Mehdi Bennis recognised among world’s most influential AI scholars

The AI 2000 initiative by AMiner highlights the 2,000 most influential researchers worldwide each year. The 2025 edition was drawn from almost 259,000 papers published between 2015 and 2024, covering 20 fields of AI research. From this dataset, 100 leading scholars were selected in each area.

Bennis’s work focuses on distributed and edge AI for wireless networks, bridging machine learning and communications in the evolution from 5G to 6G. Within the 6G Flagship, he leads research on how distributed intelligence can support next-generation connectivity.

“This recognition is very meaningful because it shows the impact of our work at the intersection of wireless and AI. Over the past years, we’ve been trying to understand how devices, whether cars, drones or base stations, can learn and make decisions together without sending everything to the cloud. That means dealing with real-world constraints like latency, bandwidth and privacy, while still training useful models. Being included in the AI 2000 list is a strong acknowledgement that these ideas are shaping the field, and it motivates us to keep pushing the boundaries of distributed and edge intelligence for 6G and beyond,” says Bennis.

The honour builds on Bennis’s track record as a Highly Cited Researcher for five consecutive years. It highlights the global role of the University of Oulu’s 6G Flagship in advancing AI and wireless research.

Watch Professor Bennis’s 6G Talk to hear more about his work on AI and wireless networks.