Scientific Director & Director - AI-Driven Systems Research Group
Xavier Costa-Pérez is Scientific Director and the AI-driven Systems Research Group Director (AIS) at the i2CAT Research Center, as well as an ICREA Research Professor, concurrently leading Space and Terrestrial Systems (ASTRO) R&D at NEC Laboratories Europe. A globally recognized leader in his field, Dr. Costa-Pérez has been ranked among the Top 2% of World Scientists by Stanford for over 5 years and is featured on the Research.com Best World Computer Scientists list. His research spearheads the digital transformation of society through the convergence of Space and Mobile Networks together with Artificial Intelligence. His team consistently delivers impactful research, evidenced by publications in top-tier scientific venues and numerous awards for successful technology transfers. He actively secures funding through internal and external competitive R&D programs and contributed significantly to standardization bodies, including 3GPP, O-RAN, ETSI ISAC, and IETF. Notably, his innovations have been integrated into commercial mobile phones, base stations, and network management systems, and have spurred the creation of multiple start-ups. Dr. Costa-Pérez has held various leadership roles across industry and research, including Deputy General Manager, Chief Researcher, and member of Technology and Scientific Advisory Boards. He is a recognized contributor to multiple standard specifications who actively participated in bodies such as IEEE 802.11, 802.16, WiFi Alliance, and 3GPP. He has also served on organizing committees for prominent conferences (e.g., AAAI, ACM MOBICOM, IEEE INFOCOM) and as an Editor for leading journals like IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), IEEE Transactions on Communications (TCOM), as well as Elsevier Computer Communications (COMCOM). Dr. Costa-Pérez holds M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Telecommunications from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), receiving a national award for his doctoral thesis. He is the inventor of over 100 granted patents, some standard essential (SEP).
Encinas-Lago, G., Sciancalepore, V., Wymeersch, H., Di Renzo, M., & Costa-P, X. (2025). RiLoCo: An ISAC-oriented AI Solution to Build RIS-empowered Networks. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.
Encinas-Lago, G., Devoti, F., Rossanese, M., Sciancalepore, V., Di Renzo, M., & Costa-Pérez, X. (2025). COLoRIS: Localization-agnostic smart surfaces enabling opportunistic ISAC in 6G networks. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.
Nikolaos Apostolakis, Marta Sierra-Obea, Marco Gramaglia, Jose A. Ayala-Romero, Andres Garcia-Saavedra, Marco Fiore, Albert Banchs, and Xavier Costa-Perez. 2025. Quantum Computing in the RAN with Qu4Fec: Closing Gaps Towards Quantum-based FEC processors. Proc. ACM Meas. Anal. Comput. Syst. 9, 2, Article 36 (June 2025), 25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3727128
Garcia-Aviles, G. and Garcia-Saavedra, A. and Gramaglia, M. and Costa-Perez, X. and Serrano, P. and Banchs, A., “Nuberu: Reliable RAN Virtualization in SharedPlatforms.” In:The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Com-puting and Networking. 2021, pp. 1–16.
Bartra, G.C., Lemic, F., Pascual, G., Rodas, A.P., Struye, J., Delgado, C. and Pérez, X.C., 2024. Graph Neural Networks as an Enabler of Terahertz-based Flow-guided Nanoscale Localization over Highly Erroneous Raw Data. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. IEEE early access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10528284. arXiv open access: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05551.
