On November 26, 2025, the Electrical Engineering (EE) Department at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM) hosted a seminar titled “RIS-Aided User Communication and Localization Under the Influence of Electromagnetic Interference.” The seminar was delivered by Dr. Ali Arshad Nasir, Associate Professor in the EE Department.

The talk focused on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) as a promising technology for improving both communication throughput and localization accuracy in next-generation wireless networks. While RIS-enabled systems can significantly enhance performance, the seminar highlighted that many existing studies overlook the impact of uncontrollable electromagnetic interference (EMI) impinging on the RIS—an effect that can severely degrade system reliability.

Dr. Nasir presented an EMI modeling framework that captures key interference characteristics and quantifies how EMI affects critical system metrics, including the achievable data rate, Position Error Bound (PEB), and localization Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE). Simulation results showed that, compared with EMI-blind configurations, an EMI-aware RIS design can recover most of the communication-rate loss while substantially improving localization performance—reducing both PEB and RMSE.

Attendees gained practical insights into how EMI-aware RIS configurations can be designed and evaluated for real-world deployments, and how interference modeling can guide joint optimization of communication and positioning performance.

The following are the highlights of the event: