Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation, 3 June 2014
Opening Address
Professor Sergey Bachevsky, Rector of the Bonch-Bruevich Saint-Petersburg State University of Telecommunications, and General Chairman of Kaleidoscope 2014;
Oleg Dukhovnitsky, Head of the Federal Agency of Communications, Russian Federation;
Rashid Ismailov, Head of Department of International Cooperation, Ministry of Communications and Mass Media, Russian Federation;
Andre Maksimov, Committee on IT and Communications, Government of St. Petersburg, Russian Federation;
Oleg Zolotokrylin, Vice-Rector of the Bonch-Bruevich Saint-Petersburg State University of Telecommunications
Ladies and gentlemen;
Colleagues and friends;
Good morning and welcome to this, the sixth Kaleidoscope academic conference. I bring greetings from ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré, who of course is an alumnus of this university.
So firstly, let me thank Bonch-Bruevich Saint-Petersburg State University of Telecommunications for hosting the event in these excellent facilities, and Professor Sergey Bachevsky for his kind welcome. My sincere thanks are also due to the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media for the many years it has supported ITU, and this Kaleidoscope in particular. I would like to thank all the distinguished members of the top table for being here this morning to greet us.
I also thank the members of the Host Committee, chaired by Mr Rashid Ismailov without whom this event would not have been possible, and especially Andrey Koucheryavy for all his efforts.
I would also like to thank our generous sponsor, SES (Luxembourg), for the prize money that will be awarded to the authors of the best papers.
Let me express my gratitude to our partnering organizations: Expo Telecom (Russian Federation), TTC (Japan), Waseda University (Japan), the Institute of Image Electronics Engineers of Japan (I.I.E.E.J.), the European Academy for Standardization (EURAS), the University of the Basque Country (Spain), and Tampere University of Technology (Finland).
In addition I would like to thank our technical sponsors, the Popov Society of the Russian Federation, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and IEEE Communication Society, and the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan (IEICE).
Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be here with you today. I have very fond memories of each of the five previous Kaleidoscope conferences and, as this will be my last Kaleidoscope as Director of TSB, it is particularly rewarding to see the conference has developed to such an extent and is being hosted by such an illustrious university.
The conference has undoubtedly become one of the highlights on the ITU’s annual programme of events and this year is no different, with an exciting agenda ahead.
The 34 papers selected for presentation, from the 98 papers submitted from 39 different countries, are published in both IEEE Xplore Digital Library and the Kaleidoscope proceedings, which you should have all received on CD. I must thank those who undertook the difficult task of selecting the papers most-deserving of presentation and, in particular, Dr Kai Jakobs, Chair of the Technical Programme Committee who unfortunately is unable to be with us due to a family concern. The best papers will be also evaluated for publication in IEEE Communications Magazine.
A prize fund totaling USD 10,000 will be awarded to the authors of the three best papers and Young Author Recognition certificates will be issued in specification recognition of contribution from youth.
This event will include the fourth Jules Verne’s Corner, which this year takes the theme, “Heart to heart communication”, imagining a world in which pheromones act as carrier substances in ‘nanonetworks’ enabling electromagnetic or molecular communications between human beings.
Ideas presented at these conferences have invigorated our standardization work. Indeed, so many of the telecommunications industry’s major transformations have come from academic research, which is why I have always been very keen to increase academia’s participation in ITU.
Last year’s keynote address by Akihiro Nakao on “deeply programmable networks” at the 2013 Kaleidoscope conference at Kyoto University gave impetus to the work on software-defined networking (SDN) in ITU-T.
Now that ICTs are enabling the convergence of entire industry sectors, ITU works with many new industry sectors such as the automotive industry, healthcare providers, utilities and financial institutions. The world is becoming more connected, bound together by ICTs and the common platforms provided by technical standards. Interoperability and compatibility are ever more essential, so conformance to international standards is increasingly important, which is why I initiated in 2008 the ITU Conformance and Interoperability programme. I am very grateful to the Russian Federation for its strong support to this programme in particular by the Central Science Research Telecommunication Institute (ZNIIS), and I am pleased to learn of the work on interoperability of Internet of Things at this university.
Building on the impetus of the Kaleidoscope conferences, the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in 2010 established an Academia membership category, which became available in early 2011. This was a logical step forward, formalizing an already very healthy relationship, and it was very much spearheaded by ITU-T.
The Academia membership category is growing fast. We have welcomed 63 academic and research institutes to ITU, of which I am please to say 45 are members of ITU-T.
Academic membership is available at a very reduced fee of CHF4000 and CHF2000 for universities in developed and developing nations respectively.
We are now working in collaboration with our Academia members to further develop this relationship and yesterday we had a fruitful workshop and meeting on promoting education in standardization.
It is my hope that this year’s ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan, Republic of Korea will give us an even stronger mandate to engage with academia and research institutes.
The standardization world is in transition. Convergence is blurring the demarcation lines between ICT standards bodies, closer collaboration between them and with the various industry sectors, and academia and research institutes will become ever more crucial. I believe these Kaleidoscope conferences will continue to make a substantial contribution to this effort and will help ensure that ITU’s continuing evolution will maintain it as the core institution to reflect the multi-disciplinary, all-encompassing future of information and communication technologies.
Thank you and I wish you an enjoyable Kaleidoscope conference.
