Mérouane Debbah

Mérouane Debbah is a renowned researcher, educator and technology entrepreneur. He is a full professor at CentraleSupélec and has served as an adjunct professor at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Throughout his career, he has made major contributions to telecommunications and artificial intelligence (AI).

Combining academia and industry, he has founded several public and industrial research centers and start-ups. He is currently Chief Researcher at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, and is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at international events on telecommunications and AI.

His research lies at the intersection of fundamental mathematics, algorithms, statistics, and information and communication sciences, with notable contributions in random matrix theory and learning algorithms. In communications, he has played a key role in the development of small cells (4G), Massive MIMO (5G) and Large Intelligent Surfaces (6G). In AI, his work focuses on distributed AI systems for networks and semantic communication. He has received numerous awards and distinctions for his contributions to both fields.

After high school at the Lycée Cheikh Bouamama in Algeria and classes préparatoires at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, he entered the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay in 1996 and obtained his PhD there in 2002, with a thesis applying free probability theory to the design of wireless networks.

He began his professional career at Motorola Labs in Saclay in 1999, then joined the Telecommunications Research Center in Vienna as a senior researcher. From 2003 to 2007, he was an assistant professor at EURECOM in Sophia Antipolis, working on the mathematical foundations of communication networks using random matrix theory and game theory applied to signal processing and wireless communications.

In 2007, he was appointed full professor at CentraleSupélec in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, where he founded and directed the Alcatel-Lucent Chair on Flexible Radio, a collaboration between CentraleSupélec and Bell Labs. This pioneering industrial chair focused on small cells and Massive MIMO and trained many PhD and postdoctoral researchers who have become leaders in wireless communications. Under his leadership, CentraleSupélec’s telecommunications department was ranked first in France and second in Europe by 2017.

In 2014, he joined Huawei and established the Mathematical and Algorithmic Sciences Lab in Boulogne-Billancourt, focusing on mathematical sciences applied to wireless, optical and networking communications. By the end of 2019, the lab had grown to more than 200 researchers and become one of the leading global hubs for industrial research and development in communication networks.