On Wednesday, 18th September 2024, CELTIC-NEXT held its Proposers’ Brokerage Day for the Autumn Call 2024 at Digital Catapult in London. This event brought together innovators and experts to explore opportunities in next-generation communications that contribute to a sustainable digital society. Attendees were invited to engage with the CELTIC-NEXT Cluster and explore funding opportunities for groundbreaking R&D projects.

The event featured keynotes, panels, and project pitches.

In the morning, Dr. Dritan Kaleshi from DIGITAL CATAPULT LONDON opened the day with a presentation on “5G and Digital Infrastructure SONIC Labs & UKTIN Founder” followed by Xavier Priem, Director of the CELTIC-NEXT Cluster who introduced the cluster.

These presentations were followed by a keynote from Kostas Katsaros, Head of Technologies at Digital Catapult, on “Towards a sustainable connected world”.

The exchange at the event helped participants to gain insights into national funding opportunities, such as presentations from Innovate UK, CDTI Spain, and Bpifrance.

The morning session wrapped up with a panel moderated by Richard Foggie highlighted the business impacts of successful CELTIC projects.

The day engaged the stakeholders with innovative pitching session moderated by Christiane Reinsch, CELTIC-NEXT Project Coordinator, this was the occasion for 11 project proposers to pitch their new project ideas, offering them visibility and potential future collaboration.

Post pitches, a networking time was organised for attendees to network with national funding authorities and project proposers to foster collaboration.

The event concluded with a guided tour of Future Networks and SONIC Labs, offering a closer look at the innovations driving the future of communications.

Panel discussion on Business impacts of successful CELTIC projects at the Proposers Brokerage Day 2024

The CELTIC-NEXT 21st Anniversary was co-located with the Berlin 6G Platform Event at BCC in Berlin between the 2nd and 4th of July 2024!

On the morning of the 2nd of July 2024, CELTIC-NEXT celebrated its 21 years of existence on the scene of international cooperation fostering innovation in the ICT domain and its application verticals. During this day, opening keynotes were organised including a welcome keynote by the Chairman David Kennedy, followed by the Eureka Chair Dr Rudolf Haggenmueller celebrating Eureka in CELTIC, BMBF Ministry delegate Frau Dr Tina Kluwer.

Welcome keynote by Rudolf Haggenmüller on the Eureka Joint Presidency

All these high-level speakers from BMBF, Eureka and the Industry shared the floor of the plenary auditorium and expressed themselves on CELTIC, its great achievements and their vision of its future.

The session was followed by a Panel discussion on “Future Persuasive Networks – and how to build them” moderated by David Kennedy, CELTIC-NEXT Chairman.

Panel discussion on Future Persuasive Networks

This panel discussed the visions shared by 5 panellists:

› Mr Engelbert Beyer (BMBF, Dept 51),

› Mikko A. Uusitalo (Coordinator 6G Flagship Hexa-X II),

› Johannes Springer (DTAG),

› Maria Guta (ESA), and

› Hans Schotten (6G Platform Germany)

The context of the discussion was the following:

During the last 5 years, the Communications network, because of Corona and other factors, became recognised as a facilitator for changing not just how we work – but as a core enabler for a whole new structure of our lives. The new era communications networks will be pervasive, providing everything to everyone at any time – for the traveller, it will be continuous connectivity, for the remote worker, it will be additional processing, for the home entertainment, it will be high quality throughput at a low price and for the professional sectors, it will be a combination of processing, AI, low latency, low power and edge computing as and where they need it.

The question is how will this be provided? Clearly the new network must be highly software based and infinitely customisable. It must be flexible and easily repurposed and or expandable. In fact, it must be intelligent and capable of learning how to supply what the users want before even they themselves know. And it must be cost/resources and power efficient. And fully automatised while secure and trustable because it remains explainable and controllable.

After that a CELTIC-NEXT Awards Ceremony was organised, rewarding 3 projects in the fields of green networking, applications & services and outstanding innovation.

We wrote a dedicated article on this occasion: https://www.eurescom.eu/eurescom-messages/winter-2024/celebrating-innovation/

CELTIC-NEXT website – https://www.celticnext.eu/