IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference
10-13 January 2020 // Las Vegas // USA

Keynotes

Saturday, 11 January 2020

Time: 8:15 - 9:30
Room: Twilight / 3rd Floor

Michael Peeters, Director of Connectivity, imec 

Michael PeetersA passionate leader with a background in both research and strategy, Dr. Ir. Michael Peeters is Program Director Connectivity+Humanized Technology at imec. Michael has been identifying and implementing state-of-the art technology opportunities in telecommunications through a career that spans two decades.

Both as Head of the Nokia Incubator and the Innovation Portfolio at Nokia, as well as CTO for the Wireless Division at Alcatel-Lucent, his role required him to make sense out of the uncertainty that exists when technological possibilities have to be balanced with business case realities. His team’s responsibility: to see beyond the business analysis and help customers envision how emerging technologies and trends, such as 5G and AI, will impact their networks and end-user community.

Prior to his role as CTO for the Wireless Division, he was CTO for the Wireline Division. The team looked beyond the product roadmap and identified what new trends, technologies and tools were on the horizon and determined how those future opportunities fit into the Alcatel-Lucent pipeline. It was also during this period that the business commercialized VDSL2 Vectoring, an idea conceived 7 years earlier while leading the Bell Labs Access Nodes and DSL Technology department.

He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, many white papers and holds patents in the access and photonics domains. Michael earned a Ph.D. in Applied Physics and Photonics from Vrije Universiteit Brussel as well as a master’s degree in Electrotechnical Engineering.

Outside of work, Michael is passionate about cooking and continues to refine the recipe for the perfect lasagna, balanced by bouts of long-distance running to offset the caloric intake inherent with such a quest.

Talk Title: Consumer Communications beyond broadband: You can't have your cake and eat it.

Abstract: More users, more bandwidth, more of the same…: the global mobile communications sector often seems to have only one need, the need for speed. Ever higher speeds and capacity to offer us more entertainment, gaming and other forms of mobile broadband. Nonetheless, ensuring reliable and low-latency communication for next-generation wireless networks and non-consumer applications are currently receiving tremendous attention. Capacity as a KPI is being complemented by reliability and latency as use-cases branch out beyond the traditional human-centric communications and entertainment into e.g. industrial automation, AR/VR and autonomous vehicles; all supported by so-called edge communications.

As the economic importance of these novel use-cases grow, what does this mean for the evolution of consumer communications? Today, the market is driven by the volume which in turn drives the possibility of further CMOS scaling for the digital processing of information. Unfortunately, not only the individual endpoint throughputs are increasing, not only the amount of endpoints and their capabilities is skyrocketing, but the nature of the endpoints is changing. Will this mean the end of consumer requirements as the main driver for innovation?

We will focus not only on beyond-broadband applications but also on the state of the art challenges we have today in communications hardware for next-generation networks, the perfect storm at the interface of the analog and digital world, where traditional scaling does not necessarily buy you performance; physical dimensions are dictated not by atom sizes but by quarter-wavelengths of one kind or another; and speeds seem to all be converging at a point where switching frequencies venture far into the super-100GHz territory.

 

Sunday, 12 January 2020

Time: 8:30 - 9:30
Room: Twilight / 3rd Floor

Mauro Boldi, Senior Technical Manager, TIM

Mauro BoldiMr. Mauro Boldi is Senior Technical Manager at TIM and coordinator of 5G PPP infrastructure project 5G EVE. He graduated with full marks at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 1998 and joined CSELT, the research centre of Telecom Italia, in the same year. At CSELT he has been involved in radio access network topics, with activities on antenna and propagation, radio over fibre solutions, collaborative networks, and energy efficiency. He is the author of patents and papers on the same topics as well as a chapter on Coordinated Multipoint solutions in the 2011 Wiley book entitled “Mobile and wireless communications for IMT-advanced and beyond”, the chapter on 5G Architecture in a Cambridge University Press book on “5G Mobile and Wireless Communications Technology”. Recently, Mauro has been one of the main editors of the 2018 Wiley book “5G System Design -Architectural and Functional Considerations and Long Term Research”.

Talk Title: The European initiative to test and validate the 5G innovative solutions: 5G EVE project

Abstract: The "fifth-generation" of telecommunication systems, or 5G, will be one of the most critical building blocks of our digital economy and society in the next decade. Europe has taken significant steps to lead global developments towards this strategic technology. 

Within the framework of the H2020 Work Programme financed by the European Commission the project “5G EVE”, started on July 2018, aims to implement an international platform to support and facilitate the deployment of 5G networks in Europe. Four sites, based in Turin, Paris, Madrid, and Athens are interconnected to trial innovative 5G use cases, ranging from smart city to smart tourism and new transport or e-health applications. Operators like TIM, Orange, Telefonica, and OTE, as well as equipment suppliers like Ericsson and Nokia, complemented by SMEs, universities and research centers all over Europe build a very strong consortium to implement and run the 5G innovative use cases.

TIM, in particular, has the leadership of the whole project and is responsible for the trials in the city of Turin, coordinating the implementation of the initiative in the city, with the support of the Municipality and other important players. Turin is one of the first cities in which recently TIM has turned on the commercial 5G services, and 5G EVE is the playground to test the innovative solutions aiming to ensure the full achievement of the large expectations related to the deployment of the 5G networks.

 

Sunday, 12 January 2020

Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Room: Twilight / 3rd Floor

Ellen W. Zegura, Fleming Professor, School of Computer Science, College of Computing, Georgia Tech

Ellen ZeguraEllen Zegura is the Stephen Fleming Professor in Computer Science at Georgia Tech and Executive Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Serve Learn Sustain. Her research interests span computer networking and computing for social good. Recently she has brought these together in a set of projects in collaboration with Elizabeth Belding at UC Santa Barbara to study and expand Internet access on Native American tribal lands. Her research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, the Army Research Lab, Cisco, and others. She was the first Chair of the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech from 2005-2012. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and the incoming Chair of the Computing Research Association Board. 

Talk Title: Public Interest Technology Research and Education

Abstract: The Ford Foundation and New America have launched a Public Interest Technology (PIT) network of universities to advance the intersection of technology and public problem solving, with a focus on education programs. Georgia Tech is a charter member of this network, building on long-standing work in a Computing and Social Good project-based course, a Civic Data Science summer internship program, and a growing portfolio of research on how to effectively meet the needs of the public sector with appropriate socio-technical systems. In this talk, I will highlight three Georgia Tech efforts, one in education, one in research, and one in research about education, while suggesting how all computer scientists can connect to public problem-solving. 

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