Digital Around the World 2020

Global situations such as the current pandemic crisis show how technological advances may not be enough. It is imperative that human beings are situated at the center of technology. The inaugural session of Digital Around the World will allow participants to reflect on how technology may lead us to a better world, through mankind itself.

This session will provide different perspective on the research and innovation related to IoT data safety, privacy and security challenges and needs. The EU H2020 project IoTCrawler, CHARIOT and SOFIE will present results and technologies over these challenges, and the overall project technical orientation and offerings. IoT Security and Privacy related to Industrial IoT, Smart City and technologies related to DLT, Intelligent search and discovery will be described.

The purpose of this session is to present the status of the cooperation between Europe and China in the 5G domain. In recent years, the collaboration has been incremental and resulted in an increasing number of achievements that will be dealt in the first part of the session. Next, European and Chinese researchers will lead a panel discussion on the opportunities and challenges posed by the collaboration between the two geographical areas. The session will conclude with a recommendation of priorities to follow. Session panelists: 1. Latif Ladid, IPv6 Forum 2. Kai Zhang, Martel Innovate 3. Jean Pierre Bienaimé, Irest 4. Chih-Lin I, China Mobile 5. Uwe Herzog, Eurescom 6. Jianhua Liu, China Mobile 7. Yinxiang Zheng, China Mobile 8. Tao Chen, VTT 9. Matti Kutila, VTT

Edge Computing brings computation, analytics and data storage closer to the location where it is needed to support the proliferation of IoT, reduce latency, tackle data deluge and improve security, resilience and trust. Intelligent IoT devices fuel the digital transformation of areas like energy, agri-food, automotive, manufacturing and smart cities & communities. The session explores the future of Edge Computing including its role of safely connecting devices; and provides insights into the requirement for orchestration with cloud services, the importance of integrating connectivity and computing with AI-based reasoning and automation, while addressing the challenges and barriers for European stakeholders across different sectors.

The term ecosystem is used abundantly throughout innovation and IoT societies – however, often without a practical interpretation on how to make ecosystem operational. In this session We will demonstrate how the Nordic IoT Centre is facilitating collaboration trough a role based ecosystem model and an ecosystem based IoT development model. Then present specific examples on how IoT solutions are being developed in the Nordic region through partnerships in the ecosystem.

Sustainable development is at the very heart of the European Union. IoT technologies can drive growth, connect people and help us protect the environment. Their emergence offers unique opportunities to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the European Green Deal, especially through their capacity to increase efficiency and save costs. This session provides an overview of how the IoT is mostly used today in sectors such as smart cities and biodiversity and how IoT and research can contribute to the SDGs.

Emerging technologies, such as AI, IoT and Blockchain are directly confronted to legal compliance. Both the US and Europe are working to address these technology specific privacy and data protection related risks. On both sides of the Atlantic, specific approach are considered. It would be interesting to explore the possibility to leverage on these good practices and lessons learned. A key question could be: How to promote "privacy by design" technology? The US and Europe share common values and the same commitment to protect individual rights and freedoms. While the normative framework is evolving very fast in both regions, each jurisdiction has adopted some specific approaches and requirements. It would be interesting to present the latest developments on the US side. The panel could also explore and discuss the potential for enhancing normative convergence (and interoperability if I may say) between both sides of the Atlantic. The role of the revised Convention 108 could also be discussed. Another question we could discuss is: How can we prevent a fragmentation of digital market between both regions in a post Privacy Shield era?

5G will reach 2.7 Billion users by 2025 to address the demand for speed not achievable by 4G. However, the beauty of 5G is designed to be not just a communication tool but a production tool for the innovative industries to imbed its communication access speed with latency way below 10 ms to make their manufacturing more efficient or car-2-car communication more reliable. These 5G targets are called 5G Verticals with critical access requirements such eHealth, emergency and safety neowrks, Vehicular networking to name a few. This session has attracted the leaders of these verticals such as 5G-AA, 5G-IA to discuss the work needed to specify the requirements for standardisation not only with 3GPP but with the sectors own standardisation ecosystem as some of them are by far larger than the communication ecosystem.

Digital technologies are reshaping many domains, being agriculture one of them. The massive deployment of IoT devices provides access to a huge amount of data that can be used to take smarter decisions at several levels. However, a lot of challenges remain to ensure the potential impact of digital transformation in the sector. What has to be done in the cloud and what on the edge? How do we cope with connectivity problems? How can we ensure interoperability between platforms and systems and avoid lock-in situations? How can we foster data sharing if trusted environments are still to be created and stakeholders do not perceive the value but the risk in doing so? This session will look at these questions and some others in different eyes by giving voice to technology players, but also to the farmers of several regions of the world. Different solutions and approaches proposed by relevant projects in the domain as well as use cases will be shared and discussed openly with the audience.

BM and BMI are fundamentally about the architecture of a firm's value creation, delivery and capture mechanisms. Promoting innovation in business models through digital technologies is about looking into new and digital ways of delivering products and services (for example new forms of servitization or offering several types of products as services in combination) while creating new forms of revenue models based on data from products or services. In this context, since IoT technologies allow connecting physical and virtual processes, they play an essential role in BMI and so they are intrinsically interconnected. In the context of emerging countries, digital technologies, including IoT, have the potential to increase and democratize access to services and products, thus promoting growth and development. In this panel we will discuss real applications of IoT and BMI and their potential for promoting growth and development considering the context of Brazil as an emerging economy.

In our global context, the Next Generation Internet, an initiative launched by the European Commission back in 2016, will be successful only if a worldwide consensus is found, enabling a Human-centric Internet. To that end, collaboration between the EU and the US is essential, both areas being strongly committed to develop the future of Internet and to shape a sustainable landscape for NGI developments. Indeed, the NGI initiative should design specific actions for policy collaboration, shared technology development and interaction between user-communities, with other initiatives in the world where parts of the NGI infrastructure are designed and deployed; and the US are one of the main places where such activities are held. Think NEXUS – Think tank for the collaboration on NEXt generation internet between EU-US – is a European Commission (Horizon 2020 research program) project that aims to reinforce EU-US collaboration, through its dedicated Think Tank, involving major stakeholders from both sides of the Atlantic on Next Generation Internet related thematic in three focus areas: Science & Technologies; Innovation & Entrepreneurship; Policy. This 1-hour session will be dedicated to further advancing EU-US talks around technologies & policies’ priorities for cooperation.

Achieving a better world by the means of technology requires a huge amount of collaboration between all the relevant stakeholders. However, this is easier said than done. Not only technical protocols, but also regulations and research structures around the world operate with different parameters that should be synchronized. This session will discuss the challenges and accelerators of international cooperation between research infrastructures.

The European Strategy on Data identifies Data as an essential resource for economic growth, competitiveness, innovation, job creation and societal progress. Global investments in data-driven innovation are expected to rebound strongly from 2021 onwards, after the slow-down caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. A critical driver for emerging AI and data-driven business opportunities is the significant growth of data volume and the rates at which it is generated. By 2025, there will be more than 175 zettabytes of data, reflecting a five times growth of data from 2018 to 2025. A lot has been said about business opportunities of using AI, but there is increasing attention to AI and Data potential for social good, for example, contributing to achieving the UN social development goals and the environmental goals of the EU Green New Deal. This session will provide an overview of the strategy on AI for Europe, looking at measures, mechanisms and policies to make data available, to use AI in the context of European values and to capture value for business, society and people. The session will also provide a glimpse on the American vision on AI and will allow speakers to debate on their synergies and differences, looking at the identification of collaboration opportunities.

Launched in 2016, the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative aims to shape the development of the Internet of tomorrow into an Internet of Humans that responds to people’s fundamental needs, including trust, security and inclusion, and reflects the European values and norms. At the heart of the initiative is a number of Research and Innovation Actions that are acting as intermediaries, which utilizes 80% of their budget for funding individual open call projects by third-party researchers, developers, hi-tech start-ups/SMEs to advance the work in NGI topics, such as Privacy and Trust enhancing technologies; Decentralized data governance; Discovery and identification technologies; Strengthening internet trustworthiness with electronic identities; Service and data portability; Open Internet architecture renovation, and EU-US collaboration on NGI. In this session, we are going to focus on giving the opportunity to a number of the third-party projects funded by two of the NGI RIAs, NGIatlantic.eu (EU-US collaboration on NGI), NGI Pointer (Open Internet architecture renovation) and an EU-US initiative funded by NGI Explorers (EU Fellowships to the US), a chance to present their project ideas to the global audience of the 24 hour-long digitalarounbdtheworld.org event.

The IoT technology shift is driving convergence across applications and industries. For many deployments this requires convergence of new modern SCADA solutions and integration with IoT Cloud Platforms at the Edge.In this session attendees will learn: - Fundamental change for polling to Publish/ Subscribe resulting in popularity of protocols like MQTT; - How modern SCADA providers are evolving their offerings at the Edge; - Architecture for a flexible Edge Ecosystem on embedded Linux/ Arm devices; - How to integrate with IoT Cloud Platforms like Azure and AWS at the Edge; - After establishing the foundation of accessing data, how to extend with Device management and Edge analytics to manage data at the edge; - Finally, a look into how a collaborative ecosystem fostering open integration can deliver the most benefit.

The session is aimed to present ways in which technology can be used for the preservation of the environment. Prominent scholars from Australia will introduce their experiences and developments. First, Professor Marimuthu Palaniswami (The University of Melbourne) will present on "Real time monitoring of the Great Barrier Reef". Then, Professor Arkady Zaslavsky (Deakin University) will give a speech on “Australian natural disasters: distributed contextual intelligence to the rescue”. A final panel on “Impact of technology on Australian biodiversity and environment” will add Prof Michelle Leishman (distinguished Professor of Biology, Director, Smart Green Cities, Macquarie University) and Dr. Brano Kusy (Group Leader, Data61/CSIRO Conveners) to the discussion of three relevant questions: 1. Can technology and IoT in particular preserve and hopefully restore and maintain Australian biodiversity ecosystem? 2. How do you see impact of big data, predictive AI coupled with billions of IoT sensors on Australian ecology and biodiversity? And 3. How Australian experience can help other countries and world regions preserve, maintain, and improve biodiversity?

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the hottest topics in the field of communications and computing. Many cloud providers offer cloud/edge services for IoT, to handle big data, to apply AI technologies, to support massive IoT devices, and to provide low-latency control. At the same time 5G cellular networks have Massive IoT as reference scenario, for which a huge number of smart sensors/actuators must be connected to low latency. Cloud and edge computing on the one and 5G on the other hand push for an IoT cloud continuum aimed at simplifying the integration, development and delivery processes of future, cloud-native, IoT applications, also considering related security and privacy issues. This session will cover the results of the Fed4IoT an EU-Japan H2020 project, where the solution based on IoT and 5G smart deployment scenario has been investigated.

How to best deal with ageing populations has become one of the pressing challenges in highly developed democratic societies, like the ones in Europe and Japan. Besides administering better health care, empowering older people to self-manage, fostering a culture of care in the community, and facilitating social participation are key. The session will address how modern technology solutions combined with the the concepts of the compassionate city and caring communities can address these challenges and help to realize a Society 5.0. Solutions in the area of Smart Ageing need not only to be technically feasible, but user acceptance, inter-cultural aspects and plausible business models must also be addressed.

This session will provide three interesting talks on future generation of mobile communications. The first talk will share real world experiences by KT on their 5G network and services deployed in republic of Korea for more than a year. The second talk will cover research and development efforts and government policies on autonomous vehicles in V2X environment associated with 5G in Korea. Last talk will provide an insight into future mobile communications in terms of 6G vision and its enabling technologies.

Over the past several years, 5G has transformed from a concept spoken about at conferences to a reality with numerous deployments being rolled out across the globe. The technology will completely change the communications landscape, paving the way for new revenues and services that were not previously possible. For operators, the growth in 5G connectivity has the potential to be extremely lucrative. As 5G becomes more available to consumers and businesses, IoT products that require this level of connectivity will grow in popularity, such as autonomous cars and devices for smart cities. The low latency and high capacity will not only enable new devices to the market but also enhance existing service value and revenues. That being said, the 5G development cannot happen without the support of massive deployment of IPv6. As a result, the IoT industry is on the right track because of scalability that IPv6 can bring. This session introduces IPv6 and 5G convergence in China and demonstrates some of the best practices that this nation incubates with more than 900 million Internet users as well as the potential opportunities.

Covid-19 has caused a global pandemic with catastrophic consequences, both in people's health and in the economy. It has been an unforeseen event that has changed the way of relating, working, trading or enjoying leisure. It has also caused collapses in hospitals and national health systems around the world. However, some Smart Cities seem to have resisted this situation more effectively. The session will raise the lessons that Singapore has learned from the pandemic and that it can share with the world.

The Journey of India to the top of IPV6 deployment table using Cross-Industry collaboration, Regulators facilitation, Government leadership, Industry support as well as opportunities provided by emerging killers applications of IPV6. Establishment of IPV6 compatible National Internet Exchange and National Internet Registry in India to fuel the IPV6 growth. Convergence of IPv6 and Emerging 5G technologies co-created through collaborative standardization approach. We will also discuss about the scalability of the smart cities projects in India and make a first balance of the different initiatives.

The main goal of this panel discussion is to identify impact of technology in recovering the Airline industry. Specifically on how to boost revenue and improve passengers’ confidence using technology. Panel will share their views on on-board Sales, on-board entertainment, integrated revenue generation systems, post-COVID airline industry etc. At the end of the session, panellists will take questions from the audience.

Despite the promise of low cost IoT networks to support applications relevant to Africa, not many large networks have been deployed so far in the continent. We want to discuss the reasons that limit the growth of IoT networks in the region, including regulatory and business aspects. Analyzing case studies we want to find out what are the conditions to make an IoT project a success.

Water is the elixir for life. While some parts of the world can access water easily and at an economical rate, others pray for water consumption on a daily basis as they face water scarcity regularly. This irregularity in the water supply is troubling numerous lives across the world and threatening the healthy life for our future generations. In such situations, immediate actions are required to be taken. Here, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a one-stop solution that has the capability of attending different water-related challenges and to solve them eventually. The session offers a look into various IoT technologies developed in the framework of EU Horizon 2020 funded projects and presents promising IoT application in the smart water sector.

This session is in the format of an Expert’s Panel where Industry leaders will present different perspectives on the evolution of Digital transformation and the role Data/AI/IoT technologies have played influencing it. A distinguish panel where participants can learn how Data platforms are evolving the IoT domain, and how the idea for a Digital Single Market is progressing in Europe. Experts will bring their vision and report some activities in four very relevant application areas that impact directly our daily living; Automotive Industry, Industrial IoT, Intelligent Manufacturing and Smart Cities for Sustainable Living.

Digital Around the World will complete its one-day virtual trip around the planet with a conclusive ceremony, giving voice to representatives of all the regions and sharing the learnings of the previous 24 hours of connecting over the world. That will make 24 visions of how digital transformation is improving the world and helping mankind have a better tomorrow.