MWC 2015

Events and Activities, , ,

Off I am to keynote and panel at one of the world’s largest tech events which is happening in Barcelona this week – the Mobile World Congress (MWC). Over the years, it has transformed from being a pure telecoms playing ground to a show of innovation, rivaling CeBIT (Germany) and CES/CTIA (US). I am so happy to go back to the city where I spent 5 wonderful years of my life, and meet friends and colleagues. I will keep you updated on some of the most exciting developments at the event …

… what a Mobile World Congress that was! The best I have attended in years! There is a real buzz and excitement going on in the community, some of which I tried to capture in my subsequent opinion blog. I was involved in an amazing panel organized by the UKTI and the Future Cities Catapult on the “Industrial Internet of Things”. And I (as the only academic throughout the event) was on the main MWC stage for a 5G panel with the CTO of Ericsson, CSO of Huawei, Director of 3GPP, and Director of the ITU, and other luminosities. The room was burstingly full! The other highlight for me was to stand next to the world’s first 5G working system, designed by Ericsson – amazing!

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HackLondon 2015

Events and Activities,

I am so excited to be judge today at the largest hackathon the UK has ever seen, https://hacklondon.org/. HackLondon is a 24 hour hackathon hosted by KCL Tech, UCL TechSoc and UCLe. Fares, our amazing undergrad student, told me “it’s going to be epic, everything is free, and any student can participate (no experience required)”. I am coming after they have programmed already for almost 30h without any notable sleep – I can’t wait to see all those lovely zombie faces …

… what an event that was! Full house and truly (!) emotional. Fares got a standing ovation from the crowd. And I also got carried away and decided ad-hoc to give my own prize of 2h mentoring + £200 book vouchers for a mixed technical and artistic writing hack called #TwitterNovel. It is a crowdsourced way of writing a novel via Twitter – great, isn’t it?

        

No More “Gs”?

Personal Reflections

I gave a keynote at yesterday’s “Innovation in 5G” event at the Digital Catapult in London, arguing that the softwarisation of 5G gives us a unique opportunity to innovate in features rather than systems. That in turn, may very well mean the end of the telco generations “Gs”. I also argued for shortening the Transport Networks to ensure we can meet latency requirements. The keynote did not go down well with everybody …