Celtic-Plus Proposers Day in Helsinki

On 20^th of June 2017, Celtic-Plus and Nokia jointly organised a Proposers Day hosted by Nokia. The event took place just before Finland takes over the EUREKA Chairmanship on July 1^st. It is expected that this will generate a lot of research activities and projects in Finland. The Proposers Day provides information on funding opportunities and project topics. This time the focus was on 5G, Industrial Internet, and on eHealth.

The Proposers Day was opened by Mr Reino Tammela, Head of Nokia Espoo and Tampere Technology Centre, and by Jari Lehmusvuori, Celtic-Plus Vice-Chair from Nokia. They welcomed the 70 participants and Reino underlined that an autonomous car using 5G is already driving in a radius of 100 km around Nokia campus. The driver must not necessarily be in the car. This works because 5G is fast enough to react when there is an obstacle.

 5G and Industrial Internet

Valerie Blavette, Celtic-Plus Vice-Chair from Orange moderated the first two keynote presentations.

In the first on “5G for Internet of Things” Karri Ranta-aho from Nokia Bell Labs presented the Roadmap from LTE to 5G. He asked the question why LTE is not good enough and what will be the service that will pay for 5G services. One element of the answer is latency: In Helsinki region latency of the LTE network is about 13 milliseconds (ms) and in most parts of the world it is more than 20 ms. Both are far too long for critical situations in road traffic or in industrial production. So LTE is not fast enough. 5G technologies with a latency of 1 ms will hit the target for both: autonomous driving and Industry 4.0.

In the second Keynote on “Industrial Internet, an IoT case for 5G” Martti Mäntylä from Aalto University presented how Multi vendors cooperation could work when cloud-to-clould sharing is not good enough. The answer is slicing enabling data sharing at the edge that will help; and again the 5G technology can do this.

Celtic-Plus project funding in Finland

The three primary research focus areas in Finland were presented by the program leaders at Tekes[i]. The “Bits of Health Program” was presented by Kari Komulainen who indicated that hospitals will set up and run their testbed that will allow demos in real live hospital environments. The goal is to strengthen Finnish participation in international cooperation as those provided by Celtic-Plus and to implement measures that facilitate this cooperation. Finland is still at the 3% target for research but additional effort is needed and public funding is used to leverage private investments. There will be a call for projects in March 2018. For this call the government has decided to moderately increase the budget. Priorities will be applied to the Celtic-Plus Calls.

The second research focus area ”5G Program” was presented by Mika Klemettinen who indicated that besides these key technologies itself it is also important to combine the results from the three primary research focus areas as enablers. Together they can be used in business verticals such as IoT data, security and others. This can be done in the biggest open 5G test network in the world placed in Finland. This Network is open to everybody and is already used by many equipment suppliers and start-up companies in agile innovation. In this context a Reboot Finland D-day takes place once per months.

The third primary research focus is the ”Industrial Internet Program” and was presented by Tiina Nurmi. She indicated that the Finnish program on Industrial Internet just doubled from 100 M€ to 200 M€ and the aim is to open the silos and to see emerging business.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Celtic Projects where funded: CyberWI and ReICOvAir, and two more are in the pipe. Tiina encourages partners from abroad to go to the Tekes tool to find partners for industrial internet: www.tekes.fi/ii. Valuable information for forming new consortia can be found there. The key message is that there is money available.

Celtic-Plus project funding in Sweden

Jessica Svennebring from Vinnova explained that Celtic-Plus is beneficial for Sweden as it very much fits into the Swedish national priorities and helps to be international. The Swedish budget was doubled and Vinnova is looking for really good projects with SME involvement. The advantage of Celtic-Plus projects is their bottom-up approach and focus on near term markets. The Celtic-Plus approach is simple and with less bureaucracy. It has an agile process that allows easy project change requests to adapt running projects to changing conditions and technologies. Projects supporting societal evolution towards: Information society, Sustainable production, eHealth, Smart industry are welcome. Also Gender Equality has become a criterion that is considered; if unbalanced, there will be an action plan to change this.

eHealth

The third and last keynote presentation on “Digitalization for eHealth” and a case for 5G was presented by Mari Koskinen from BusinessOulu. She explained that the Digital Testing environment has been built in Oulu’s University Hospital including a 5G test platform for e-Health allowing tests directly in the hospital. This will create cornerstones for building the hospital of the future that is expected for 2030 in Oulu.

Project proposal Pitches

Another core element of the Proposers Day was the pitching of project ideas. 14 proposers presented their ideas on a wide range of ICT topics. They included 5G-related technologies, automotive telecoms, eHealth, security, IoT and Software development metrologies. The presentations were followed by productive discussions with the audience. Some of these discussions could lead to interesting new Celtic-Plus project proposals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] The Finnish funding agency Tekes will be called Business Finland that is a merger of Tekes and Finpro.

The presentations are available at https://www.celticnext.eu/event/proposers-day-helsinki/