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Talk Abstract: IRS have attracted the wireless community in recent years owing to many benefits they offer. This talk starts with the basics of IRS and then some in depth analysis and design of IRS with other modern technologies such as non-orthogonal multiple access, backscatter communications, simultaneous transmission and reflection IRS, and deep reinforcement learning will be discussed. Some future directions and research challenges will also be made part of the discussions. Recent research results at Dr. Hassan’s Information Processing and Transmissions lab will also be made part of this talk.