An exciting year of transition and renewal for CELTIC-NEXT

New ambitions and new roadmap


Xavier Priem
Director CELTIC Office

CELTIC-NEXT has been through several changes this year: a new Director, updated vision, mission and roadmap, and last but not least, the active role in the new Eureka Clusters Programme (ECP). Our Spring Call has been very successful, with six projects labelled and now in the funding phase, and we are curious to see the proposals from our Autumn Call, which closed on 22nd November. We are very active in preparing the future with a new Flagship series programme and closing partnerships with other funding bodies.

An enriched DNA for future growth

When I became the new CELTIC Director at the end of March this year, I discovered, from the inside, CELTIC’s strong DNA, built over its 18 years of successful fostering of the ICT RDI community across Eureka countries. It has been around nine months since then – one could say, the time of a pregnancy. It has been an interesting experience, because, in a way, we have further enriched CELTIC’s DNA over the last months in various manners.

First, we did this by following the long-­established tradition of labelling new projects from the last bottom-up Spring Call; here I personally wish to all projects to be successful in being awarded with their ­national fundings.

Secondly, we did this via the joint work and exchanges we had with our other Eureka Clusters friends in the context of the ECP Multi-Annual-Plan preparation and successful approval, on 17th June 2021, by Eu­reka and its funding Public Authorities. We will use the opportunity of the ECP MAP to address wider industrial communities and bring in additional funding countries to our ICT community. The ECP MAP application gave us also the additional opportunity to revisit the vision, mission and roadmap, last elaborated in 2018, in the light of the latest challenges and opportunities that both our ICT community and the wider world have been facing since then, like COVID-19, supply-chain challenges and the new potential role of satellites and alike in 5G, 6G and overall services.

Finally, and very much linked to the last point, CELTIC will cross its DNA with other communities in the near future, starting with the European Space sector.

This new enriched DNA will be the base for future flagship calls and projects, coming in addition to the successful series of CELTIC flagship projects like SASER, SENDATE and currently AI-NET.

Progressing implementation of Eureka Clusters Programme

After an intensive preparation and application period, which culminated in the ECP authorisation to operate as Clusters, the five Eureka Clusters CELTIC-NEXT, EUROGIA2020, ITEA4,

SMART and XECS are now implementing the first Multi-Annual-Plan (MAP) as well as the first Annual Operational Plan (AOP). CELTIC-NEXT is, as in the preparation phase, very active in the implementation phase, in order to best represent our ICT community’s interests in the joint committees and actions. This period is crucial for CELTIC-NEXT to get the maximum return on investment from the new Eureka Clusters Programme, by getting the best representation in those additional funded calls. Therefore, I want to use this occasion to encourage readers from the RDI community to feed us with your needs, wishes and ideas on topics (technologies, use cases, and more) for the elaboration of future joint thematic call topics. The first thematic call will be about “Sustainable Industry” and will, among others, look at Green ICT as well as Space-Earth-Ocean Integrated Systems.


Conclusion and Outlook

As the new Director, I am proud and honoured to drive this transformation and the development of CELTIC on behalf of CELTIC’s Management Group and Core Group members. Our new strategy gets already positive responses from the funding authorities of numerous Eureka countries, who want to invest in our new vision, mission and roadmap as presented in our application to ECP MAP. Our future flagship series programme is also getting very good traction, encouraging us to further pursue this new path. 2022 will be an interesting year for CELTIC!

CyberWi – Cyber-security in the Wireless Industrial use case

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.

Approach

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.

Achieved results

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

Conclusion

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.

› Further information

CyberWI project on CELTIC-NEXT website – https://www.celticnext.eu/project-cyberwi/

Eureka − A major tool to promote research and innovation

Interview with Eureka chairman Miguel Bello Mora

On 1st July, Portugal took over the Eureka chairmanship for one year – already for the third time in the 35-year history of Eureka. The motto of the Portuguese Chairmanship is “Innovation for a greener, digital and healthier planet through a collaborative approach”. CELTIC News editor Milon Gupta asked Eureka chairman Miguel Bello Mora, CEO of the Atlantic International Research Centre in Portugal, about priorities and progress of Eureka after the first quarter of the Portuguese Eureka term.

What are the main priorities of the ­Portuguese Eureka chairmanship?

Miguel Bello Mora: We have five main priorities for the Portuguese Eureka chairmanship:

First, to increase the global outreach of the Eureka Network by promoting collaboration with international organizations with an important innovation component, like the European Space Agency, and via the organization of a series of international events.

Second, to enhance new forms of cooperation for effective RDI programmes by strengthening the relation with the European Union within the new Horizon Europe framework programme for research, development, and innovation.

Third, strengthening the Eureka Network’s positioning by reinforcing the mechanisms for the generation of projects, contributing to the revitalization of the ­Eureka Clusters Programme.

Fourth, adding value to the Eureka label, with the organisation of Eureka’s Global ­Innovation Summit 2022 and the Eureka Ministerial Meeting in Portugal in June 2022.

And fifth, to continue the necessary restructuring of the Eureka Secretariat and pursue a healthy financial model for the ­Eureka Secretariat.

Which role do you see for the Eureka Clusters Programme in the context of the Portuguese priorities?

Miguel Bello Mora: The Portuguese chairmanship is contributing to the revitalization of the Eureka Clusters Programme by implementing the new governance model, ensuring greater compromise from public authorities on the funding of projects, intensifying the participation of industrial key players at the board of Clusters’ governance structures and promoting collaboration and cross-fertilisation between Clusters through the organisation of joint calls.

A joint thematic call is promoted with a topic focused on Space-Ocean-Earth Observation Systems and Space related technologies which would include the promotion of projects linked with the Green Deal in areas like Earth Observation from Space and its combination with Artificial Intelligence.

How would you describe the progress of Eureka in the first months of the Portuguese chairmanship?

Miguel Bello Mora: During the first months of the Eureka Portuguese chairmanship some of the strategic priorities have been implemented, like the collaboration with the European Space Agency, where a Memorandum of Understanding is in preparation, and the first of the international events on “Eureka meets the Atlantic through Space-Ocean-Earth collaborative innovations”. In addition, the final proposal for the Eurostars 3 programme, one of the flagship projects of Eureka, has been completed in August.

What is your vision for Eureka and its programmes beyond the Portuguese chairmanship?

Miguel Bello Mora: Our vision beyond the ­Portuguese Chairmanship is to have Eureka as a major tool to promote research and innovation, strengthening the bottom-up, open and flexible nature of the network by building on the work done by the previous Chairmanships while following the strategic priorities of the recently approved Eureka Strategic Roadmap for 2021-2027.

Eureka shall promote the dynamism of the economy and European innovation through the recovery period from the crisis associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and should stimulate new opportunities for the development of new products and services in global markets, as well as new international collaborations towards citizens wellbeing and healthy living.

How Portugal supports CELTIC-NEXT projects

The Portuguese National Innovation Agency

Rita Silva
ANI – Agência Nacional de Inovação, SA

ANI – Agência Nacional de Inovação, SA, is the National Innovation Agency of Portugal. It is owned in equal shares by IAPMEI – the Portuguese Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation under the Ministry of the Economy and Digital Transition – and FCT – the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education. ANI supports technological and business innovation in Portugal, contributing to the consolidation of the national innovation system and to strengthening the competitiveness of the national economy in global markets.

In 2020, Portugal reached a 1,6% R&D share of national GDP, an all-time high. 57% of R&D funding comes from companies’ investments. There are around 4,300 R&D-performing companies investing an average of 420,000 euro per year to develop new technologies.

Portugal’s innovation strategy

Along this path, an ambitious national strategy for technological and entrepreneurial innovation for the period 2018-2030 has been defined. It includes main targets such as achieving a global investment in R&D of 3% of GDP by 2030, with a relative share of two thirds coming from private expenditure, as well as becoming a European leader in digital skills by 2030. From 2021 to 2027, Portugal aims to double the Portuguese participation in European Union funding programmes, and to attract around 2 billion euros for R&I, as well as tripling the number of students in mobility in higher education, compared to 2014-2020.

ANI has a central role in the Portuguese innovation ecosystem and contributes to the achievement of the major national innovation goals. The Agency manages financial and ­fiscal incentives programmes to promote private investment in R&D and to foster collaborative R&D between companies and R&D institutions for an effective transfer of knowledge to the market. ANI also promotes the internationalisation of Portuguese innovative companies and R&D institutions through supporting their participation in the Horizon Europe R&DI Framework Programme as well as other international networks for R&D cooperation and business internationalisation such as the Enterprise Europe Network and the Eureka Network.

Portugal has now for the third time since becoming one of the 18 founding member states of the Eureka Network in 1985 taken over the Chairmanship of Eureka from July 2021 until June 2022. ANI is part of the Chairmanship Team, hosting the National Eureka office.

FACTS about Portuguese participation in CELTIC- NEXT projects

The EUREKA Clusters prove to be an excellent channel for the internationalisation of Portuguese companies, academia, RTOs and research centres enabling them to access to global value chains, to new knowledge and to partner with numerous countries. In fact, the opportunity offered by the Eureka Network and the Clusters projects to collaborate beyond Europe on a truly global stage is one of the major benefits identified by companies.

CELTIC-NEXT is the Eureka Cluster with
the largest Portuguese participation. This is related to the fact that the technological area with the largest Portuguese participation in EUREKA projects is electronics, IT and telecoms technology (62 %).

Between 2008-2020, 31 CELTIC projects with Portuguese participation were funded. Since 2017, with the introduction of a grant-based funding instrument relying on European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) to support Eureka and Eurostars projects, the funding of Eureka Clusters projects has become more agile and stable in Portugal. This has raised interest and created renewed dynamics among stakeholders to apply and participate.

Under the new instrument “Projetos de I&D Industrial à Escala Europeia”, 11 new CELTIC projects were recently funded, reflecting a total investment from the Portuguese entities involved of 7 million euro and corresponding to approximately 4.5 million euro of public funding.

The Portuguese entities most represented in CELTIC-NEXT projects include companies such as UBIWHERE Lda, CELFINET – CONSULTORIA EM TELECOMUNICAÇÕES, S.A., Proef Eurico Ferreira S.A., GLINTT Healthcare Solutions S.A., Wavecom – Soluções Radio S.A., and renowned research centres like Instituto de Telecomunicações, Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP), or Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco.

CELTIC-NEXT projects with Portuguese participation focus on several ICT areas such as energy efficiency and quality of service/experience in mobile telecommunications networks, smart operations optimization and performance monitoring in mobile telecommunications networks, healthcare, smart cities, and internet of the future. Their main partner countries are Spain, France, Finland, Sweden, Turkey, Canada, Korea, and Israel.

As an added-value of participating in
CELTIC-NEXT projects, Portuguese entities report an overall increase in competitiveness levels through the possibility to access new markets, to improve their positioning in global value chains, an increase in exports, improvement in R&DI capacities and gain of new expertise through the possibility to employ highly qualified human resources and lastly, the enlargement of the company’s product portfolio and cross-selling of solutions.


ANI headquarters in Porto

› Further information
ANI website – https://www.ani.pt/en

What living in interesting times means for CELTIC-NEXT

David Kennedy
CELTIC-NEXT Chair Person

In common folklore it is often unclear, if the wish “may you live in interesting times” is intended as a curse or a blessing. Either way, it can mean that you experience a lot of change and you need to remain active and responsive to the changes to ensure that you progress positively. Well, for the CELTIC-NEXT community the recent times have been very interesting with lots of changes impacting every aspect of our domain.


© AdobeStock

CELTIC-NEXT in the new post-Covid world

One interesting aspect of the way we all restructured our lives and work in the “lock-down” period is that we have rapidly learned to do many things remotely. This creates a very significant shift from travelling and meeting to using communications to stay in contact via webinars and videoconferencing. In fact, we have learned that many meetings are no longer necessary, if the participants have reliable communications of sufficient capacities. The issue here is that we have proved the concept for remote working – even if we were forced into it without any preparation – to the extent where it is unlikely that we will ever justify the amount of travel and meetings we had in 2019 going forward.

The impact of this on business processes is that the integration of high-speed high-capacity communications infrastructures into both the production and use of many advanced products is now assured and the communications technologies must deliver.

A good example will be the advanced traffic management on the roads and the introduction of autonomous cars. In this context all road users need to be equally informed about changing circumstances on the road and, more specifically, any safety risks. And once you start supplying this information, the supply must be continuous and reliable and economical. Despite the increasing requirement for pervasive communications, we are also under pressure to ensure the sustainability of communications by lowering the power consumption of all elements of the network.

In summary, the new outlook for the ICT domain is that we have to provide incredible speed and reliability for the connections for low cost with a very low environmental profile. Clearly there are many challenges in this.

CELTIC-NEXT and the New Eureka ­Clusters Programme

In the past two years the CELTIC-NEXT Cluster has worked with the other Eureka Clusters to help evolve the Eureka Clusters Programme (ECP). The idea is to revitalise the instrument, as an effective and efficient international research collaboration tool and to stimulate more involvement and investments.

The approach was to consider the processes and see where the programme could be more responsive to the ever-changing set of research and innovation requirements and priorities facing industrial and national interests. A key result is the introduction of joint calls operated collectively by the relevant Clusters while presenting a consistent and seamless interface to the project proposers and the national authorities. To demonstrate the new flexibility of the Clusters, the first joint call – the AI call 2020 – was launched and run successfully. The lessons learned included greater collaboration between Clusters and more analysis of the delays and interactions in the project decisions as the Clusters combined resources. The next step in this development we hope to see now is a reduction in the overall time to decision for Eureka projects and that this experience can also be used to improve the throughput of the regular Cluster “bottom-up” calls.

The new flexibility has increased the operational costs for the Clusters, but it is anticipated that it should stimulate more national investment in the new joint topics which will increase the overall volume of the programme. This increase in research project volume should compensate for the increased costs to keep the ECP instrument efficient and practical. We in CELTIC-NEXT have heavily invested in the new structure and we are now looking forward to see how the programme volumes evolve.

Conclusion

From the CELTIC-NEXT perspective we remain committed to embracing the changes and using them to help us better serve our community. The origin of the CELTIC community was the need to bring the digital communications benefits to the world. This has evolved to the point where the vertical communities are now informed and active regarding the benefits advanced communications can bring to their domains that they are now becoming drivers of the changes in the communications infrastructures and services too.

We do live in interesting times, and CELTIC-NEXT remains committed to helping all parts of industry and society to embrace and benefit from advanced communications.

The Eureka Clusters Programme

A New Era of Joint Thematic Calls

Jari Lehmusvuori
Nokia, CELTIC-NEXT Vice-Chair

Many steps have been taken and many milestones reached in 2021 both in CELTIC-NEXT and jointly with the other Eureka Clusters. We are experiencing an inspiring time of both facilitating the well-known industry innovation projects, as well as planning the new Eureka Clusters Programme (ECP) jointly with the other innovation Clusters in Eureka. With the launch of the ECP in the 2nd half of 2021 a new era with both the bottom-up Calls and thematic Calls will be available as opportunities for the innovations on the next generation communications in the CELTIC-NEXT community. Therefore, it is worthwhile here to summarize the baselines as an early introduction.

The traditional CELTIC bottom-up calls in spring and autumn are not affected by the additional ECP processes. The Joint Thematic Calls under the ECP’s Multi-Annual Programme (MAP) are additional commitments from both Public Authorities and Clusters to work together on common and cross-Cluster topics. The current CELTIC-NEXT projects are performing well, and as a highlight, the new CELTIC-NEXT Flagship project AI-NET is now also up and running.

Thematic joint project calls by Eureka Clusters Programme

The planning and organization of the Eureka Clusters Programme (ECP) started in October 2020. It has continued under the lead of Eu­reka and with a strong contribution by the CELTIC Office. While not yet approved, the first call for projects may be introduced in late 2021 with a closing date in spring 2022. The ECP Calls follow the concept of joint calls of mul­tiple Clusters, which enables widening the scope and competences available to a project. Each of the Calls have a theme agreed between the industry and the funding Public ­Authorities of the countries. The ECP provides project opportunities to both large companies and small and medium-sized companies, and the public authorities funding according to their national policies. Each of the supporting countries assign an indicative and viable budget outlook for a thematic Call which, among the other new features, will provide improved predictability on funding. In addition, the schedule of funding decisions from idea to start is the goal. All these main features of the thematic joint calls of ECP make them a new innovations project instrument to the CELTIC-NEXT industry community, which is complementary to the single-Cluster bottom-up calls.

CELTIC-NEXT in the ECP

The Multi Annual Plan (MAP) sets out the commitments of the public authorities and the Eureka Clusters. They jointly determine which RDI communities can be integrated in the MAP as Eureka Clusters, what the expected funding level will be, and what potential thematic areas for collaboration are. Each RDI community wishing to join the ECP applies for a period of 4 years to operate as a EUREKA Cluster. CELTIC-NEXT as such a community has submitted the application to Eureka as of 1st July 2021. Being a part of this ECP MAP approval process it has enabled us to update our CELTIC-NEXT Roadmap together with the MAP. As a Eureka Cluster the communications industry community of CELTIC-NEXT will have the opportunity for the future thematic joint calls that set out the challenges of sustainability and autonomous mobility as examples. The themes and a description of the calls to be launched in the coming year, including the budget commitments of the participating Eureka countries are given on the Annual Operational Plan of ECP.

Eureka Clusters AI Call 2021

As a preliminary step towards the joint calls, the Eureka Clusters AI Call 2021, to which CELTIC-NEXT substantially contributed, was organised with a submission deadline of 28 June 2021. This is an opportunity for the companies in the communications area to set up cross-innovation projects with a large network of organizations in the area of Artificial Intelligence with flexibility in the topics.

CELTIC-NEXT Autumn 2021 Call

CELTIC-NEXT is continuing as the communications and applications Cluster in Eureka. The Celtic Autumn Call 2021 will be launched with the submission date in November 2021. It is a bottom-up Call with flexibility in the scope for the projects. Proposals for new innovations projects are welcomed. A brokerage event is foreseen for pitching of project ideas and partnering.

CELTIC-NEXT Flagship project AI-NET

The new industry-led CELTIC-NEXT Flagship project AI-NET (Accelerating Digital Transformation in Europe by Intelligent NETwork Automation) started in mid-2020. It is targeting automated resilient networks for economy and society. The project brings together partners from seven European countries and three fields of technology: Communications Networks and Technologies for 5G and Beyond, Near-Use Data Centers, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Novel solutions for network automation are expected in the forthcoming two years.

Change in the CELTIC-NEXT ­Management Team

Xavier Priem has started as the new CELTIC ­Office Director. He has a strong track-record, both in innovation management and business development, thus providing an excellent background for industry innovations. Please join me in welcoming Xavier to the lead in the times of new challenges. He took over from Peter Herrmann, who retired in spring after having dedicated 15 years to CELTIC. As the CELTIC Office Director since 2014 he relentlessly drove the Cluster for the benefit of the European telecommunications industry innovations. Please join me in thanking Peter.

How Eureka Clusters keep reinventing ­themselves

Valérie Blavette
Orange

In order to effectively foster innovation, the Eureka Clusters, including CELTIC-NEXT, are constantly innovating themselves. This is why we are currently setting up a new Eureka Clusters Programme that increases synergies between Clusters. This new programme was designed during the former Dutch Eureka Chairmanship and is being implemented during the current Austrian Chairmanship, whose motto is ‘‘Towards a New Eureka’’. It is impressive to see how an Intergovernmental organisation that was created in 1985 is so dynamic, flexible and future-looking to enhance collaboration at a global scale.

It was decided to set up a new governance structure for the Eureka Clusters Programme, which is based on new bodies for representing both the Public Authorities and the Cluster communities, as well as to facilitate dialogue between the industry and the national funding bodies.

New governance for better public-­private dialogue

For enhancing the public-private dialogue, the Public Authorities Committee (PAC) has been set up at director’s level with representatives of over 20 countries at the time of writing. In addition, the Clusters Committee (CC) has been formed, with three industry representatives of each Cluster.

The kick-off meeting of the ECP programme took place on 15th October. In the meeting, the PAC and CC members discussed the importance of the Eureka Clusters for their respective company, industry and community as well as some strategic and topical priorities.

CELTIC-NEXT is represented by Vincent Marcatte, Orange Vice President, Julie Byrne, Nokia Head of Partnerships and David ­Kennedy, Director of Eurescom.

At the time of writing, the new Public ­Authority Committee (PAC) had already gathered 19 participating countries, chaired by the UK.

Agreeing on strategic priorities

When industry and the Public Authorities will agree on some strategic topic, it will be reflected in the Multi-Annual Plan (MAP) of the ECP. When the MAP will be finally approved in June 2021 thematic calls among a set of clusters or at individual level will be decided for the next four years, starting with the most urgent ones. Among the topics and challenges high on the agenda of both the Public Authorities and the PAs are AI, Green Deal, Cyber­security and Beyond 5G/6G.

Denmark and South Korea have proposed a new joint Cluster call on “Technology driven Green Transition” that could take place already in the transition period with projects funded already in 2021, if enough countries can join.

The Central Coordinating Function and the CC Support Group

The new ECP will be supported by the Central Coordination Function (CCF) that will be half funded by the PAs and half by the clusters. Nadja Rohrbach, who has been working at the Eureka Secretariat in charge of Clusters since more than two years, seconded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), has been in charge of the CCF from the PA side since last summer.

The Cluster Committee will be assisted by a Support Group, where CELTIC will be represented by Jari Lehmusvuori from Nokia, ­Antonio Cuadra Sanchez from Indra Minsait, Peter Herrmann, Celtic Office director, and the CELTIC-NEXT Chair.

CELTIC-NEXT and the Eureka Clusters AI call

CELTIC-NEXT paved the way for the new ­governance during its Inter-Cluster Spokespersonship. We started seizing the opportunity of AI being high on the agenda of both industry and a number of Public Authorities by setting-up the first AI call jointly organised by CELTIC-NEXT, Eurogia, ITEA, PENTA and Euripides. It was both a collective challenge and an educating experience. A new cluster tool and portal had been developed by Eurescom specifically for this first joint call.

The clusters attracted 16 countries who gave their financial support to that call including Singapore, which is new in Eureka. By mid-June, when the call ended, we received 41 valid project proposals.

For this first joint call it was decided to synchronise label and funding decisions wherever possible. The supporting Public Authorities agreed to participate to a pre-consensus and a consensus meeting where the decision to label / fund projects from all clusters was examined, taking into account the evaluations both from the cluster tech­nical experts and from the PAs.

Finally 16 projects were labelled and a quick path for funding of those projects has been explored by the countries.

Open to the verticals and to challenges

The Eureka Clusters keep innovating, and CELTIC-NEXT is open for more joint initiatives and challenges that advance European and global innovation in the smart connected world domain. For our autumn call we organised once again a joint call with Eurogia, the Cluster on low carbon energy. In mid-September we had an exciting joint proposers day with over 200 registered participants, and a new brokerage tool. This is just one example for a converged industry effort including
the verticals, which shows how CELTIC-NEXT contributes to the new Eureka Clusters Programme.

Conclusion

After two years of dense activity as CELTIC-NEXT Chair, I am now required for a new position inside Orange.

Through my roles as CELTIC Chair and Inter-Cluster Spokesperson, I have been happy to contribute to increasing the interest of the Public Authorities towards CELTIC-NEXT and Eureka Clusters in general.

As for me, I will still participate as CELTIC-NEXT Core-Group member from Orange.

Last but not least, I wish all the best to my successor and to CELTIC-NEXT!

AI-NET Kick-Off Event

CELTIC Flagship Project for Intelligent Network Automation


Milon Gupta
CELTIC Office

On 1st June 2021, CELTIC flagship project AI-NET was officially launched at a high-level online event. Representatives from the public authorities of Germany, Sweden and Finland as well as representatives of the AI-NET project consortium, comprising major players from industry (large and SMEs), research organisations, and academia, presented the visions and goals of the ambitious European project to an audience of more than 150 participants.


Darja Isaksson, Director General at Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency


Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ina Schieferdecker, Director-General for Research for Digitalization and Innovation at the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

AI-NET aims at ‘Accelerating Digital Transformation in Europe with Intelligent Network Automation’. The project is addressing the challenge that the current centralised cloud infrastructure is not adequate for serving the requirements of the digital transformation in Europe. AI-NET is built on the premise that three technologies need to be combined to shape a new secure service and application platform: 5G, edge-centric computing, and artificial intelligence.

The main goal of the AI-NET project is to provide enablers and solutions for high-performance services deployed and operated at the network edge. AI-NET is using artificial intelligence for complementing traditional optimisation algorithms, in order to manage vastly increased network complexity.

The kick-off event was opened by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ina Schieferdecker, Director-General for Research for Digitalization and Innovation at the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). She said: “AI-NET is an important step for Germany and Europe towards technological sovereignty.”

In the following presentations, the representatives of the funding agencies from Sweden and Finland – Darja Isaksson, Director General at Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency, and Heikki Uusi-Honko, Head of International Networks at Business Finland – shared their views on the importance of AI-NET from the perspective of their national innovation strategies. While Ms Isaksson pointed out that “AI-NET is a cornerstone in Vinnova’s strategy for digital transformation”, Mr Uusi-Honko highlighted the importance of AI-NET for contributing to sustainable growth in Europe. CELTIC-NEXT Vice Chair Jari Lehmusvuori, Head of Department at Nokia Bell Labs, completed the session by presenting the European innovation perspective of Eureka Cluster CELTIC-NEXT.

The next session was dedicated to presenting the AI-NET sub-projects AI-NET-ANIARA, led by Ericsson Research, AI-NET-PROTECT, led by ADVA, and AI-NET-ANTILLAS, led by Nokia Bell-Labs. Magnus Frodigh, Vice President & Head of Ericsson Research, Sweden, Dr. Christoph Glingener, CTO ADVA Optical Networking, Germany, and Patricia Layec, Research Department Head, Nokia Bell-Labs, France, presented the ambition of AI-NET to connect critical infrastructures and data centres through enhanced transport networks and improved networking concepts that will results in reinforced overall security.

The event concluded with a panel discussion on how Europe can accelerate the digital transformation with intelligent network automation. Panelists in the session moderated by Eurescom Director and CELTIC Chairman David Kennedy were Dr. Mohsen Amiribesheli, Research Technology Manager at Konica Minolta Global R&D; Dr. Markus Ohlenforst, Managing Director at IconPro GmbH; Dominik Flick, Project Manager for Energy Performance Management at Stellantis / Opel Automobile GmbH; Dr. Timo Lehnigk-Emden, Managing Director at Creonic GmbH; and Prof. Dr. Jan Juerjens, Director Research Projects at Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering.


Presentation by Prof. Dr. Jan Jürjens from Fraunhofer ISST

About AI-NET

AI-NET is a 74 million-euro public-private partnership project under CELTIC-NEXT, the EUREKA Cluster for next generation communications for a digital society. AI-NET comprises three sub-projects with 92 companies, research organisations, and universities from Germany, Sweden, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Poland. The CELTIC-NEXT flagship project is coordinated by ADVA Optical Networking SE, a European telecommunications vendor headquartered in Germany.

AI-NET is publicly co-funded by the public authorities of Germany (BMBF), Sweden (VINNOVA), Finland (Business Finland), and the United Kingdom (Innovate UK). The project will end in August 2024.

› Further information

› AI-NET Kick-Off Event Page – https://www.celticnext.eu/event/celtic-ai-net-kick-off-event/
› AI-NET Project Page – https://www.celticnext.eu/project-ai-net/

Next generation communications meets clean energy

Virtual Proposers Day of CELTIC-NEXT and EUROGIA2020

Milon Gupta
CELTIC Office

The second Proposers Day held by CELTIC-NEXT and EUROGIA2020 on 15–16 September 2020 was quite different from the first edition, which took place on 29th January in Madrid at the Nokia premises. This time, the COVID-19 restrictions made an in-person event impossible. Thus, the Proposers Day was held as a virtual event. The positive aspect was that the number of registered participants doubled to over 200. Also the number of proposal ideas for the joint CELTIC Eurogia Call in autumn increased, from 12 to 15. And no less than 11 Public Authorities presented funding opportunities in their countries.

Due to the successful first joint proposers day, CELTIC-NEXT and EUROGIA2020 had decided to bring together both Eureka Cluster communities again for the autumn call that was open until 19th October. Responding to the growing need for cross-cutting approaches and synergies between Eureka Clusters, the goal of the joint call was to expand knowledge, boost visibility and promote cooperative efforts for innovative results. The second joint Proposers Day offered a discussion forum for organisations interested to participate in a collaborative research project via CELTIC-NEXT in the area of next generation communications or via EUROGIA2020 in the area of low-carbon energy technologies.

Welcome and keynote

The first day of the event started with welcome speeches by Valérie Blavette, Inter-Cluster Spokesperson and CELTIC Chairperson from Orange, and Sinem Altuncu, EUROGIA2020 General Manager from Paycore. This was followed by a keynote on cybersecurity challenges, given by Dr. Heiko Lehmann from Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs. According to Dr. Lehmann, the rapid evolution of cybersecurity threats creates growing market opportunities.


Keynote speaker Dr. Heiko Lehmann from Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs

Session on proposal submission

After the inspiring beginning, it was time to get to the nuts and bolts of proposal submission. Pierre Besse, Vice-President of EUROGIA and Dr. Peter Herrmann, CELTIC Office Director presented how easy it is to submit a project to the Joint Call. Both presented the eligible subjects of their respective Cluster and explained the requirements for a successful project proposal and how the online submission tool can be accessed. In addition, they explained the timeline and the evaluation process for proposals by technical experts and Public Authorities.

Business Impact from CELTIC and ­EUROGIA projects

If some participants were wondering about the benefits of getting involved in Eureka Cluster projects, they got convincing answers in the session on business impacts from CELTIC and EUROGIA projects, which was moderated by Pierre Besse from EUROGIA2020. In the first presentation, Dr. Antonio Cuadra-Sanchez presented the business benefits which his company Minsait (part of Indra Sistemas S.A., Spain) gained from its multiple participations in CELTIC projects, in particular the award-winning NOTTS project on next generation over-the-top multimedia services.

The business example for EUROGIA was equally convincing. Sahin Calglayan from Turkish Energy IoT Platform provider Reengen presented the benefits and impacts of EUROGIA project SolarPact.

Funding and focus in different countries

On the second day, representatives from 11 Public Authorities presented in a session moderated by CELTIC Programme Coordinator Christiane Reinsch the funding situation and research focus areas in their respective country. The countries and representatives included: Austria – Michael Walch, FFG; South Africa – Toto Matshediso and Vinny Pillay, DST; Canada – Narayanan Kasturi, NRC-CNRC; Israel – Neta Gruber, IIA; Turkey – Umut Ege, TUBITAK; Finland – Hannu Nurmi, Business Finland; Germany – Sabine Hemmerling, DLR; Spain – Juana Sanchez, CDTI; Switzerland – Colette John-Grant, InnoSuisse; South Korea – Hyewook Joung, KIAT; and Singapore – Navjeev Singh, Enterprise Singapore.


Presentation by Navjeev Singh from Enterprise Singapore

Singapore and South Africa were for the first time represented at a Proposers Day, which shows the growing international reach of CELTIC-NEXT and EUROGIA2020.

Successful SMEs

The session on successful SMEs, moderated by CELTIC Office Director Dr. Peter Herrmann, featured two success stories of SMEs which had benefitted significantly from their involvement in the respective Cluster project.


Piotr Pawalowski, Vice-President and CTO of medVC

Piotr Pawalowski, Vice-President and CTO of medVC, a Polish medical collaboration tool provider, explained how medVC developed major elements of its services through participation in CELTIC projects. The SME from Poznań had participated in the award-winning CELTIC project “HIPERMED – High Performance Telemedicine Platform” and the also award-winning successor project “E3 – E-health services Everywhere and for Everybody”. Today, medVC has a growing business, meeting the increasing telemedicine service demands by hospitals and patients.

Utku Korkmaz, CEO of Solarcati, presented how his company, a Turkish solar panel service provider in Turkey, is benefitting from its participation in EUROGIA2020.


Utku Korkmaz, CEO of Solarcati

Project idea pitches

Another core element of the Proposers Day was the pitching of project ideas. 15 proposers presented their ideas on a wide range of ICT and energy topics. The presentations led to productive discussions, which were moderated by Christiane Reinsch from the CELTIC Office. CELTIC Consortium Building Sessions had been organized and announced to support the participants to find partners and build a successful proposal.

› Further information

› Proposers Day page on the CELTIC-NEXT website – https://www.celticnext.eu/celtic-eurogia-online-proposers-day-15-16-september-2020/

 


Joint CELTIC-NEXT and EUROGIA2020 call timeline

Supporting the Telecommunications Area in Spain through CELTIC-NEXT

Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI)

Juana Sánchez
CELTIC-NEXT representative
Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI)

The Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology is the main R&D funding agency in Spain.

CDTI is a public business entity, answering to the Ministry of Science and Innovation, which fosters the technological development and innovation of Spanish companies. It is the entity that channels the funding and support applications for national and international RDI projects of Spanish companies. Therefore, CDTI contributes to improving the technological level of the Spanish companies by means of implementing the following activities:

› Financial and economic-technical assessment of R&D projects implemented by companies.
› Managing and fostering Spanish participation in international technological cooperation programmes.
› Fostering international business technology transfer and support services for technological innovation.
› Supporting the setting up and consolidating of technological companies.

CDTI employs over 350 people, three quarters of whom are engineers and graduates. Even though the bulk of the CDTI infrastructure is in Madrid, the Centre offers to Spanish companies a strategic network of CDTI SOST (Spanish Office for Science and Technology) offices in ten countries: Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco and the USA to promote the Spanish technology at international level, mobilize global financial resources and detect international market opportunities for Spanish high-tech companies with the aim of fostering the transnational technological cooperation in International Programs at bilateral or multilateral level, with special focus in the European programs, like Horizon Europe or Eureka.


CDTI premises in Madrid

Commitment with Eureka and CELTIC-NEXT – new funding procedure implemented

Addressing its international orientation, CDTI has strong support with the Eureka programme in general and with Eureka Clusters in particular. The bottom-up orientation of Eureka is fully aligned with CDTI’s philosophy.

CELTIC-NEXT, focussed on the telecommunications area, has become a Eureka Cluster with high interest in Spain. The Spanish CEL­TIC community ranges from large companies to small and medium-sized companies that regularly participate in its calls to improve their competitiveness. The impact of Celtic projects encourages Spanish companies to use this way to accelerate their potential business establishment in the telecommuni­cations area.

In order to accelerate the time to contract of CELTIC projects, CDTI has a new funding procedure that forces Spanish companies to apply for funding as soon as Celtic projects are labelled. Spanish funding application is done in two phases: First, the leader of the Spanish sub-consortium applies a ‘Eureka request’ after the deadline of each CELTIC-NEXT call (margin: 15 days). Second, once the projects are labelled, each company involved in labelled projects presents the full memory (national request) with a margin of 20 days. This improved process will avoid long-term funding procedures for CELTIC projects and will shorten time-to-contract.


E3 medical test video sequence

Successful Spanish CELTIC project E3

The E3 project is a good example of CELTIC success based on three principles: OPEN platform that guarantees access EVERYWHERE for EVERYBODY. E3 has designed, implemented, tested and validated with final users (patients and professionals) an E2E (End-To-End) videoconference platform able to allow EVERYBODY (low-cost high-quality video conference & e-health services reusing in-home infrastructures) access to e-health services EVERYWHERE (both rural & urban areas, both patients and professionals) thanks to bandwidth adaptation techniques that allow simultaneous multipoint conferences with SD and HD.

These developments were tested and validated by doctors in 15 use cases over one common OPEN platform (adapted to point-to-point videoconferences and STB/HDTV functionalities), able to reuse in-home infrastructure (professional-to-patient scenarios and patient-to-patient scenarios).

E3 is a cross-domain project that uses Open Innovation to allow external partners (6 Spanish SMEs, 1 Polish SME, 1 Polish medical institution and 3 French medical institutions) to collaborate from project definition to test and validation easing go-to-market fit that has allowed to generate 12 new products and improve 14 products generating over 26.5 million euro revenue with 5.2X ROI since end 2020.

The main impact on Spanish partners has been on CALBOQUER SL (ASMEDIT) which launched Face-to-face+E3 developed solution to its 10 million customers with a 3 million euro revenue yearly increase. ASMEDIT is using STARFLOW (CLEVERNET) WAN Optimization solution to guarantee its professionals working from home connectivity, reliability and data in motion security.

Three start-ups have been created to commercialize E3 project developments, including SMART Health TV solutions in Spain which is participating in the ESA Space COVID19 Response Initiative as provider of tele­care technology for CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche).


E3 project: User-friendly experience / Videoconference at Home TV

The E3 project has received 8 awards including: CELTIC-NEXT Innovation Award Winner (Heidelberg, 2020), EUREKA Excellence Award Winner (EUREKA Stakeholders Conference Amsterdam, 2019) and CELTIC-NEXT Excellence Award Winner (CELTIC-NEXT Event at EuCNC in Valencia, 2019).

Conclusion

CELTIC-NEXT is a strategic Eureka Cluster for Spanish companies that offers an excellent framework to improve their competitiveness in the telecommunications area at international level. Spain has many successful projects that have helped companies to establish as a reference in such competitive markets. CELTIC’s support is key for participants. Besides, its Core Group offers high level orientation to participants.

CDTI, aligned with CELTIC-NEXT and with Eureka Clusters in general, has optimized the funding procedure with CELTIC calls to accelerate the time-to-contract of CELTIC projects. This new procedure has already been implemented in the CELTIC-NEXT Spring Call 2021.

› Further information

› CDTI website – https://www.cdti.es
› E3 project page – https://www.celticnext.eu/project-e3/