Bio

Professor Kondoz is the founding head of I-Lab Multimedia Communication Research Group, whose aim is to design new fixed and mobile media communication applications by researching advanced technical solutions as well as incorporating the users throughout the research involving the building blocks of the whole delivery chain.
Professor Kondoz’s current research interests are in the areas of digital signal, image/video, speech/audio processing and coding, wireless multimedia communications, error resilient media transmission, immersive/ virtual/augmented environments, and the related human factors issues including human computer interaction/interface, and measurement/modelling of Quality of Experience (QoE). He has published more than 400 journal and conference papers, three books and 9 patents, which are currently being used.
Prof. Kondoz has been involved with many national and EU projects in the networked media area involving 100s of researchers. Most recently, he coordinated the EU FP6 NoE VISNET II, which developed advanced video processing and coding solutions for video surveillance and virtual collaboration applications. Currently, he is the coordinator of FP7 STREP DIOMEDES, which deals with the distribution of multi-view entertainment using content aware delivery systems. Prof Kondoz has also served as the joint chairman of the academic group advising the EC in preparing the call on Future Media & 3D Internet in the FP7 program. Professor Kondoz is the managing director of MulSys Limited, www.mulsys.com, a University of Surrey spin-out company marketing the world’s first secure voice product over the GSM/3G voice channel, which has been pioneered by Professor Kondoz’s team in the I-Lab.

Abstract

The talk will present the challenges positioned by the evolution of mobile communications, framing these challenges in the framework of the future Internet discussions. The talk will explore the polymorphic nature of the future communications infrastructure, and the multiplicity of technical and society views that will be present in such a infrastructure.

Bio

Rui Luís Aguiar, born 1967, holds a PhD on Electrotechnical Engineering from the Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal. He is Associate Professor at the Telecommunications Department at the same University, responsible for advanced telecommunication subjects, mostly associated with current trends and future technologies, specially at graduate levels. He currently also holds an Adjunct Professor Position in Carnegie Mellon University, associated to the Institute of Networking Information. He is also responsible for the Multimedia and Networking research line inside the Aveiro pole of the Instituto de Telecomunicações, a non-profit R&D organization.
Prof. Aguiar is leading a research group in the Aveiro pole of IT, centred on heterogeneous networking. In particular, the group is tackling mobility, QoS and multicast problems in diverse environments, from “traditional” 3G evolution, to novel IP-oriented architectures, and ad-hoc environments. The group receives funding from European-funded research (five such projects running at this moment), from the Portuguese Government, and from industry (mostly operators and manufacturers, amongst which Portugal Telecom and Deutsche Telekom).
The participation of Prof. Aguiar in European Research is extensive since 1992. After many R&D projects, both industry and state funded, he acted as Chief Architect for the IST project Daidalos, a 50M€ funded EU-project, with technical consistency and direction responsibilities. He is currently involved in EU-funded projects Onelab2, SWIFT, C-CAST, SooS and 4WARD.
He holds more than 250 papers in international and national journals and conferences. He has contributions to several standardization fora, including IEEE and IETF. He was the General Chair of ICT2006 (International Conference on Telecommunications), and Technical Co-Chair of the IEEE ISCC2007 (International Symposium on Computer Communications), and of ICSN 2005 (International Conference on Networking and Services). He has been invited as speaker in several fora, both industry and academia-oriented, including talks to ARIBE, in Japan.
Prof. Aguiar is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of ACM and a certified Engineer in Portugal. He has acted as consultant to several companies on telecommunications strategy, and as an expert on court cases in telecommunications. He has also been a member on evaluation boards of several research programmes, both EU, and in several other countries (France, South Africa).

Abstract

In the coming decade there will be an explosion of the number of wireless devices and networks and, consequently, of the amount of wireless communication that takes place. In providing services and running applications on these devices and operating the networks, we will be faced with the challenge of not only sharing the spectrum in an efficient way manner amongst a huge number of devices, but how to reduce the energy consumed by these systems. In fact energy consumption related to ICT is becoming a growing concern since it account 3% of the total global energy consumption, which amounts to 2% of the world wide CO2  emissions, and this figure is expected to double every 4-5 years. To curb the growing share of energy consumption of ICT systems and to significantly extend battery autonomy of wireless devices, we need a new approach to network design and operation, a  green networking approach, under the premise of minimizing the impact in terms of energy consumption, spectrum use and radiation while guaranteeing the QoS and expected capacities. This keynote talk will provide an overview of new paradigms in network architectures, and technical challenges and potential way forward during this green radio revolution.

Bio

He is the Director of the Centre for Communications Systems Research (CCSR), Faculty of Electronics and Physical Sciences, The University of Surrey in the UK.
He has published more than 500 research papers in refereed journals, international conferences and as invited speaker. He currently has more than 15 patents in the field of mobile communications.
Prof. Tafazolli is the editor of two books on “Technologies for Wireless Future” published by Wiley’s  Vol.1 in 2004 and Vol.2 2006.
He is the founder and the past Chairman of IET International Conference on “3G Mobile Technologies” and is currently chairman of EU e.Mobility Technology Platform Expert Group.
He is advisor and consultant to a number of mobile companies and currently member of Scientific Advisory Board of Telefónica I+D.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions the integration of a myriad of smart interconnected objects embedding pervasive information processing and intelligent interfaces for advanced machine-to-machine, personal and social interaction. This capability for providing sensed information will generate unprecedented environmental and energy optimised control approaches.
A cross-disciplinary action integrating ubiquitous sensing technologies, next generation communication networks and computational environment models will
support social services and applications to assist future environmental management actions and policies. Furthermore energy conservation must be a prerequisite for the IoT development itself. This will not only require energy efficiency for electronics (sensors, actuators) but also specific platforms and architectures to control energy demands of core infrastructures. New distributed resources and information management procedures are required to optimize power consumption harmonizing energy requirements of devices, sensor/actuator nodes and IoT infrastructures.In this keynote, we will discuss current challenges for innovative architectures and platforms integrating Ubiquitous Sensor Networks as enablers of Green IT services and applications through NGN operator infrastructures. A particular case will be discussed for the Resource Layer to Internet of Things that the EU Project SENSEI project represents. This novel ICT infrastructure enables powerful solutions to address both Green IT monitoring and control of our eco-environment as well as power efficiency in the information management for future M2M, personal and social IoT services and applications.

Bio

Master degree in Computer Science from the Valencia Polytechnic University in 1995. During the period 1994-1998, worked in the Speech recognition department, researching about natural language recognisers and the post-process of these recognisers to obtain semantic information from the user’s utterance. In 1998, he started working in Dragon Systems, Inc. in Newton, Massachusetts (USA) as International Software Engineer, working in the design and development of the speech recognition products in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch and Japanese. He also made different conferences
about the products worldwide. In September 2000, he started working in Telefónica I+D (Research & Development), in the Speech Recognition Group, as the responsible of the Natural Language speech recognizer its evolution and innovation. From year 2004 he has been working in new advanced platforms concepts to develop telephony services, specializing in sensor networks and context-aware platforms, where he has been the technical responsible of the new Telefonica developments in the field. He has participated in several European Projects and he is currently working in the FP7 SENSEI project. He is also coordinating the research projects and standardization activities in which Telefonica is participating in the Internet of Things field. He has been member of several Technical Program Committees like CAPS or EuroSSC, author of several publications and invited speaker in various events talking about M2M, IoT and Green IT.