Keynotes
Keynote 1: June 29th 8:45-9:45
Toward Enhancing Digital Resiliency
Masugi Inoue, Director General of Resilient ICT Research Center, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
Abstract
Thirteen years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake. During that time, efforts have been made to strengthen the information and telecommunications infrastructure and research and development for this purpose. However, the Noto Peninsula earthquake that occurred on January 1 this year once again recognized the vulnerability of the infrastructure, as in the previous earthquake, although the emergency recovery response of the telecommunications environment has improved from 13 years ago. Connected cars, drones, HAPS, and satellite constellations are essential to the layering of information and communication resilience, but the existing infrastructure that is the foundation of those systems has multiple vulnerabilities. After reviewing them and research trends in resilient information and communication networks, this presentation will introduce the research and development being undertaken at NICT. NerveNet, a regional digital and telecommunications infrastructure with enhanced resilience, has recently begun to be used as both a normal and emergency network in Shirahama Town, Wakayama Prefecture, and Nobeoka City, Miyazaki Prefecture. A network based on the “Die-Hard Network” concept, which is capable of carrying and delivering data in a bucket relay fashion even in the event of a complete loss of communication, is in use in Konan City, Kochi Prefecture, and research and development is still ongoing for systems that can be used by the Self-Defense Forces, police, fire departments, and other agencies that are in actual operation at the time of disaster. The presentation will consider how ICT can improve the resilience of society.
Biography
Dr. Masugi Inoue, Director General of Resilient ICT Research Center, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan
Masugi Inoue graduated from Kyoto University in 1992, received his Dr. Eng. degree from The University of Tokyo in 1997, and joined the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) of the Ministry of Posts and Telecom, Tokyo, Japan, which is now NICT. He was involved in the research and development of the world fastest WLAN in MM-wave bands, common-signaling MIRAI architecture for heterogeneous networks in the 4G era, ID-locator split architecture called HIMALIS for future Internet, a resilient information and communications platform system called NerveNet, etc. He also worked for international cooperation through the operation of Joint Research Programs such as ASEAN IVO, Japan-US called JUNO and Japan-EU under HORIZON 2020. He has been in his current position since April 2021. He was a visiting researcher at Polytechnic University, New York, in 2000 – 2001. He received the Best Paper Award from IPSJ in 2006 and 2007, the Young Scientists’ Prize in 2007 and the Prize for Science and Technology in 2019 from the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the ITU-AJ Accomplishment Award in 2020, etc. He has been serving as Director of Finance of IEICE (a member of the board) and previously served as Chairman of the Technical Committee on Mobile Network and Applications, Director of General Affairs, Director of Finance and so on in the IEICE Communications Society. He is a fellow of IEICE and a member of IEEE.
Keynote 2: June 30th 8:45-10:00
Cyber Physical Systems in Healthcare, Transport and Emergency Response
Niki Trigoni (University of Oxford, UK)
Abstract
Cyber physical systems have widespread application in a multitude of smart city applications. In this talk, I will present our experiences and lessons learnt from cyber physical systems in three different settings: healthcare, transport, and emergency response. I will present some of the key challenges faced by sensing, scene understanding and coordination algorithms, including lack of sensing infrastructure, sparsity of training data and dynamic changes in sensing quality and connectivity. I will then present recent research directions that we have pursued to address these challenges including multi-modal sensing, cross modality training and domain adaptation techniques.
Biography
Prof. Niki Trigoni (University of Oxford, UK)
Niki Trigoni is Professor at the Oxford Department of Computer Science, heading the Cyber Physical Systems Group. Her interests lie in the tight integration of sensing and machine intelligence for context inference, control and human-machine interaction. She has applied her work to a number of application scenarios, including mobile autonomy, asset monitoring, and localisation systems for emergency situations, as well as workforce safety and efficiency. Trigoni has founded and served from 2014-2019 as Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training on Autonomous and Intelligent Machines and Systems. Driven by her passion for research translation, in 2015, she founded Navenio Ltd, a deep tech Oxford spinout on infrastructure free indoor positioning, and a 2020 KPMB Best British Tech Pioneer. In 2020, she won the CTO of the Year award at the UK’s Women in IT Awards, demonstrating impact from translating positioning tech to improve efficiency in the healthcare sector.
Keynote 3: July 1st 8:45-9:45
25 years later: Delivering the promise of wearable computing with generative AI
Paul Lukowicz (DFKI and University of Kaiserslautern, Germany)
Abstract
For nearly three decades now Wearable Computing has been promoted as the next step in the evolution of personal devices. The vision builds on a combination of advanced context awareness, unobtrusive multimodal input and head mounted displays to provide “any time any place” access to digital information and a seamless fusion of the digital and physical worlds. While with smart watches, sensor enabled earbuds and even rings individual wearable devices have become common, the broader vision of ubiquitous intelligent assistance acting at the interface of the physical and the digital world to continually support human actions and interactions in all situations is still far from reality. Despite many attempts head mounted displays (HMD), the hallmark of wearables, have never caught on.
In the talk I will argue that the above is less due to hardware limitations, including the limitations of current HMDs,than to the limited ability of current systems to adequate recognize and adapt to complex dynamic, real world situations. Context recognition systems are trained to recognize predefined lists of narrowly defined aspects of the environment, rather then being able to comprehensively interpret the situation around the user. Assistive functionalities tend to be limited to static sets of actions “hard wired” to such narrowly defined situations.
Emerging generative AI systems in particular multimodal foundational models, promise to be able to change that. Vision enabled LLMs are already able to provide rich descriptions of complex real world scenes. From such descriptions they can also generate flexible actions plans taking into account user profiles and processing advanced multimodal input (speech gesture etc). This will finally enable the original wearable vision of ubiquitous always on assistants and the fusion of the digital and physical world in users’s every day life.
Biography
Prof. Paul Lukowicz (DFKI and University of Kaiserslautern, Germany)
Prof. Dr. Paul Lukowicz is a Full Professor of AI at the RPTU in Kaiserslautern, Germany and at the same time Scientific Director at DFKI Kaiserslautern, where he heads the Embedded Intelligence group. His research focuses on context-aware ubiquitous and wearable systems, quantum computing, and human-AI interaction, including sensing, machine learning, system architectures, large-scale-to-edge systems, and applications. He is the Coordinator of the HumanE AI-Net, a large networking project with more than 50 European partners and acts as Editor for various scientific publications. He has served on more than 50 program committees (including TPC Chair) at high-quality international conferences of all the main conferences within his research area.