NSF Announces Investment in Multi-Sector Partnership to Accelerate Research in Next-Gen Networking and Computing

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced a new investment of over $37 million aimed at the development of intelligent, resilient and reliable next-generation—or NextG—networks. The investment called RINGS—short for Resilient and Intelligent Next-Generation Systems—is a public-private partnership that focuses on accelerating research to increase the competitiveness of the U.S. in NextG networking and computing technologies and ensure the security and resilience of NextG technologies and infrastructure.

This public-private partnership brings unique experience, insight and resources to research efforts to accelerate the translation of fundamental research findings into new technologies that can transform the telecommunication and information technology sectors of the U.S. economy. The RINGS program is NSF's single largest effort to date to engage public and private partners to jointly support a research program. Private sector partners include Apple, Ericsson, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm and VMware. Government partners include the U.S. Department of Defense's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“The RINGS program is a visionary and ambitious effort that will benefit many critical aspects of societal infrastructure, and will have long-term, transformational impacts on the next generation of network systems,” said NSF Division of Computer and Network Systems Director Gurdip Singh. “I am excited to see how awardees under this program lead the path toward new communication capabilities that improve our lives, from education to infrastructure and national security. Congratulations to all awardees.”

The 2022 RINGS awardees are listed below.

RINGS: Internet of Things Resilience through Spectrum-Agile Circuits, Learning-Based Communications and Thermal Hardware Security, Northeastern University
RINGS: Ensuring Reliability in mmWave Networks, UCLA
RINGS: Bringing Post-Quantum Cryptography to Large-Scale NextG Systems, Florida Atlantic University
RINGS: Object-Oriented Video Analytics for Next-Generation Mobile Environments, Princeton University
RINGS: Intelligent and Resilient Virtualization of Massive MIMO Physical Layer, Yale University
RINGS: Wideband NextG Tb/s mmWave Communication and Networking, University of California, Berkeley
RINGS: REALTIME: Resilient Edge-Cloud Autonomous Learning with Timely Inferences, Rutgers University–New Brunswick
RINGS: Enabling Wireless Edge-Cloud Services via Autonomous Resource Allocation and Robust Physical Layer Technologies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
RINGS: Coding over High-Frequency for Absolute Post-Quantum Security, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
RINGS: Deep Generative Models for Ultra High-Dimensional Next-Generation Communication Systems, The University of Texas at Austin
RINGS: Accelerating the NextG Protocols Definition to Code Generation with an Automatic and Secure Verification-Compilation Tool-Chain, Northwestern University
RINGS: Mobility-Driven Spectrum-Agile Resilient mmWave Communication Links for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Traffic Management in the Sky, University of North Texas
RINGS: Walk for Resiliency & Privacy: A Random Walk Framework for Learning at the Edge, Rutgers University–New Brunswick
RINGS: Robust and Resilient Wireless Networks Using Next-Generation Spectrum, Northwestern University
RINGS: Collaborative Inference and Learning Between Edge Swarms and the Cloud, The University of Texas at Austin
RINGS: Power Resilient NextG Data Centers, University of Washington
RINGS: Resilience of NextG Communication Systems to Malicious Modification Attacks, The University of Texas at Dallas
RINGS: Scalable and Resilient Networked Learning Systems, The University of Texas at Austin
RINGS: Reshaping the Last Mile for High Availability and Resilience, University of California, Berkeley
RINGS: Resilient and Low-Latency Networks for Situation Awareness in the Factory of the Future, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
RINGS: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Enabled Large-scale UAV Network with Distributed Navigation, Mobility Control and Resilience, The Ohio State University
RINGS: Resilient mmWave Networks via Distributed In-Surface Computing (mmRISC), Princeton University
RINGS: Deployable End-to-End Resilience for Critical Internet Applications via Modular Redundancy, Columbia University
RINGS: Building Next-Generation Resilient Wireless Systems from Unsecure Hardware, New York University
RINGS: Language-Agnostic Resilience Engineering at the Edge with WebAssembly, Carnegie Mellon University
RINGS: Massive Extended-Array Transceivers for Robust Scaling of All-Digital mmWave MIMO, University of California, Santa Barbara
RINGS: Resilient Edge Networks with Data-Driven Model-Based Learning, New York University
RINGS: LARA: Layering for Active Resiliency and Awareness in Next-Generation Wireless Networks, University of California San Diego
RINGS: Resilient Delivery of Real-time Interactive Services Over NextG Compute-dense Mobile Networks, University of Southern California
RINGS: Harnessing the Complexity of Modern Electromagnetic Environments for Resilient Wireless Communications, University of Maryland, College Park
RINGS: Resilient Wireless Systems for Future Uplink Traffic through Cell-Free, Loosely Coordinated Access, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station
RINGS: Resilient Edge Ecosystem for Collaborative and Trustworthy Disaster Response (REsCue), New Mexico State University
RINGS: Enabling Data-Driven Innovation for Next-Generation Networks via Synthetic Data, Carnegie Mellon University
RINGS: Bumblebee: A Neural Network Transformer Architecture for Summarization and Prediction in Interactive XR Applications, Carnegie Mellon University
RINGS: NextSec: Zero-Trust, Programmable and Verifiable Security Transformation for NextG, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station
RINGS: l-RIM: Learning based Resilient Immersive Media-Compression, Delivery and Interaction, Auburn University
RINGS: Just-in-Time Security: Adaptive Physical-Layer Security for NextG Low-Latency mmWave Wireless Networks, Georgia Tech Research Corporation.