time digital twins, we plan to show how AI can help future radio networks perceive, predict, and adapt to their environment — stepping closer to the vision of AI-native, continuously learning wireless systems into reality.”

Marasinghe leads the AI-RAN research at 6GFlagship which explores the intersection of AI/ML and wireless systems. Bordallo Lopez, Associate Professor of Vision Systems Engineering at the Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis (CMVS) at the University of Oulu, specializes in computer vision and sensor fusion, while Susarla, a postdoctoral researcher, working in the field of AI, Machine Vision and radio communications.

The AI-RAN Alliance brings together leading companies and research institutions to accelerate the use of AI in next-generation networks. This award further strengthens Oulu’s position as one of Europe’s key centers for 6G research and innovation.