CELTIC 21st Anniversary Celebration

at the Berlin 6G Conference 2024

And its a wrap up of the CELTIC-NEXT 21st Anniverssary 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 Canadian VIP David Lisk on the Eureka Joint Presidentship. Then the Eureka Chair Dr Rudolf Haggenmueller did a keynote to celebrate Eureka in CELTIC, followed by the BMBF Ministry delegate Frau Dr Tina Kluwer.

All these high-level speakers from BMBF, Eureka and the Industry shared the floor of the plenary auditorium and express 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.

This panel discuss 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),
• 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 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 available here.

On the 2nd of July in the afternoon session, the AI-NET Flagship held its Closure Event where were summarized the challenges and key achievements of the CELTIC ambitious European initiative, launched in mid-2021 with the support of the public authorities of Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, UK, and Poland, and with more than 90 partners from industry (both large and SME), RTOs and academia.