The Eureka CELTIC – ESA Space-ICT Programme

Enabling the faster convergence and development of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks & services

On 22 November 2021, Eureka Cluster CELTIC-NEXT and the European Space Agency (ESA) signed a Memorandum of Intent (MoI) in Porto, Portugal, which aims to bring their respective communities closer together. The MoI will help to foster economic growth and jobs through coordinated R&D&I activities and the commercial exploitation of integrated space and terrestrial systems enabled by 5G and 6G. The collaboration aims to leverage the complementarity of ESA and CELTIC-NEXT and build on synergies to maximise the return on investment and to support achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

In today’s rapidly changing political and economic environment and its regional battlefields, Space ICT has become, more than ever, a pillar for sovereignty and resiliency.

Space ICT is currently at the centre of attention for global industry and governments. On the economic side, new non-European entrants are currently disrupting the sector with Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellites and High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellites (HAPS). On the political side, satellites, with all their potential missions and services, have shown to be essential assets for countries, not only for media broadcasting and observation, but also for connectivity to individuals and objects.

European industry and countries must defend their economic and political shares in Space ICT. European industry must be able to support European countries’ ICT & data sovereignty. Sovereignty cannot be achieved by purchasing and deploying equipment and services from foreign vendors that could fall under or are already under control of non-trustable governments.

Recent events in Eastern Europe have shown, how critical it is to count on both terrestrial and non-terrestrial ICT services, as together they constitute one of the critical infrastructures of a country, especially considering the digitalisation of the society and the vertical industries.

Therefore, it is mandatory to increase and leverage to its maximum the European and allied countries’ funding to reach the critical mass for R&D&I and a faster time-to-market for the European countries and allies’ ICT industry.


Eureka Chairman Miguel Bello Mora, Elodie Viau – Director of Telecommunications and Integrated Applications and Head of ECSAT at the European Space Agency (ESA), and CELTIC Office Director Xavier Priem

The central role of space and satellites

Space, satellites and alike play an extended and increasingly critical role in 5G, 6G and overall ICT services enabling the digital society.

Space and satellites had already an important role in the global ICT world for the economy, industry, and the people. They have already provided media broadcasting (TV), geo-positioning (GPS, GONASS, etc.), data links (backhauling and access), and telephony (satellite phones). For data links and telephony, they were mainly meant to provide those services in areas not well or at all covered by terrestrial networks, and recently also where high-data capacity was not needed. LEO fleets have somehow changed this perception by providing high-peak capacity over the coverage of one LEO satellite, with the foreseeable de-facto limitation of the maximum number of simultaneously attached users, as those share the same total LEO satellite bandwidth.

Since 5G and reinforced with 5G-Advanced, and the planned 6G, more industry verticals are getting digitalised, automated and autonomised, wireless connected instead of wired connected, or simply “connected”. People will expect that services delivered by those vertical industry sectors will be ubiquitous, always on and resilient. A good example is Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV), being cars, trucks, terrestrial drones but also flying objects like future flying taxis, delivery drones, and more. 3GPP has now opened wider doors for the inclusion of SatCom besides the traditional backhauling role.

Space ICT remains a complex field with specifics in terms of operational conditions for R&D&I as well as field deployment.

Entry barriers to the Space ICT sector

Several factors create an often too high barrier to entry for new or small players originating from the terrestrial ICT sector to move their technologies and products to the space or third dimension:

› The specific space environment for radiations, dimensions and weight, power supply limitations (level and duration) implying very costly special hardware platforms, if they even exist
› The satellites‘ launch costs
› The inherent inaccessibility after launch in case of outages or upgrades poses challenges not existing for terrestrial network players
› And, moreover, the space and satellite technologies (platform, payload, antennas…) knowledge itself

For the existing actors from the space sector, they seek for more competencies in 3GPP technologies and closer integration with terrestrial actors.

What CELTIC-NEXT and ESA bring to the collaboration

ESA TIA ARTES and CELTIC-NEXT provide various funding instruments: Open Calls, ITT, PPP for ESA, and bottom-up, flagship and joint ECP calls for CELTIC-NEXT. By exposing those instruments to each other’s community and together, both organisations will provide a privileged forum for cross-fertilisation and collaboration of both communities, leveraging the different TRLs, funding schemes and public funding agencies across the large sum of their respective geographical coverages: the Eureka countries for CELTIC and the ESA countries, some being common and some being different. Some stakeholders are common to ESA and CELTIC-NEXT, but most are new to the other. Both organisations see high complementarity in joining forces to leverage the association of their respective assets, forces, and communities.

As Elodie Viau said at the MoI Signature ceremony in Porto: “ESA`s strategic programme line Space for 5G & 6G demonstrates the essential nature of satellites for 5G and 6G. It sets the standards and frameworks for systems and services interoperability, as well as the base for integrating terrestrial networks with satellites. We draw technology and product roadmaps; we support and foster the development of integrated satellite terrestrial systems and value-added services.”

What this collaboration will enable and what it will target

This MoI and the attached collaboration will enable the faster convergence and development of terrestrial and non-terrestrial network and service technologies in the innovative field of Space ICT, i.e., three-dimensional networking.

The MoI will focus on technology pathfinders and solutions to develop and validate research & development projects initiated by ESA and CELTIC-NEXT. In addition, the MoI includes the organisation of joint events as well as the dissemination of relevant information to terrestrial, non-terrestrial, and combined operators and vertical market stakeholders.

More specifically, 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. The focus of the cooperation is to consider the issues in a holistic way by considering the end-to-end perspective of new communications services enabled by 5G and 6G technologies, including an understanding of the economic, environmental, and societal benefits.

How it will be implemented

In a first phase, each organization will run its own funding instruments, with its own processes. This cooperation does not replace their respective funding programmes and instruments, but leverages them for identified synergies in terms of topics of interest or strategic goals for their communities.

Coordination on specific themes will be put in place. These themes, include, but are not limited to:

› Multi-layered Space ICT and Flying Objects Convergence
› Design and development of systems, subsystems and technology
› Networks and services conformance and interoperability tests
› Viable business ecosystem models
› Convergence and integration of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks
› Frequency spectrum sharing between satellite networks and other satellite/terrestrial networks
› Network timing and synchronisation technologies
› Edge cloud computing
› Data driven (AI enabled) management
› Data curation technologies
› Digital twins

To support the achievement of their common objectives, the two organisations intend to:

› Share knowledge, ideas and lessons learned
› Create awareness and promote opportunities for collaboration
› Utilise and leverage their relevant resources and expertise necessary to ensure the success of the common objectives, in support of the activities initiated in the context of this cooperation
› Plan and manage jointly relevant activities in areas of common interest in line with the signatories’ respective legal frameworks
› Collaborate on the organisation and execution of activities with a view to reaching the common objectives identified
› Regularly attend meetings concerning the effectiveness of the collaboration, with reference to the priorities agreed
› Participate in suitable events organized by the other signatory
› Undertake joint communication, as appropriate, addressing the cooperation domains

Joint actions will be developed such as:

› Roadmapping
› Joint cross-community technology and strategy advisory boards
› Exchange on call dates and processes to anticipate best conditions for calls and participants
› Knowledge network creation and animation
› Joint working groups on specific topics across funded projects
› Joint webinars and workshops
› Promotion and provision of testbeds and trials platforms (R&D, integration, launch)
› Mutual advertisement of calls and bringing communities to jointly apply

The strategic technology calls and actions roadmaps are currently under development. CELTIC-NEXT is happy to receive your input and feedback to enrich its contribution to the joint work.


The new Space-ICT Programme – Targeting the global 3D Internet

Outlook

This MoI is the first of a series of new collaborations for CELTIC-NEXT. This fulfils the objectives set by CELTIC-NEXT’s Core Group to develop CELTIC-NEXT’s support to and impact for the ICT community by enriching its DNA with new verticals and communities. The space community is also eager to collaborate more with the terrestrial ICT community. This collaboration offers the perfect playground for both communities to meet and work together on strategic topics and projects. CELTIC-NEXT welcomes greatly the space community’s contribution to this strategic programme in terms of inputs to the roadmaps, participation to joint events and meetings, and proposals in the coming Space-ICT and 3D-NET focused calls to be announced soon.

Accelerating the digital transformation in Europe

Public event of CELTIC flagship project AI-NET

The public event of AI-NET in Berlin on
28 April 2022 presented the first-year results of the CELTIC flagship project. In addition, the half-day event hosted by Fraunhofer HHI provided the opportunity to discuss topics of strategic relevance related to the work of ­AI-NET.

The event, moderated by CELTIC-NEXT Chairman David Kennedy from Eurescom, started with high-level presentations by representatives of the four public authorities funding the project.


The attentive audience on site – A larger number of participants attended remotely

Public authorities stress digital ­sovereignty

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ina Schieferdecker, Director-General for Research for Digitalization and Innovation at the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, set the tone, when she explained the relevance of AI-NET: “AI-NET is an important step for Germany and Europe towards resilient and secure network infrastructures for technological sovereignty.” She highlighted that a peaceful Europe needs to be in the driving seat of the digital transformation as progressed by AI-NET. She put this in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on the economic and technological sovereignty of Europe.


Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ina Schieferdecker from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research

Andreas Aurelius, Head of ICT department at Swedish innovation agency Vinnova, stressed the importance of resilient societies enabled by resilient digital infrastructures in Europe. He particularly highlighted AI-NET’s contribution to enabling resilient networks infrastructures across Europe by making them more secure and autonomous – characteristics he considers critical for our future society and economy.

In the same vein, Heikki Uusi-Honko, Head of International Networks at Business Finland, underlined the high relevance of AI-NET, as industrial sovereignty is more topical now than ever. He added that in order to get innovations fast to the market, it requires a native digital mindset, which AI-NET has demonstrated. He highlighted the expected impact for Europe and its fast step change in the digital transformation.

Christian Dubarry, Head of European Affairs at Bpifrance, explained how France considers cloud computing as a future champion of sovereignty, and expects a doubling of the number of companies for trusted cloud computing already by 2025. He said that AI-NET ANTILLAS could contribute to these goals with its concept of edge and fog infrastructure.

All four public authority representatives acknowledged the intermediate results of the three AI-NET sub-projects.

Presentation of project results

After a demonstration tour of selected results achieved by AI-NET, the event continued with presentations of AI-NET and its sub-projects. Coordinator Achim Autenrieth, Director Advanced Technology at ADVA, started by providing an overview on AI-NET as a whole before handing over to the leaders of the three sub-projects. Azimeh Sefidcon, Research Area director for Cloud at Ericsson, presented AI-NET-ANIARA and its achievements to date. AI-NET-PROTECT was presented by Jörg-Peter Elbers, Senior VP Advanced Technology at ADVA. And finally Olivier Audouin, Director of external affairs at Nokia, gave an overview on AI-NET-ANTILLAS and its results.


Huge interest in the AI-NET results at the demo tour

Panel discussion on digital sovereignty

The final highlight of the event was a panel discussion on the geopolitical, economic and technological challenges Europe is facing on its way digital sovereignty. The six panel participants provided a diversity of industry views on the subject. Panel participants included Johan Sandell, CTO of Waystream, Christoph Glingener, CTO of ADVA, Timo Lehnigk-Emden, CTO of Creonic, Olivier Winzenried, CEO of WIBU systems, Jim Dowling, CEO of Logical Clocks, and Jonathan Rivalan, R&D Director of SMILE.

The lively discussion, moderated by CELTIC-NEXT Chairman David Kennedy, identified numerous challenges that need to be addressed, from supply-chain risks to critical dependencies in the areas of key technologies and raw materials required for Europe’s digital infrastructure. The panel participants and the audience joining the discussion could not converge on the best path to achieving digital sovereignty, but achieved a higher level of insight on the challenges to be tackled.


Lively panel discussion on digital sovereignty (sitting, from left): Timo Lehnigk-Emden, CTO of Creonic, Jim Dowling, CEO of Logical Clocks, Olivier Winzenried, CEO of WIBU systems, Jonathan Rivalan, R&D Director of SMILE, Johan Sandell, CTO of Waystream, Christoph Glingener, CTO of ADVA, and moderator David Kennedy (standing)

About AI-NET

CELTIC flagship project AI-NET was officially launched on 1st June 2021. 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/6G, 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.

› Further information

AI-NET project website – https://ai-net.tech

The new improved Eureka Clusters Programme

David Kennedy
CELTIC-NEXT Chair Person

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.

Bigger is better

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.

The way forward

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.

Let’s invent together a smarter and safer world

It is more than ever time to invest in ICT

Valérie Blavette
Orange
blavette(at)celticnext.eu

I hope all readers of CELTIC News are well. My feeling is that going through a pandemic changes us and makes us think differently. It makes us understand what is crucial and what is only nice to have. We also learn that we can adapt, do things differently and fast. Not only AI will pave the way for a smarter world, even if for sure AI will play an important role there.

Despite all difficulties, most of us have still been able to telework and communicate thanks to digital tools, telecom networks and the cloud.

AI, telecom and IT tools have proved to be critical assets

First of all we can be proud of our telecom and IT assets. As an example, the dimensioning of networks allowed the unusual traffic peaks during the first weeks of the crisis. Working for the research of a big telecom operator, Orange, I am proud of my colleagues in the operational units and of all the working forces which allowed the continuity of services of the critical infrastructures.

Most importantly, the telecom infrastructures connected the hospitals and the businesses during that strained period. What would have been our daily life during the social distancing measures and home office without the telecom infrastructure? Without the digital applications? Without news from the remote family, talking to friends, allowing grandparents to see the younger ones, exchanging and getting information, making online food shopping? As a mother, I also appreciated that my children could do their lessons online, even if it is not always easy for a ten-year-old boy to organize his daily screen time around math, English and geography instead of using it for Fortnite, FIFA or “The Legend of Zelda”.

When I helped our au pair to get her first online medical teleconsultation from home, I thought of the CELTIC eHealth projects HIPERMED and E3, which created novel solutions for teleconsultation and telesurgery.

Some results from other CELTIC projects have also been very valuable, like VIRTUOSE, which created solutions for multi-party ­video communication and video analysis, area management and security. Or the UNICRINF project, which developed novel solutions for improving emergency communication.

Continuous support by the CELTIC ­Office

At the time I wrote this article, the CELTIC office was busy as always supporting proposers and CELTIC projects at any stage. For running projects online reviews have been organized. A first joint call between the CELTIC and the EUROGIA communities has been organized during the first trimester of this year. On 31st of March the CELTIC office has held a successful AI proposer’s webinar with a large audience – around 200 registered participants from 24 countries, many of them joining from home.

EUREKA Clusters AI call

At a time when the COVID-19 crisis has created more solidarity, more connections, even if we needed to be physically distant, the Clusters CELTIC-NEXT, EUROGIA, ITEA, PENTA and EURIPIDES2 have been cooperating more than ever to define the first EUREKA Clusters AI call.

When defining this first common call, the EUREKA Clusters have learnt a lot on how to streamline processes and make it easier for both applicants and Public Authorities. In particular a single online project submission tool for all participating Clusters has been defined and set up. We proved collectively agile, and I would like to thank the inter-Cluster colleagues for their cooperation in this new adventure.

Conclusion

Going back to the Coronavirus crisis, I hope we will be collectively able to heed all the lessons learned. No doubt our ICT infrastructures, digital tools and the use of AI at different levels have saved many lives since the beginning of the year. Some Asian countries especially reacted very fast, showing us images of what we so far thought was sci-fi. Thanks to Big Data, IA, and global collaboration, the research helped a lot to react as fast as possible to limit the damages caused by the pandemic.

That is why, even if the European and worldwide economy will need some time to recover, I am convinced it is more than ever time to invest in ICT. Research should be as fast as possible, to fight such a pandemic or to invent a smarter, safer world. That is what CELTIC and EUREKA should be after in the coming months.


Photo: © Adobe Stock

Smart connected world meets clean energy

Ready for change

How CELTIC-NEXT’s flexibility enables our industry-driven projects to be successful

Valérie Blavette
Orange
blavette(at)celticnext.eu

The ICT landscape is changing rapidly. In order to keep pace, R&D programmes need to adapt to meet the changing needs. In the case of CELTIC-NEXT, I can confidently say that we are up to the challenge, as this year’s successes confirm. At the CELTIC Event in Valencia on 19th June 2019, which was co-located with the EuCNC Event and the Global 5G Event 2019, three projects were awarded for their excellence in the areas of networking technologies (SOOGREEN), applications (E3), and multimedia (4KREPROSYS). The NOTTS project was honoured with the Innovation Award for its outstanding market innovation beyond the project lifespan.

This year has been quite special for our Cluster, as three already awarded CELTIC projects have received in addition EUREKA Awards! In May, SIGMONA was highlighted as EUREKA Global Project of the Year at the EUREKA Global Innovation Summit in Manchester. In September, 4KREPROSYS and E3 each received a EUREKA award at the EUREKA Stakeholder Event in Amsterdam.

These awards for CELTIC projects are the direct consequence of our programme’s flexibility. It allows projects to stay aligned with the quickly evolving technological landscape and the company strategies. CELTIC’s flexibility in combination with the industry-driven character is at the core of our programme. In view of the ongoing initiative for defining the future of Clusters, which has been launched by the current EUREKA chair from the Netherlands, I am convinced that we need to maintain the flexibility and the industry-driven character of our programme in order to stay successful in the future.

The future of Clusters at the EUREKA Stakeholder event

The future of Clusters was a major topic at the EUREKA Stakeholder event in Amsterdam on 4th September. In this context, a central goal was to capture feedback by stakeholders on Clusters and other EUREKA instruments. Representatives from industry and academia shared their views about EUREKA Clusters. In addition, a live survey among the audience on areas of improvement for Clusters was conducted, which showed interesting results. The participants voted that the most essential measures for improving the Cluster programmes should be:

  • Increase availability of funding from countries – 41{b28ae05319d94bff0b4d65c5a9f4524dd588360f05c61ef440e1608e0a1c4144} of participants supported this
  • Simplify the proposal process – 25{b28ae05319d94bff0b4d65c5a9f4524dd588360f05c61ef440e1608e0a1c4144}
  • Have a shorter time to contract – 21{b28ae05319d94bff0b4d65c5a9f4524dd588360f05c61ef440e1608e0a1c4144}
  • Higher visibility of EUREKA Cluster programmes – 9{b28ae05319d94bff0b4d65c5a9f4524dd588360f05c61ef440e1608e0a1c4144}
  • Create cross-technology / cross-Cluster projects – 5{b28ae05319d94bff0b4d65c5a9f4524dd588360f05c61ef440e1608e0a1c4144}

The major improvement factor identified by the stakeholders – availability of funding from countries – is beyond the scope of any structural change within the Clusters. Concerning the other factors, which are to varying degrees influenceable by Clusters, it should be noted that in the case of CELTIC-NEXT part of the proposal process has already been simplified. We have changed from a two-phase proposal submission to a one-phase submission process, which reduces the required time and effort.

My highlights from the Proposers Day in Istanbul

In order to foster new project submissions, CELTIC-NEXT held a proposer’s day in Istanbul on 25th September. There was a keynote by Hakan Çelik, the R&D Design Chief of ISBAK, about the smart city of Istanbul, which I found particularly interesting.

Mr Çelik explained in his presentation that smart cities are a complex and overarching topic. It includes security, smart mobility, governance, energy, living issues, as well as people and NGOs representing them. According to Mr Çelik, the ultimate goal of smart cities is to improve quality of life and enable better sustainability.

Another highlight was a panel on the business impact of Celtic projects, which was moderated by Işıl Özkan from Turkcell. Representatives of Vestel, Argela, NETAS and ISBAK shared their experiences on the benefits of a number of CELTIC projects in which they were involved, including CONVINCE, TILAS, H2b2Vs, SIGMONA, VIRTUOSE, and COMOSEF. The panellists emphasized the flexibility of CELTIC as a key success factor.

Finally, in the pitching sessions 12 interesting new project ideas were presented, in order to find additional partners for project proposals to be submitted in October or at our spring call next year.

Across the various CELTIC-NEXT Proposers Days in 2019, a total of 52 project pitches were presented, which indicates how attractive our Cluster is to industry and academia in Europe and beyond.

Plans for call on Artificial Intelligence

One of the hottest topics is currently Artificial Intelligence (AI). A number of countries have expressed their interest in a synchronised AI call between CELTIC-NEXT and most of the other EUREKA Clusters. Among the interested countries are Spain, UK, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, Austria, South Korea, and Hungary as well as the Belgian regions Flanders, Brussels, and Wallonia. Some other countries may join this AI initiative later.

We aim to organise this synchronised AI call in June 2020 in addition to the usual CELTIC-NEXT bottom-up calls. Keep checking our website (www.celticnext.eu)and social media channels for updates.

Conclusion

My first year as CELTIC chairperson has been exciting. It has shown me that it is important for our programme to embrace change. And it has shown me at the same time how important it is to adhere to the key principles of CELTIC – flexibility and the industry-driven character of our programme. Based on this, I am confident that CELTIC will continue to thrive in a changing landscape. And as this year’s inter-Cluster spokesperson I may add that EUREKA Clusters as a whole will keep playing an important role in generating value for industry and citizens in Europe and beyond.

The ICT landscape is changing rapidly. In order to keep pace, R&D programmes need to adapt to meet the changing needs. In the case of CELTIC-NEXT, I can confidently say that we are up to the challenge, as this year’s successes confirm. At the CELTIC Event in Valencia on 19th June 2019, which was co-located with the EuCNC Event and the Global 5G Event 2019, three projects were awarded for their excellence in the areas of networking technologies (SOOGREEN), applications (E3), and multimedia (4KREPROSYS). The NOTTS project was honoured with the Innovation Award for its outstanding market innovation beyond the project lifespan.

This year has been quite special for our Cluster, as three already awarded CELTIC projects have received in addition EUREKA Awards! In May, SIGMONA was highlighted as EUREKA Global Project of the Year at the EUREKA Global Innovation Summit in Manchester. In September, 4KREPROSYS and E3 each received a EUREKA award at the EUREKA Stakeholder Event in Amsterdam.

These awards for CELTIC projects are the direct consequence of our programme’s flexibility. It allows projects to stay aligned with the quickly evolving technological landscape and the company strategies. CELTIC’s flexibility in combination with the industry-driven character is at the core of our programme. In view of the ongoing initiative for defining the future of Clusters, which has been launched by the current EUREKA chair from the Netherlands, I am convinced that we need to maintain the flexibility and the industry-driven character of our programme in order to stay successful in the future.

ReICOvAir

On the road to future networks

CELTIC Event in Valencia

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

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

Keynotes and SME success story

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panel on impact of CELTIC projects

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

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


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

CELTIC Awards

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

Excellence Award for Multimedia:

4KREPROSYS – 4K ultraHD TV wireless REmote PROduction SYStems

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

Excellence Award for Applications:

E3 – E-health services Everywhere and for Everybody

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

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


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

Innovation Award:

NOTTS – Next generation Over-The-Top multimedia Services

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

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


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

Exhibition

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


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

Live emergency demo at the harbour

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

 

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

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

Sessions for proposers

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

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

Further information

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

Implementing the new roadmap

H-OPTO