Abstract: The advent of smart wearables such as Apple's recently announced first spatial computer Vision Pro equipped with 3D cameras entails that the Internet will no longer be at arm's length. With the rise of the emerging Metaverse, the future 3D Internet will be about being inside the Internet rather than simply looking at it from a 2D phone or computer screen. In the coming age of hyperintelligence, new cybernetic organisms will emerge from existing AI systems. These hyperintelligent cybernetic organisms will soon think thousands then millions of times faster than us and they will regard us humans as we now regard plants, though both are anticipated to live together in a mutually beneficial symbiosis. This keynote will elaborate on the symbiosis of Inter(net) and (human) being in the context of the future Metaverse’s so-called Virtual Society, giving rise to the powerful concept of Interbeing, a word that is not in the dictionary yet. AI software solutions will thereby play a central role in filling out these virtual worlds of the Metaverse, powered by human participation and human-in-the-loop/AI interactions with a range of constantly evolving AIs, ranging from intelligent smart contracts to novel life-like digital organisms that exploit generative AI models to produce clever solutions that AI researchers did not consider, had thought impossible, or even outwitting us humans.

Biography: Martin Maier is a full professor with the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Montréal, Canada. He was educated at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and received MSc and PhD degrees both with distinctions (summa cum laude) in 1998 and 2003, respectively. He was a recipient of the two-year Deutsche Telekom doctoral scholarship from 1999 through 2001. In 2003, he was a postdoc fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2006 through 2007. He was a co-recipient of the 2009 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award. Further, he was a Marie Curie IIF Fellow of the European Commission from 2014 through 2015. In 2017, he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation in recognition of his accomplishments in research on FiWi-enhanced mobile networks. In 2017, he was named one of the three most promising scientists in the category “Contribution to a better society” of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) 2017 Prize Award of the European Commission. In 2019/2020, he held a UC3M-Banco de Santander Excellence Chair at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Madrid, Spain. He is co-author of the book “Toward 6G: A New Era of Convergence” (Wiley-IEEE Press, January 2021) and author of the sequel book “6G and Onward to Next G: The Road to the Multiverse” (Wiley-IEEE Press, February 2023).