Investigating cognition in such complex networks would have been a mere academic study, but for their continuously growing impact on our daily lives. The mobile communication system offers an ideal example where the number of users and their requirements are growing exponentially due to various applications. These must be served by limited resources, be it bandwidth, power or time. In addition, the nature of communication and the actors therein have changed from a homogenous (voice calls/ TV broadcast/ fixed phones) to heterogenous (bursty data, internet, satellites and flying objects in different orbits). There is a demand for seamless connection to these entities and to different types of traffic. Having identified all the available resources, the only way to meet the requirements and also to scale up is to make the systems intelligent through active cognition, realizing flexible designs allowing dynamic reconfiguration. In this setting, the significant and diverse research carried out in AGNOSTIC offers a framework to design and implement these heterogenous systems with varying traffic types to meet the growing demands with the available resources. This would offer critical communications to the needy and during natural disaster, as well as entertainment leading to an uptake in commercial activities in the communications arena.
Another application area that has truly moved from the niche to utilitarian is that of radar sensing. Automotive radars offer a cheap, yet powerful, sensing mechanism that enables driver safety and comfort. However, a road-side scenario with multiple cars, all equipped with radar, is one of the most dynamic and complex scenes; making radar operation efficient in such scenarios requires distributed cognition. This is considered essential in the concept of autonomous vehicles, a concept that would revolutionize travel making it less mundane and tiring for young and elderly alike. The waveform design, integrated sensing and communications, sensor placement and related effects investigated in AGNOSTIC, aids to the further proliferation of sensing in daily lives including vital sign monitoring, people counting and human action recognition.
There exist many other societal applications where all the system resources are being used but needs an additional degree of freedom for functional efficacy and efficiency. In this context, AGNOSTIC is relevant to the current developments in the society.