On the road to future networks

CELTIC Event in Valencia

This year’s CELTIC Event took place in Valencia, Spain on 19th to 20th June. It was co-located with EuCNC, the European Conference on Networks and Communications, which gave CELTIC-NEXT additional attention among the 5,000+ EuCNC participants. The CELTIC Event consisted of a conference with award ceremony on day 1 and sessions for project proposers on day 2. In parallel, 15 selected CELTIC projects showed their results in the exhibition at the Valencia Conference Centre. One of the highlights of this year’s event was the emergency communication demo at the harbour of Valencia, which was performed by CELTIC project UNICRINF.

Eric Hardouin, Ambient Connectivity Research Valérie Blavette, chairperson of CELTIC-NEXT, Director at Orange

Keynotes and SME success story

In the first keynote, Eric Hardouin, Ambient Connectivity Research Director at Orange, presented a vision of future networks. He emphasised that beyond performance aspects, research on future networks has to address a number of additional challenges, including trust and resilience in multi-tenant environments, EMF-aware transmissions, the efficiency of energy and natural resource usage as well as digital inclusion. He pointed out that there is still a lot of research needed to deliver the full 5G potential. According to Mr Hardouin, the exploding complexity of networks due to multiple requirements for optimisation calls for system-level solutions.

In the second keynote, Diego R. Lopez from Telefónica I+D shared his insights on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to network transformation for nurturing the Smart Network. According to Mr Lopez, such a network should be smart in all senses, i.e. fast, simple to use, easy to tune, and above all, intelligent in order to make the network scalable, adaptable, multi-purpose, and suitable for integration.

The third speaker, Steny Solitude from French SME Perfect Memory, shared the story of his company’s success, which is closely linked to its participation in CELTIC projects. Perfect Memory has created an innovative digital asset management (DAM) solution based on results by CELTIC projects MediaMap and MediaMap+.

Steny Solitude from French SME Perfect Memory Diego R. Lopez from Telefónica I+D

Panel on impact of CELTIC projects

After the opening keynote, the audience witnessed a lively panel session on the impact of CELTIC projects, which was emceed by David Kennedy, director of Eurescom. The five panellists represented six CELTIC projects: 4KREPROSIS – Marco Mattavelli, EPFL, Switzerland; flagship project SENDATE – Emmanuel Dotaro, Thales, France; NOTTS and MONALIS – Antonio Cuadra Sanchez, INDRA, Spain; SIGMONA – José Costa Requena, Cumucore, Finland; and UPSC – Isil Ozkan, Turkcell, Turkey.

Not surprisingly, all five panellists concluded that the industry-driven and close-to-market projects under CELTIC allowed their organisations to reap immediate benefits in terms of accelerating market innovations, sustained competitiveness, and a profound increase of their knowledge base and international business connections. The type and scope of these impacts varied widely, due to the fact that the panellists represented on the one hand large companies like Thales or Turkcell and on the other hand SMEs like Cumucore.

Panellists discussing the impact of CELTIC projects (from left):
José Costa Requena, Cumucore; Antonio Cuadra Sanchez, INDRA;
Emmanuel Dotaro, Thales; Işıl Özkan, Turkcell; Marco Mattavelli, EPFL

CELTIC Awards

The first day of the CELTIC Event ended with a highlight – the CELTIC Awards. Four CELTIC projects won the CELTIC Award for their outstanding work. Three of these projects were awarded for their excellence in the areas of networking technologies, applications, and multimedia. The fourth was honoured with the Innovation Award for its outstanding market innovation beyond the project lifespan. The awards were presented to representatives of the winning projects by CELTIC-NEXT chairperson Valérie Blavette and handed over by Juana Sanchez from CDTI, the representative of the Public Authority in Spain.

Excellence Award for Multimedia:

4KREPROSYS – 4K ultraHD TV wireless REmote PROduction SYStems

The project partners have been very successful in their specialized video production ecosystem. The business relevance of the developed 4KREPROSYS solution has been evaluated as very high. The successful involvement in major events like the FIFA World-Cup 2018 underlines the competitiveness of the solutions brought forward by the project.

Coordinator: Dominique Grillet, AMP Visual TV
Duration: December 2014 – June 2018
Project Video – https://youtu.be/NNvWkSVlpHo
Website – https://www.celticnext.eu/project-4kreprosys

François Valadoux, AMP Visual TV, France and Marco
Mattavelli, EPFL, Switzerland, from 4KREPROSYS;
Juana Sanchez, CDTI, Spain; and Valérie Blavette,
CELTIC-NEXT Chairperson

Excellence Award for Network Technologies: SOOGREEN – Service-oriented optimization of Green mobile networks

SooGreen’s main objectives were to reduce the energy consumption of services and to improve the mobile network architectures and content delivery, taking advantage of the smart grids by using a holistic approach at the level of network components, architecture, management and control. The project has addressed the need to reduce the energy consumption of services in different mobile network architectures, focusing on topics like modelling and measurement of services energy consumption in mobile networks; dynamic optimization in access; energy-efficiency aspects of emerging virtual and cloud RAN architectures; and interaction between service delivery in mobile networks and smart grids.

Coordinator: Dominique Bodere, Orange
Duration: July 2015 – November 2018
Project Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVZfvAaHUIA&t=47s
Website – https://www.celticnext.eu/project-soogreen

Valérie Blavette, CELTIC-NEXT Chairperson; Dominique
Bodere, SOOGREEN Project Coordinator from Orange,
France and Juana Sanchez from CDTI, Spain (from left)

Excellence Award for Applications:

E3 – E-health services Everywhere and for Everybody

E3 designed and implemented an end-to-end platform to make e-health services available in both rural and urban areas, to patients and professionals. E3 used and extended the results from the awarded CELTIC project HIPERMED. E3 developed the HIPERMED results further by addressing other communication types and compression techniques. In addition, E3 extended the type of scenarios by testing the developments in 15 healthcare scenarios, which were validated by doctors and professors who tested the platform results.

Project Coordinator: Oscar Chabrera Villarreal, ViLynx Spain S.L.U.
Duration: December 2014 – June 2018
Project Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7_fH8wUQDw
Website – https://www.celticnext.eu/project-e3

E3 project coordinator Oscar Chabrera from Vilynx, Spain
and Juana Sanchez from CDTI, Spain, and Valérie Blavette,
CELTIC-NEXT Chairperson

Innovation Award:

NOTTS – Next generation Over-The-Top multimedia Services

The project had developed a sustainable integrated solution to guarantee the OTT content delivery from the customer’s perspective for the whole content distribution chain. The main activities included new media distribution architectures for OTT contents, and novel methods for Quality of Experience (QoE) estimation. NOTTS technology has supplied European content providers, service providers and telecoms network operators with new technologies that allow increasing revenue from new OTT business models.

Project Coordinator: Antonio Quadra Sanchez, INDRA Spain
Duration: May 2013 – 31 March 2016
Project Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmQn2o-7Ak4
Website – https://www.celticnext.eu/project-notts

NOTTS Project Coordinator Antonio Quadra Sanchez from
INDRA Spain, Juana Sanchez from CDTI, and Valérie Blavette,
CELTIC-NEXT Chairperson

Exhibition

In the EuCNC exhibition area, 15 commercially important CELTIC projects presented their results. Visitors had the chance to experience first-hand prototypes of solutions which have been developed in the selected CELTIC projects. The demos allowed visitors to experience the technological progress made by those projects in an interactive and playful way.

Exhibition – High media interest in CELTIC projects, here the VIRTUOSE project

Live emergency demo at the harbour

Shortly before the EuCNC social event on 18th June, CELTIC project UNICRINF showcased a live emergency demo at the Port of Valencia. The demo attracted a large number of visitors who witnessed how the UNCRINF solution enabled the communication between emergency teams on land, in the air, and at sea.

The video of the live demo is available on the CELTIC YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/b2wFQ6eB6Zo

See also the article about UNICRINF in this edition of CELTIC News.

Sessions for proposers

The sessions on the second day were dedicated to helping proposers learn about making a good proposal for the upcoming autumn call in October and finding the right partners for their consortium. In the first session, CELTIC Office Director Peter Hermann presented best practices for proposers and explained how to set up a successful CELTIC project. The ensuing round-table with representatives of Public Authorities provided practical information on funding and research topics in different EUREKA countries.

The afternoon was dedicated to project idea pitches and networking. This offered ample opportunities for meeting other experts from the ICT community to discuss emerging R&D needs and proposals for related collaborative projects. Session moderator Christiane Reinsch, Programme Coordinator at the CELTIC Office, introduced 17 new project ideas. This was followed by proposers, who pitched their innovative project ideas for the upcoming CELTIC call in short elevator pitches. The CELTIC Event ended with open networking and bilateral discussions between proposers and representatives of Public Authorities.

Further information

CELTIC Event 2019 page – https://www.celticnext.eu/event/celtic-event-co-located-with-eucnc-19-20-june-in-valencia-spain/