Celtic-Plus Awards 2015
Four projects honoured for excellence and innovation in ICT
30 April 2015, Vienna, Austria. The Celtic-Plus Awards 2015 were presented at the Celtic-Plus Event in Vienna on 27th April. Four Celtic-Plus projects were honoured for outstanding achievements in different categories of information and communication technologies.
Celtic-Plus Awards 2015 (from left): Roger Roberts, Guillaume d’Azémar de Fabrègues and Steny Solitude from MediaMap+, Peter Herrmann from the Celtic Office, Jens Mödeker from CIER, and Patrick Zimmermann from Opera-Net. Not in the picture: Lorenzo Iacobelli from SPECTRA.
The award committee had selected projects of excellence in the categories “Connecting People”, “Network Technologies”, and “Services and Applications”. In addition, one project received the innovation award. The awards were presented to representatives of the winning projects by Celtic-Plus chairman Jacques Magen, who particularly highlighted the high business potential of all selected projects.
Innovation Award: Opera-Net
The Celtic-Plus Innovation Award is given to a project that already finished a few years ago and has achieved high business impact. This year, the Innovation Award went to the Opera-Net project on ‘Optimised Power Efficiency in mobile Radio Networks’. The project solution has been rolled out by French network operator Orange across most of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, reaching more than 140 million customers.
Technologies developed in the project enabled savings between 2% and 3% of power consumption in Orange’s 2G/3G radio networks in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In 2013 this represented more than 35 Gwh reduction of energy consumption, corresponding to an OPEX reduction of about 5 million euro per year.
Consortium partner Arelis Thomson Broadcast launched a new set of TV broadcast emitters on the market in September 2014, which uses the new OPERA-Net emitters. The global market for TV broadcast emitters is estimated to be about 500 million euro per year.
The project consortium was led by Orange Labs, France, and included nine other industry and academic partners from Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, and Singapore.
Opera-Net Website: https://www.celticnext.eu/project-operanet/ Duration: June 2008 – May 2011
Excellence Award for “Connecting People”: CIER
The CIER project brings broadband connectivity to rural areas in Europe and Africa. The project developed a plug-and-play radio-frequency communication system that brings high-speed Internet to rural areas. Key features are energy-efficiency, robustness, reliability, and the possibility to connect geographically large areas in a challenging environment.
In a field trial in Tanzania, a 90 km network has connected three schools and a Hospital. A first commercial deployment has been done in the German City of Nordhorn, connecting a business area in a few days. The project was led by Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany, and included seven further industry and academic partners from Finland, France, and Germany.
CIER Website: https://www.celticnext.eu/project-cier/ Duration: February 2011 – July 2014
Excellence Award for “Network Technologies”: SPECTRA
The SPECTRA project implemented novel cognitive-radio techniques which allow automated self-configuration of devices. The SPECTRA solution improves the robustness of connections and increases the coverage at the same time.
SPECTRA developed the hard- and software components and demonstrated two proof-of-concept platforms which are able to communicate cognitively in real time. The platforms are available to network equipment vendors and operators for experimentation in the network planning stage.
They can be used in quite different application cases, including LTE network, femto-cells but also in emergency communication systems. The work on robustness of connectivity has also business relevance in public safety applications where LTE positions itself more and more as an alternative to TETRA, a professional mobile radio solution used by firefighters and police.
SPECTRA components are already being exploited by two major companies in China, Agilent and Orange China. The project was led by Thales Communications & Security, France, and included six further industry and academic partners from France, Monaco, and Spain.
SPECTRA Website: http://spectra-celtic.eu/
Duration: September 2010 – 31 August 2014
Excellence Award for “Services and Applications”: MediaMap+
The MediaMap+ project made it possible to produce a TV programme with much less effort for manipulating and verifying media content prior to the broadcast. MediaMap+ provides an integrated workflow for audio-visual productions covering the whole production chain.
It makes audio-visual content easily identifiable and available for re-use in future media productions. Videos are enriched with sematic meta-data that allow users to find relevant video sequences via a built-in search function. The MediaMap+ toolset allows assembling these sequences through simple drag and drop and it allows a high degree of automation throughout the whole media production.
Aspects that typically slow down media production are broadcast rights and copyrights of the reused Video sequences. The MediaMap+ production system handles the rights management for used content and significantly reduces the related overhead.
The project was led by SGT, France, and included five further industry and academic partners from Belgium and France.
Website: http://mediamapplus.eu/ Duration: April 2012 – June 2014
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