Xavier Priem
Director CELTIC Office
For CELTIC-NEXT, 2024 was a year of celebration and renewed successful innovation support and change. Let’s look together at what was achieved in 2024 and what we plan for 2025.
Looking back to 2024
2024 was a challenging year for many reasons. Joint collaborative innovation and knowledge exchange is one of the best weapons against obscurantism, pandemics and wars. Our ICT community is one of the best positioned to understand and support this. Cybersecurity, Resilience of Critical Infrastructures, and Sustainability… are topics to be fully supported by our ICT technologies and are ranked now as absolute priorities in the new world paradigm. The new flagship SUSTAINET goes along those strategic lines.
2024 was also a year of joyful, proud celebration! CELTIC turned 21 years old! This unique anniversary was celebrated in Berlin on July 2nd, 2024, during the 6G Berlin Conference under the new joint Canadian-German Presidency of Eureka. High-level representatives from our Industry and Ministries and Eureka’s new President took the floor to share their support and enthusiasm for CELTIC throughout its history and in the coming years!
The EUREKA Network was under Türkiye’s chairmanship from July 2023 to June 2024. Many thanks to Türkiye for the tremendous period, the extraordinary work achieved under its chairmanship, and the fruitful network meetings organised in essential locations in Türkiye. Türkiye is an important stakeholder of CELTIC-NEXT, being at the Public Authority and the ICT community levels, with a vibrant ecosystem and highly appreciated participants in the various CELTIC projects throughout the years!
On the 2nd of July, on the occasion of the CELTIC-NEXT’s 21-year celebration, EUREKA publicly announced its new Presidency: a first in its history, two countries have taken over the Presidency of EUREKA from Türkiye: Germany and Canada!
The dual presidency of Canada and Germany is not only new in EUREKA’s history, but it also reflects the overall will of the EUREKA Network to grow outside Europe and give central roles to countries outside of the European continent. This will increasingly open the door to global collaborative innovation projects. Technologies developed within such a framework can better address global challenges, such as the UN SDGs like sustainable development and circular economy.
Xavier Priem, CELTIC Director, Opening the CELTIC 21st Anniversary Celebration
Status of the Eureka Clusters’ Programme
All Eureka Clusters have been brought under the 2021-created Eureka Clusters’ Programme (ECP). A Multi-Annual Plan was defined and implemented over the last three years. This plan runs from July 2021 to June 2025. Eureka Public Authorities and the Clusters are currently analysing together the results of this first period of the ECP to derive an improved programme framework for the coming years. CELTIC-NEXT is closely collaborating with the other Clusters and the Public Authorities to represent the interests of our ICT Community best.
This new presidency is essential for the EUREKA Clusters as it is mandated to establish the new ECP public-private partnership framework arrangement between the Eureka Countries and the five Clusters of the Eureka Clusters’ Programme. Intensive work has started to establish the new base of the ECP to reach better support for beneficiaries and all stakeholders around the table. The five Clusters have elected CELTIC-NEXT’s Director to represent them and lead the work on the Eureka Clusters Programme Partnership Arrangement document and annexes. The target is to sign the final document during the last Eureka Network HLG/HLR meeting in June 2025. This is a challenging task as it will define the Eureka Clusters Public Private Partnership arrangements for the upcoming multi-year period.
We will soon collect our community’s feedback on our strategic research and innovation roadmap (SRIA) as we are currently conducting an update process. The target is to provide this new SRIA as input to our participation in the new ECP period starting July 2025. The duration of the new ECP is still under discussion but it is already decided to make it longer than the original four years. We will incorporate this new roadmap in our Launch Events and Proposers’ Brokerage Days, starting second half 2025, to allow consortia to propose innovative projects in a more extensive variety of technologies, services, applications, and verticals. This reinforces our traditional bottom-up approach. We will continue to run our Spring and Autumn Calls based on our successful legacy. This is a unique selling point of CELTIC as a Eureka Cluster compared to other international funding schemes.
Running Calls
When this edition of the CELTIC-NEXT’s News is published, the Autumn Call 2024 will have closed. Therefore, it is already time to announce the Spring Call 2025! The Spring Call 2025 will be launched in December 2024 with an online event. The Proposers’ Brokerage Day will occur in a physical presence at the beginning of February 2025. The precise date and location will be announced via our Newsletter and website. The submission will close on the 25th of April 2025 for a labelling decision before mid-June 2025. Forecasted possible start dates for labelled projects would be the second half of 2025. We can also happily say that more countries support CELTIC-NEXT.
Flagships – Goodbye and thank you AI-NET, hello SUSTAINET!
AI-NET Flagship and its three vertical projects delivered tremendous successes, greatly impacting several fundamental KPIs. Those projects ended in July 2024, except for AI-NET-ANTILLAS, which will still pursue some work until the end of 2025.
A tremendous final Closure Event occurred on July 2nd, 2024, collocated with the 6G Conference Berlin. AI-NET received the CELTIC-NEXT Best Innovation Award.
“AI-NET achieved outstanding achievements in the area of 6G enabling technologies complementing 5G solutions with a focus on edge-centric compute and AI, shaping new secure services and application platforms. Excellent results for a sustainable computing platform supporting AI on top of the communications system have been successfully demonstrated. AI-NET showed highly competitive solutions, for example, in the area of energy-efficient edge data centres. Data centre solutions are close to the best hyper scaler solution that reached power-aware effectiveness of 1-1.2 PUE. That clearly outlines the competitive edge that the project has achieved to meet global challenges for Europe’s future prosperity and competitiveness.
Scientific excellence in future 6G Technologies and the achievement of ambitious KPIs to secure future markets that can enable 6G Technologies have been shown.
Overall, 316 scientific publications in leading international journals and conferences supported by 184 PhD and Master Thesis have been accepted and successfully finished. High business outcomes are expected due to the 72 IPR, Open Source, and Standards contributions. With 77 Proof of Concepts, 70 keynotes, and 43 hirings, the project underlines its excellence even further.
The project worked on timely solutions concerning security, sustainability, performance and cost reduction of AI in future telecom networks. Energy Metering measuring energy consumption in real industry environments was only one part of the project next to hybrid IT management solutions and incremental manufacturing. Optimized power distribution in synergy with the network management and the lightweight software layer solutions can be used as a first entry point for the Telecom customer to access a Telco cloud. New AI algorithms that showed federated learning (FL) next to unlearning, analysing overfitting parametrization next to smart clustering solutions promised data saving in large scale once deployed on a computing platform.”
In the meantime, the new flagship called SUSTAINET was labelled for its initial application in June 2024. Its central thematic is focusing on network resilience, energy efficiency, sustainability, high-performing end-to-end networks, and network security.
SUSTAINET high-level description: “In the midst of global crises and geopolitical challenges, Europe is charting its course towards a digital, sustainable future. However, with its share of the global ICT market declining, urgent actions are required to ensure technological sovereignty. This project addresses this multifaceted challenge by focusing on network resilience, energy efficiency, sustainability, high-performing end-to-end networks, and network security.
Achieving seamless interconnection of digital systems, essential for future high-performance communication networks, demands research in ICT hardware and control software. The transition towards a “Digital Society” necessitates increased dependence on ICT for power supply control, emphasising the need for resilient, scalable networking technologies combined with the support of new services such as cognitive and complete context awareness.
Network resilience is paramount in such interconnected networking for critical infrastructures and requires new concepts to ensure communication continuity during errors or disasters. Such networking will also call for secure networks with robust cybersecurity measures to combat evolving threats.
Furthermore, network sustainability is vital for realising a climate-neutral future. Telecommunications networks must prioritise connectivity and serve as platforms for a sustainable society. Operators must adapt to fluctuating renewable energy availability, transitioning from consumers to prosumers in the energy market.
Collaborative R&D efforts are imperative to achieve these objectives and regain technological sovereignty. Government support and industry initiatives must converge to drive innovation in key technologies, fostering industrial cooperation and joint R&D initiatives.
This project proposes a holistic approach, integrating research in frictionless network performance, resilience, security, and sustainability to propel Europe towards a sustainable, technologically sovereign future.”
The CELTIC-NEXT office is happy to connect with potential new additional partners interested in joining the flagship during the ramp-up phase. Please contact us at .
Outlook for 2025
2025 will be the year of the new flagship(s) implementation, a strong collaborative effort from all stakeholders, consortia participants, the CELTIC-NEXT Office, and the involved Public Authorities!
2025 should be a year of growth, thanks to the upcoming new ECP framework arrangement, the renewed trust and support of existing partnering Public Authorities, and new incoming funding countries like Brazil and Chile!
Further information
Stay tuned by visiting our Call Calendar page: https://www.celticnext.eu/call-calendar/
and/or by subscribing to our Newsletter under https://www.celticnext.eu/news-subscription/