Semantic communications: Transmitting beyond bits | ITU Journal | Webinar

In the past decades, communications primarily focused on how to accurately and effectively transmit symbols from the transmitter to the receiver, in which bit-error rate or symbol-error rate is usually taken as the performance metrics. With the developments of cellular communication systems, the achieved transmission rate has been improved tens of thousands of times and the system capacity is gradually approaching to the Shannon limit. Inspired by powerful deep learning technologies, semantic communications have been regarded as a promising solution to further improve the system efficiency, which is recognized as the second level of communications by Shannon and Weaver. Semantic communications aim to realize the successful semantic information exchange rather than receive the transmitted bit sequences or symbols accurately. In this webinar, the concept of semantic communications will be introduced first. Afterwards, the recent work on deep learning enabled semantic communications will be discussed. Potential