Over four decades, wireless networks continue to play a fundamental role in data transmission and communicating information between users. Wireless networks have gone through five large-scale revolutions, resulting in 1G, 2G, 3 G, 4G, and most recently 5G networks. In 1G and 2G, voice and text were possible. In 3G and 4G, pictures and video become commonplace. In today’s 5G, live ultra-high-definition three-dimensional data, virtual reality, and augmented reality services can be employed. In this talk, I will start by providing our vision for next-generation networks. We emphasize that human-centric mobile communications will continue to be the most important application in the such future network. In this context, I will start by highlighting the digital divide that separates world countries into “haves” and “have-nots” as illustrated by our imbalance index project. Then, I will focus on the necessary wireless networking solutions that overcome the digital divide and bring better coverage, robustness, and smartness. Moving forward, I will review our recent advances in non-terrestrial networks, which includes both UAVs and satellite. In this fold, I will introduce several complex optimizations and machine learning methods that predict UAV trajectory, data rate, and energy consumption. I will show satellite systems are essential for today’s traffic-intensive applications while maintaining an accepted end-to-end latency for delay-sensitive applications. Throughout the talk, I will highlight several challenges in existing communication technologies that could have the potential of shaping new research and deployment directions of future wireless networks.