The CELTIC-NEXT Online Proposers Day in January aims to foster new project ideas for the upcoming CELTIC-NEXT Spring Call, which has a submission deadline of 14th April 2022. The goal of this Call is to expand knowledge, boost visibility and promote cooperative efforts for innovative results.
Further information and free registration are available on the Proposers Day Page.
Harold Linke
HITEC Luxembourg S.A.
Ludwig Seitz
Combitech (until 2019 RISE)
Joni Jämsä
CENTRIA University of Applied Sciences
Andreas Ohlsson
Applio Tech AB
While the fusion of cloud, mobile and wireless technologies is one of the biggest business enablers, it is also seen as a major cyber-security challenge. The lack of security technologies that function across such different infrastructures hinders the adoption
of these technologies on the global market, thus limiting the growth potential in this sector.
The three-year CELTIC project CyberWi (2016-2018) created results on security solutions integrating seamlessly over different infrastructures, like Cloud Computing, IoT networks and Embedded Systems, and showed a way towards deployment of commercially viable secure systems that can be implemented in Industrial Internet applications.
CyberWi was a joint undertaking by 13 partners from 3 European countries: Luxembourg, Finland and Sweden.
In order to ensure that the obtained results work in a production environment, demonstrators and test beds were implemented and publicly presented.
The use cases covered the following topics:
› Building automation, to protect the operation of different sensors and actuators deployed in a building
› Home automation, to protect heterogeneous consumer devices functioning as part of an automated home
› Logistics, to protect the information collected when tracking transports and goods
› Industrial systems, to secure a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system on an oil platform
› Traffic applications, to ensure the safe operation of a traffic signal pre-emption system for emergency services
› Weather services, to ensure road weather station operation as a service hotspot for multiple vehicles
In addition, the development of the OSCORE IETF standard opened the door to progress other lightweight security enablers in areas such as authorization and access control, group communication and authentication. The development of security standards has raised industry interest and led to new collaborations.
CyberWi developed new architectures and standards to improve the security in the above-mentioned use cases. The results have a high commercial impact.
These are some examples:
› The SME Applio (former Q2d Solutions) is now in a go-to-market position with a new software product family developed based on CyberWI results. There are several different commercial IoT solutions about to be implemented. A free and simple IoT service called “Applio Free” has been launched and is in use.
› Road Weather Station – By developing open interfaces the project has conducted road weather stations communication measurements and improved the cybersecurity of wireless connections between the road weather station and the server.
› Hali 2.0 – Traffic Light pre-emption system for emergency vehicles helps municipalities, fire/police departments and hospitals to reach their target faster and safer. Hali is implemented in several Finnish towns with over 700 users.
Further results in standardization and research:
› IETF standards (OSCORE and ACE) for object security and access control in constrained environments (e.g. sensor networks). These standards are integrated into several products. RISE has gained a foothold in the international standardization community at IETF and plans to exploit this in future research projects.
› Open source reference implementations of our proposed standards contributed to commercial open-source libraries implementing the OMA Lightweight M2M standard,
› CyberWi led to the implementation of the Cyber Security Laboratory named SecuLab at the Finnish research institute CENTRIA. SecuLab examines, tests and develops the security of industrial Internet and wireless systems. SecuLab provides tools for system security testing and expertise in information security management to SMEs of the region. It provides expert consulting, whether the company needs an assessment of the information security situation or support for solutions that can be used in company operations.
Hali 2.0 overview
The CyberWi project successfully contributed to different R&D topics in the cybersecurity area. A main result is the establishment of a security standard for IoT devices (OSCORE), which is the basis for new additional standards (e.g. Group OSCORE etc). The results of CyberWi are part of several commercial applications and laid the foundation of new services and products.
CyberWI project on CELTIC-NEXT website – https://www.celticnext.eu/project-cyberwi/
21 years in the life of any initiative is significant achievement as it shows that the goals, methods and achievements of the community are maintaining relevance and value for the community.
As a EUREKA cluster, the CELTIC community held their first call for projects in 2003, resulting in selection of 15 projects based on quality and relevance and were supported by the national authorities and launched.
Whilst, the current statistics show that, there have been over 175 CELTIC projects which have generated at least 650 patents and 1500 products and services. Besides, this work resulted in almost 1500 higher level degrees (PhD & MSc) and stimulated more than 4500 scientific publications. This is the power of Collaborative Innovation.
For 21 years the CELTIC-NEXT process has continued to evolve to meet the ever-changing research requirements of the ICT industries, related academics and vertical sector organisations and, more critically, the national interests of the EUREKA Member States. In fact, what the CELTIC-NEXT EUREKA community has learnt over the years is that this marriage of the industry needs with the priorities of national interest can achieve a high return on investment for the supporting parties. This Win-Win type of collaboration presents a sustainable model.
However, we cannot assume things will always be the same. As we speak, new challenges in the way we prepare and do collaborative innovation have arisen in more recent times. Some involve the politics of the moment, having faster programs, and others raise security and sovereignty issues. Finding fair and practical ways to address such issues will test the industry players and the national authorities’ joint ability to always find the common ground of mutual interest. But having recently participated in exercises where the interested parties sat down around a table to discuss what improvements we can make to increase the value and effectiveness of the EUREKA Cluster programs, I have no doubt solutions can be found. Authorities and Industry have a shared ambition to make the clusters programs better, more relevant and easier to operate for the future. This willingness to evolve innovatively on how we do collaborative innovation is the key to future success for all.
If we look forward in even the next 10 years, we can expect that the communications infrastructure will have become even more pervasive, people will have ceased to notice how they are connected but they will be quite confident that the connectivity of the required quality will always be there when they need it. Similarly, our devices – from our phones to our cars – will have capabilities not just to serve our needs but to anticipate our future needs and make sure the data and communications services are there for us. Industry will be transformed with fully digitised systems modelling and managing just about every industrial process.
Behind all of these visions will be a set of people who will work with their international peers in a collaborative way to advance the technologies, improve the social sciences and ensure a sustainable future for all. CELTIC-NEXT will work on enabling this vision.
Looking forward to the next 21 years !!
© Canva
It is said that there are periods in history where, if you jump 50 years, the world is recognizable. But there are other periods of rapid development where such a jump brings you to an unrecognisable new world. The first half of the 20th Century would be an example of the latter as at the turn of the century the world was still based on horse transport but by the middle of the 20th Century cars, trains and planes had made the world small and accessible to all.
For Telecommunications we have seen such a generational change in the first 20 years of the 21st Century. In fact, the pace of change from the late 1990s to today has seen the communications infrastructure change and evolve so rapidly that it has changed the behaviour of society as a whole.
As the new technologies advance, they reach a level where they become “adequate”. What I mean by this is that it became sufficient for all normal needs to the point that you, as a user, no longer expects or demands evolutions. You don’t ask any more if you PC processor is fast enough – they all are fast. We are rapidly entering the era where you don’t worry about your data connection any more as it is fast enough. So where do we go from here?
There is a core challenge in the ICT domain that each evolution of the network infrastructure has prompted a complete infrastructure renewal. The fixed network had to be changed for a mobile network and then, in subsequent generations, all physical network elements had to be replaced with newer faster devices. No other infrastructure industry has had such a challenge. For example, the electricity network to your house has probably never been renewed. In the ICT sector growth has been explosive as people now have a communication device for every family member (probably including the dog) and most family members now have several communicating devices.
This means that Telcos must get a good return on investment on each new technology within a very short time in order to be able financially implement the next generation. To progress from here the ICT industry now has to migrate to more generic hardware that can provide many of the interesting evolutions through updating software. Network infrastructures must have interfaces that allow elements to be changed without changing the whole system. At the same time the whole ICT domain must address the new requirements that include important issues like: sustainability, renewability, inherent societal considerations and, more recently, sovereignty.
Two streams of innovation are essential for the future: the first is the revolution – where new services and devices that enhance our live must be invented and brought to life; and the second is evolution – where every aspect of how we do things must be overhauled to be done more efficiently, using less energy and resources, and for lower costs.
ICT not only must facilitate this for its own industry but also it is the facilitator for other sectors. The revolution of millions of sensors – the Internet of Things (IoT), combined with the explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems means we now should have all the data and the intelligence to learn how to improve everything.
The great opportunities for ICT now include:
These challenges are ideal for the Eureka Clusters Programme, as the combination of national interest and early industry investment ensures the wellbeing of both society at large and the industry sectors is considered.
ICT is a tool for economic growth and development. The dramatic evolution of the ICT networks now mean that it generates lots of new opportunities and can change the way our civil society functions. We must now join forces within the CELTIC-NEXT cluster to address these challenges and take advantage of the exciting opportunities to protect, preserve and enhance all the best and beautiful parts of our societies and, at the same time, to invent and develop new, better, more sustainable, solutions to our existing problems.
The exciting evolving ICT sector can be used as a stimulus to stop the spread of negative trends and lead the way towards sustainable development on all levels. CELTIC-NEXT is looking forward to a new generation of projects inventing new networks and services that facilitate a better future for all.
The Eureka Clusters Programme (ECP) is coming out of a restructuring phase where there was a lot of pressure on the Clusters themselves to become more flexible and responsive, against a promise of more investment and more support for the industry and community research and collaboration needs. At this point it is useful to see how we are progressing and if we are achieving our goals.
From the Clusters side we have shown great flexibility and adaptability by running joint thematic calls for topics that were identified as common interest. However, despite this the major expectations the Clusters had from the renewal have not emerged yet. We expected that the joint calls would be new topics that would generate new budgets and increase the investment overall in the Cluster activities, but to date, we have not seen this in reality. In fact, many Eureka member public authorities admit they are funding the new joint calls from the existing Cluster budgets with no additional funding being generated.
The problem here is that we are then, in effect, just increasing the number of calls to be managed and therefore the number of reviews, assessments, funding decisions, etc., for what is effectively the same size programme. Clearly it is not a long-term strategy to keep increasing the costs of operation without seeing any increase in the volume and value of the programme. So, we do need to do a progress assessment on the New ECP model and work out which parts are working and which parts need more attention.
From the Clusters perspective, one part that has not taken off is the expected high-level meetings between industry representatives and national authorities. It was foreseen that we could have strategic discussions that would lead to common ideas on the priorities and therefore a mutual commitment of both public authorities and industry to invest in the identified priorities of the moment. We are just not there yet. We need to get this dialogue going to stimulate the anticipated increases in investments.
The other point of concern is that we have an increasing trend for smaller project proposals coming from the community. We need to see why this is happening and how can we motivate more substantial actions. One possible cause is that proposers are being conditioned by warnings of limited funding opportunities – so they ask for less, so the project ambition is reduced, so the public authorities are not impressed by the limited proposals, and we are in a downward cycle. Another suggestion is that proposals are shrinking, because resources are limited. However, this is only true if the proposals are moving away from the core needs of the industry. Industry players are simple in this regard in that they decide what they need to do for their future business and, if the project proposal is in line with their business goals, then they commit the necessary resources. But maybe we are coming back to the missing strategic discussion where the business needs and the national interests need to be aligned.
The Cluster commitment to flexibility has been proven by the joint calls, but this has introduced two concerns: the first is that the public authorities seem to have difficulties being equally flexible – it was really unfortunate that one public authority refused to support a project in a joint call, as it was proposed through a Cluster they did not support – this challenges the very basis of joint calls; the second concern is that the level of budget commitment to joint calls is such that the issues may be better addressed as recommended themes within the normal bottom-up calls of the Clusters.
Whatever way we look at it, there is a clear need to strategically invest from both the national and the industry sides – but it must be done in a coherent way. There are several challenges in the new model that we must progress on, to get the additional value from the programme. It is now emerging that it will be necessary to have multiple national level meetings with the Cluster interests rather than the one common high-level meeting – or maybe both approaches need to run in parallel.
In any case, we must preserve and promote the essence of the extremely efficient and useful Eureka Clusters instrument. This, in essence, is the structure in which the proactive Cluster core groups, as the key industry players of their respective sectors, work in partnership with the Eureka public authorities to stimulate a set of bottom-up project proposals that capture the needs of industry, aligns them with the national interests and develops products and services for the benefit of both society and industry as a whole. The EUREKA Clusters Programme matters.
For CELTIC-NEXT, 2021 was a year of renewal and change. 2022 is a year of implementation: translating the new roadmap into partnerships and calls, designing the Space ICT flagship programme, acquiring new Core Group memberships, and implementing the first official inter-cluster joint thematic call of the Eureka Clusters Programme on accelerating industrial sustainability.
Before going into the other topics, let me first share on behalf of the CELTIC Office our deepest compassion with our Ukrainian colleagues and their families. We are worried about the destiny of those who were not able to flee or had to stay and fight the invader. Our attempt to contact them was not successful. Our only hope is that this is because our contact attempt was their lowest priority, and they did not find the time and energy to answer.
In the first half of 2022, we have pursued the implementation of CELTIC’s new roadmap by running several actions, and we will continue to do so in the second half. We are presenting this roadmap in our Proposers’ Days, to allow consortia to propose innovative projects in the large number of fields of technologies, applications, and verticals of the roadmap. This is our traditional bottom-up approach. We will continue to run our Spring and Autumn Calls as per our successful history. This is a unique selling point of CELTIC as a Eureka Cluster compared to other international funding schemes. And it will remain so in the future.
Secondly, we are entering into new partnerships to enhance our funding impact in the global ICT community, as well as in other industries. Those partnerships will nourish further our roadmap and attractivity to Public Authorities to fund impactful innovative projects across and beyond the Eureka and European countries. This is already bearing fruits with the joining of two new CELTIC Core Group members: SES S.A. and CELLNEX Telecom.
One of the new partnerships has already been signed with ESA, the European Space Agency, in the form of a Memorandum of Intent (see the Space ICT article in this issue of CELTIC News). CELTIC and ESA will coordinate efforts and exchange on terrestrial network and non-terrestrial network convergence and cooperation. Some of those new partnerships, as for example the one with ESA, will be translated into flagship programmes and associated calls.
Space ICT has become a subject of high attention for industry and governments, and this has been strongly reinforced by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. A clear sign has been also sent by 3GPP, which has now opened wider doors for the inclusion of SatCom besides the traditional backhauling role. The MoI will encourage terrestrial ICT and Space ICT industry collaboration with other industry verticals to facilitate the adoption of advanced Space ICT technologies in the business models and processes of all industry sectors.
CELTIC-NEXT and ESA are working together to define a joint roadmap of technologies, use cases and agenda of calls. ESA is a key actor in the development of all aspects and fields of space activity. Once the first roadmap and an agenda of calls are ready, CELTIC and ESA will advertise them. The joint roadmap and agenda should be defined during the first half of 2022, and the first CELTIC Space ICT flagship call should be announced for the second half of 2022.
CELTIC has started to approach potential new Core Group members to enrich its DNA. And CELTIC is proud to have added two strong new members with headquarters based in Europe to its Core Group:
SES S.A. is a leading satellite operator. With over 70 satellites in two different orbits, their reach is unlike any other. They combine a vast, intelligent network of satellites and ground infrastructure with industry-leading expertise to manage and deliver high-performance video and data solutions virtually everywhere on the planet. SES S.A. already delivered a keynote in the ECP Joint Sustainability Call 2022 Webinar in Luxembourg.
CELLNEX Telecom is a leading infrastructure operator for wireless telecommunication in Europe. Cellnex has made a firm commitment to developing its network, which currently comprises around 128,000 sites. 71,000 of them are already in the portfolio and the rest in the process of closing or planned roll-outs up to 2030, which perfectly positions the company to develop new-generation networks. CELLNEX provides services in Spain, Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Austria, Denmark, and Sweden thanks to the investments undertaken to boost its transformation and internationalisation. CELLNEX already delivered a keynote in CELTIC’s Spring Call 2022 Proposers’ Day.
Other prospective new Core Group members will be approached this year.
After having led the two pilot pre-ECP joint calls on AI, CELTIC-NEXT has contributed to the first ECP Joint Call targeting the acceleration wof industrial sustainability, with the two sub-topics chosen by the 16 participating Public Authorities:
› Green ICT
› Space-Earth-ocean integrated systems for better observation and data exploitation
The timeline of this call is shown in the figure.
Information about the call, which closed on 2nd May 2022, is available on the Sustainability Call Website at https://eureka-clusters.eu/sustainability.html
2022 is and will remain a challenging year for many topics. Joint collaborative innovation and knowledge exchange are among the best weapons against pandemics and wars. Our ICT community is one of the best positioned to understand and support this. Cybersecurity, resilience of critical infrastructures (for example with SatCom), and misuse of ICT technologies against people and nations are certainly topics to be ranked now as absolute priorities in the new world that is in front of us. CELTIC has made a collaborative proposal to its fellow Clusters within Eureka and will try to elaborate a strategic programme in that direction towards Eureka funding bodies.
