Orange

Through the FIWARE Mundus activities, mostly performed in the FI-LINKS project, countries from all over the world have already started to mobilize innovators and users around new FIWARE ecosystems. FIWARE is currently stepping out from experimentation into commercialisation. The technology must be adopted at global level in order to allow European FIWARE stakeholders to expand their reach worldwide. The first main objective of FI-GLOBAL is to underpin a FIWARE global community, by increasing the number of FIWARE ecosystems all around the world. FI-GLOBAL will identify and engage multiple stakeholders, who will help bootstrapping innovation ecosystems around FIWARE, provide support to startups, enhance the open platform with additional FIWARE components, and deploy new FIWARE nodes. FI-GLOBAL facilitates the set-up of a worldwide recognized FIWARE Master Course to educate future students and establish international cooperation via a FIWARE Education Community. The second main objective is to incentivise the take-up of the FIWARE platform and facilitate the means for an effective cooperation among innovators and users from the global community. FI-GLOBAL will mobilize a truly global marketplace of FIWARE applications that will stimulate new solutions and business ideas, and incentivize innovators and users to discover the platform and adopt the technology. This will be done by providing tools that support the cooperation among the global ecosystems to implement new ideas/services and match particular needs that may have been already tackled by FIWARE solutions; and launching a FIWARE Global Piloting Programme to encourage the improvement and replicability of FIWARE solutions at global scale. Reaching these objectives will contribute to make FIWARE the “de facto” reference in terms of global open source platform for the development of solutions and applications and one of the main instruments for promoting entrepreneurship and strengthening digital education worldwide

The valuable insights that can be inferred from analytics of data generated and collected from a variety of devices and applications are transforming businesses and are therefore one of the key motivations for organisations to adopt such technologies. Nevertheless, the data being analysed and processed are highly sensitive and put the individuals’ rights to privacy at risk. With the imminent arrival of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), companies are coerced to adopt privacy enhancing technologies that, on the one hand, protect data to ensure their clients’ privacy and on the other hand, allow their processing while keeping them meaningful, useful, and protected at the same time. The PAPAYA project aims at addressing the privacy concerns when data analytics tasks are performed by untrusted third-party data processors. Since these tasks may be performed obliviously on protected data (i.e. encrypted data), the PAPAYA will design and develop dedicated privacy preserving data analytics primitives that will enable data owners to extract valuable information from this protected data, while being cost-effective and accurate. The PAPAYA project will consider compliance with the GDPR as a key enabler to provide solutions that minimize the privacy risks while increasing trust in third-party data processors by means of auditing and visualization modules (a dashboard). The PAPAYA primitives as well as the dashboard will be combined in an integrated platform that will be designed, implemented and validated through a set of use cases reflecting relevant real world applications (namely, healthcare analytics and web & mobile data analytics).

5G promises increased connectivity, high data rates, and ultimately new services. The first 5G release standard in 3GPP will be available by June 2018 with pre-commercial deployment in Korea soon after. Whilst 5G will meet current demand, the exponential rise in demand for wireless connectivity will ultimately require Tbps connectivity in indoor spaces. The future network will use an all optical fibre core, and an ultra-high data rate wireless ‘bridge’ to the User. WORTECS focuses on the goal of ultra-high data rate wireless. High-frequency mm-wave (in the band above 90 GHz) radio communications will be combined with optical wireless communications in the infrared and visible regions of the optical spectrum, using novel heterogeneous networking concepts. A compelling virtual reality application will be used to showcase the capability of the WORTECS network. The project will deliver two Proof-of-Concept demonstrations. An ultra-high density LiFi/Radio network providing multi-Gbps to virtual reality terminals will be developed, and an ultra-high data rate Proof-of-Concept capable of Tbps networking will also be targeted. WORTECS brings together innovative, world leading LiFi SMEs Oledcomm (France) and PureLiFi (UK), Global telecommunications operator Orange (France) and research institutes BCOM (France) and IHP (Germany). These are joined by university research leaders in optical wireless communications from the University of Oxford (UK) and the University of Las Palmas (Spain). The consortium has the dual ambition of proposing new scientific solutions beyond 5G while transferring these technologies from research labs to industrial world. A successful project will both showcase technologies required to alleviate the radio spectrum crunch, and provide substantial benefits to EU citizens through the exploitation of results by WORTECS commercial partners.

Recent research activities in the ICT area, in particular in digital content and media sectors, has resulted in a number of technological enablers which allow the creation of new products and services. This has established a new converged social media environment in Europe as a playground for a large number of stakeholders, to ultimately enable creation of the related business, new jobs, and revenues benefiting from these developments. However, the main drivers of the new media and content technologies are the big industries, whereas the main users of these technologies are small enterprises / SMEs, which are creating product and services to reach the end customers – European and world-wide citizens. We can still observe a gap in discussions between the large technology providers and the small technology adopters, preventing the establishment of common strategies for the technology take up towards a more efficient creation of the new innovative product and services. Therefore, there is a clear need for the establishment of a common European community in the area of convergence and social media, in order to lay-down common research and innovation strategies, by involving important players from academia and research institutions, policy makers, end users, etc. Accordingly, one of the main goals of the VITAL MEDIA project is to enlarge the community in the social media area at the European level, at level of the national and regional clusters, through collaboration amongst the NEM Initiative and the clusters. The enlarged community will be animated through a number of discussions at workshops to be organised at all mentioned levels and through cooperation within an innovative online collaboration tool, aiming to widely discuss and establish research and innovations roadmaps for the area, by strong cooperation with research and academic institutions active in the area, covering the identified gaps between the technology providers, their users/adopters, and research.

The Internet (r)evolution has changed traditional business and forces it to reinvent itself. Traditional operator-enabled services are losing on their importance due to a variety of new communication services, like chat and social networks, which complement or supersede traditional ones like voice telephony. Technical progress has minimized the need for access-controlled communication services and is moving instead to context based communication, which is presumably available at only marginal or no additional cost. However, unlike traditional telecommunication services, that enable universal communication, Internet communication tools are characterized by their walled garden approach, where users can only communicate with users of the same application and are not free to change application without losing their data or contacts. The main goal of the reTHINK project is to design and prototype a new, non telecom centric, but Web-centric P2P Service Architecture enabling dynamic trusted relationships among distributed applications called Hyperlinked Entities that support use-cases such as contextual and social communications, M2M/IoT and content oriented services. This project will enable any type of service delivery through specialized end-to-end network quality commitments, powered by specialized P2P and/or Cloud services (delivered as SaaS,PaaS or IaaS). The major structural difference between the operators approach and the web companies is related to a recurring concept in the deployment of ICT solutions: full deperimeterisation of services. Operators today cannot directly compete at a global level because their services are not and cannot be provided outside of the deployed and owned network. The services operators provide are tightly coupled with the network's functionalities and its geographical extension. The work is performed by a consortium of 3 global telecom operators, 2 SMEs, 2 Universities and 2 leading research institutes, coordinated by Eurescom.