Keynote Talks

Keynote Speaker I

Ingrid Moerman, Ghent University, Belgium

Biography

Ingrid Moerman received her degree in Electrical Engineering (1987) and the Ph.D degree (1992) from the Ghent University, where she became a part-time professor in 2000. She is a staff member at IDLab, a core research group of imec with research activities embedded in Ghent University and University of Antwerp. Ingrid Moerman is coordinating the research activities on mobile and wireless networking, and she is leading a research team of about 30 members at IDLab-Ghent University. Her main research interests include: Internet of Things, Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN), High-density wireless access networks, collaborative and cooperative networks, intelligent cognitive radio networks, real-time software defined radio, flexible hardware/software architectures for radio/network control and management, and experimentally-supported research. Ingrid Moerman has a longstanding experience in running and coordinating national and EU research funded projects. At the European level, Ingrid Moerman is in particular very active in the Future Networks research area, where she has coordinated and is coordinating several FP7/H2020 projects (CREW, WiSHFUL, eWINE, ORCA) and participating in other projects (Fed4FIRE, FORGE, FLEX, Flex5Gware). Ingrid Moerman is author or co-author of more than 700 publications in international journals or conference proceedings.

Title: Wireless Experimentation with SDR: The Way to Drive Innovation

Abstract: There exist many ways for researching and developing innovative solutions: from theoretical analysis, simulations, small-scale set-up to large-scale experimentation. This first part of this talk will discuss the benefits and pitfalls of different approaches and illustrate them with some concrete examples.
While experimentation seems to be most challenging approach, the second part of this talk will present how the software defined radio (SDR) facility offered in the H2020 ORCA project is capable to accelerate wireless innovation. The advantage of SDR over “off-the-shelf” technology is that it enables full and open implementation of all network functionality, also the lower physical and medium access control (MAC) layers. The ultimate goal of the ORCA project is to enable wireless experimenters to unlock the potential of reconfigurable radio technology by setting up advanced experiments involving end-to-end applications that require control of novel wireless technologies or cooperation between multiple networked SDR platforms within extreme and/or diverging communication needs in terms of latency, reliability or throughput, well before new radio technologies become available on the market in commercial off-the-shelf products.
In the third and last part of the talk, the ORCA vision towards orchestrating next-generation services through end-to-end network slicing will be presented. Network slicing (also known as network virtualization) allows network resources to be used in a flexible, dynamic, and customized manner, and most crucially, provides isolation between different virtual networks. ORCA believes that each network segment should have their own orchestrator, tailored to the segment’s particularities. The use of a separate orchestrator for each network segment reduces complexity and breaks down the larger E2E network orchestration problem into smaller parts. In this way, each segment orchestrator can focus on a limited number of well-defined tasks, reducing the software complexity, both in terms of design and implementation. The ORCA vision is expected to foster innovation for everyone (not only big industrial players, but also smaller companies and the research community), to reduce development life-cycle, to simplify standardisation and to stimulate multi-disciplinary experimentation.

Keynote Speaker II

Deevid De Meyer, Cronos Group, Leuven, Belgium

Biography

Deevid De Meyer is a young Cronos Group entrepeneur with a passion for world changing technologies. After his Computer Science studies, Deevid started out as a Python developer for the famous Pepper robots. During this time Deevid became fascinated with AI and Machine Learning. After a year, Deevid co-founded Brainjar, a machine learning "as a service" company that focuses on building production-ready applications with AI technologies.
Currently active as solution architect for Brainjar, talking to customers and transforming problems into technical architectures, Deevid is also founding a second company QNTM, which aims to guide large enterprises through the rapidly evolving Quantum Computing landscape. Over the past few years, Deevid has given over a hundred excellently received talks on various subjects surrounding quantum computing and AI, ranging from inspiring keynotes to technical deep dives.

Title: 2020: The AI Decade

Abstract: By now it should be clear to everyone that AI has had a significant impact over the past decade. Thanks to the rise of deep learning, applications are being released almost every week that were previously deemed impossible. Chatbots, deepfakes, self-driving cars, intelligent cameras, digital authors, these technologies have been made feasible in the past 10 thanks to machine learning, and breakthroughs are still happening on almost a weekly basis. Where 2010 was the decade where AI broke through, many people think that 2020 will be the decade where it reaches maturity and widespread adoption. In this presentation, we will look at today’s frontier of artificial intelligence, and predict how the field of AI will evolve in the coming decade.