Simon Gauntlett, Dolby, to speak at our 'Future of TV' conference in March '18

We are delighted to have Simon Gauntlett joining our fantastic group of speakers. He will talk about 'Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision in production – to deliver next generation pictures and sound'.

Simon is Director, Imaging Standards and Technology, at Dolby Laboratories. He leads a team that works with international standards bodies, broadcasters, and consumer electronics manufacturers toward the development and adoption of advanced imaging standards.

Prior to joining Dolby in 2016, Simon was the CTO of the Digital TV Group, where he helped set up the UK UHD Forum, and was editor in chief for the D-Book, the UK specification for interoperability of the DTT (Freeview) and Connected TV platforms.

Simon has a master’s degree in electronics and communications engineering from Exeter University and BBC graduate training. He is an Honorary Fellow of the BKSTS, and current Chair of the SMPTE UK Section.

James Walker of Cisco confirmed as speaker for 'Future of TV' Conference

With great pleasure we announce that we have secured James Walker from Cisco as speaker for our 2018 Spring Conference on 'The Future of TV'.

James is a technical leader working in the Chief Technology and Architecture Office of Cisco on media innovation projects. He is leading the platform work-package within the 2-Immerse project.

 

Prior to Cisco, he worked in the New Initiatives and TV Platforms divisions for NDS, Motorola PCS, C-Cube Microsystems and BBC R&D.

 

 

2-Immerse: A Platform for Immersive Object-Based Multi-Screen Experiences

‘2-IMMERSE’ is an H2020 collaborative project creating and piloting new immersive object-based multi-screen experiences. To deliver these service prototypes, 2-IMMERSE is developing an extensible standards-based platform to support the production, delivery and orchestration of these immersive ‘Distributed Media Applications’.

 

His presentation will introduce the theatre and sports-based service prototypes that that have been designed, developed and trialled by the project, highlighting their key features. It will then present the architecture and implementation of the cloud-based platform we have developed in realising these service prototypes, and our approach to orchestrating the media objects of a Distributed Media Application within the end-user’s device environment.

 

 

2018 Spring Conference - The Future of TV

 

Date: 6th - 7th March

Location: Adastral Park, Ipswich, IP5 3RE

Fees: none

In order to successfully peek into the future one must understand the past. Have you ever been asked what sort of television you had when you were young, in order to guess your age? Throughout history television has been redefined for the generations as technology evolved from

• black and white to colour
• 4:3 to 16:9
• cathode ray tubes to flat panels
• public service to advertising funded
• standard definition through to ultra-high definition
• being a few channels to being hundreds
• being free-to-air only to incorporating paid-for offerings
• being a scheduled broadcast experience to being an experience that could then be recorded and now is available on demand.

At present industries are more competitive and diverse than ever before. They embrace and drive change faster and faster. There however is one constant throughout, and it is the reason why we watch at all: The Power of The Story

So:

What IS the Future of TV?

 

The two-day conference was opened by Lisa Perkins, the Research and Innovation Director for Adastral Park.

We heared from fantastic keynote speakers coming from all four areas which are the building blocks of Television:

• Story-telling
• Delivery
• Production, and
• Consumption

We took the time to discuss the well known trends - including all the good and bad that comes along, and we will hopefully discover new viewpoints during our breakout and meet and mingle sessions, to take away as inspiration.

Watch and Download

Conference brochure (pdf)
Communication brief (pdf)

Comms Article
Photos 

Presentation downloads (pdf):

• Hackthorn Innovation - 'How to help storytellers use technology to...', Steve Sharman 

Speaker Profiles:

• Lisa Perkins, BT, Adastral Park & Research Realisation Director
• John Wyver, writer and producer at Illuminations
• James Walker, Cisco
• Simon Gauntlett, Dolby
• Simon Parnall, Ofcom
• Anders Erlandsson, Ericsson
• Ed Haslam, Conviva
• Alan Chalmers, University of Warwick
•  Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy, BBC R&D Engineer
• Matt Locke, founder of Storythings
• Matt Stagg, EE
• Olivier Wellmann, Vice President of Product Management at Conviva

Television - but not as we knew it

We are absolutely thrilled to have John Wyver, writer and producer at Illuminations, as keynote speaker at our 2018 Spring Conference on 'The Future of TV'.

"Television as we knew the medium since the 1950s may now have come to an end. Yet for the half-century to the early 2000s we understood television as a small-screen broadcast technology for domestic consumption within inflexible programme schedules. With that form fractured and fragmented into on-demand and streaming services, interactive option, social media integration, IPTV delivery and multiple screen consumption in an almost infinite plurality of settings, the television of today and tomorrow is hard to define and predict, let alone understand so as to build careers and business models.

 

At the conference we will see to offer some context for such a complex world, and consider how television was imagined at another moment of radical uncertainty, in the late 19th and early 20th century. Drawing on the methodology of the emerging practices of “media archaeology” the presentation explores and illustrates the earliest ideas and first instances of television. These include television as a telephone-delivered service to public viewing rooms and television as a large-format form for projection in cinemas. Television - but not as we came to know it."

JOHN WYVER is a writer and producer with the independent production company Illuminations. Since 1982 he has produced and directed an extensive range of documentaries and performance programmes about the arts and digital media. His productions have been honoured with a BAFTA Award, and International Emmy and a Peabody Award among others. Working since the mid-1990s with BT Research, BBC R&D and academic partners, he was a pioneer in integrating broadcasting and network media, and he continues these interests in the current 2-IMMERSE research project co-funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme.

 

He works with the Royal Shakespeare Company as Director, Screen Projections, and for the company he produces the RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema broadcasts, as well as other theatre for the screen including the Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare Trilogy (2017) and the forthcoming Hamlet for BBC Two. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Westminster, where his research interests include the history of the arts on screen and television adaptation of theatre productions. He is the author of Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (2007) and the forthcoming Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History.

 

Lisa Perkins to Open the 2018 Spring Conference on 'The Future of TV'

We are delighted to announce that Lisa Perkins, Director of Strategic Research and Innovation, will be opening our conference on 'The Future of TV taking place at Adastral Park, Ipswich on 6th and 7th March 2018.

Lisa is director of research and applied innovation in BT’s Technology, Service and Operations division. She is accountable for all aspects of strategic research, down-streaming innovation and partnerships with world leading universities. She actively promotes and drives the digital literacy agenda, working with schools and encouraging children and teachers to develop a love of technology. Lisa runs the Adastral Park campus, including all elements of Innovation Martlesham, and is working on an exciting transformation agenda for the site.

 

Previously, Lisa was director of customer assurance, strategy and operations, in Openreach CIO and drove the technology strategy and its investment, enabling business transformation and growth for Openreach. She also led service improvement through establishment and adoption programmes across a significant customer base.

 

Lisa has worked across various areas of BT for 20 years, leading major programmes such as Superfast Broadband, Voice over IP and other cutting edge technical deliveries across core and access networks.

 

Lisa has two children, plays various sports, is a trust governor for a local Academy school and is an accredited coach.

A bit of wonderful history

We received a proper letter!

We not often do. Everything is digital and cyber and cloud these days. Although this is our bread and butter business, receiving this letter touched a beautiful nerve. This was not a bill or an advertisment: Somebody had taken an effort to write, print, find an envelope, put a stamp, and drop it into the post box to send us a kind and joyful message regarding our champion, Tommy Flowers.

As we enter the second year of our endeavour, we would like to share with you this endorsement.

Dear Sir

TOMMY FLOWERS

 

It is with great interest that I have read the report in 'THE TELECOMMUNICATIONS PROFESSIONAL' [p25 July/September 2017] about the Institute's work. At the age of 96 I am probably the one of the very few engineers living today who worked with Tommy in the Engineer-in-Chief's Office. True did I not know him personally when he did the wonderful groundwork on 'Colossus', although when it became public knowledge I found out that I had been involved in the assembly and testing of parts for the computer, known to me then as just one of the peculiar products we made up where I worked in the Circuit Laboratory. However, I came to work with him when we were building the first electronic public telephone exchange at Highgate Wood in North London.Then I came to know him well and have a great respect for his ability & his pleasant personality. To me it is great that he is now honoured by the creation of the Institute bearing his name and I write to you to tell you how pleased I am to see this. I only wish that I could help in some way to further the aims of the Institute, but age and limited mobility prevents that. I am certain that were he still to be with us Tommy in his own modest way would thoroughly applaud the institute and his work.

May the Institute have a wonderful future.

Yours most sincerely,
                                   Roy F Howard

We herewith pass on those wishes to all our members and supporters for a wonderful 2018!

The TFInstitute team!

TFInstitute Autumn Conference on 'Security & Trust'

Security and Trust

How to empower and protect all users?

The Tommy Flowers Autumn Conference took place 26–27 September 2017 - our third conference in the Institute’s first year. 

Over 130 people attended across the two days, with students and academics from across more than a dozen universities and with senior representatives from some of the world’s biggest ICT companies and Innovation Martlesham members - with ADVA, Sandvine, Vodafone, Huawei, Cisco; Intel and the National Crime Agency all presenting.

The event went exceptionally well with excellent feedback from both students and industry.

The conference focussed on Security and Trust, addressing how the ICT industry must protect customers and themselves from deliberate external and internal attacks. How technology can empower users and how new capabilities can, in turn, enable new kinds of attack or have unintended consequences - resulting in a constant evolution across technology, user behaviour and the perception of human rights.

 

 
Professor Ben Azvine – BT Research & Innovation’s Global head of security research and innovation hosted the event.

 

"Cyber security is, in my opinion, one of the greatest man-made challenges of our time", explained Ben. "The frequency and impact of breaches is increasing and we need to continuously adapt and innovate to stay ahead of the threat environment."

 

Over the course of the conference, a number of panel sessions were held addressing:

• The wider society viewpoint
• The industrial view point
• Industry’s perspectives on Security

Addressing the societal viewpoint, the audience were treated to an interactive panel session with Prof Howard Shrobe (Director of Cyber Security @ CSAIL, MIT); Ian Daft (National Crime Agency) and Prof Lorna McGregor (Director of University of Essex Human Rights Centre).

 

Howard discussed case studies looking at pitfalls in the current security design architectures and discussed new architectures that could lead to 3 classes of benefits - Prevention; Resilience and Regeneration – allowing systems to recover more quickly from attacks to fully functional states.

 

Ian Daft explained the workings of the NCA, discussing the fight to cut serious and organised crime; how innovating with industry is so important and gaining confidence and trust from the public.

 

Prof Lorna McGregor provided a fascinating insight into "algorithmic accountability" – in other words, when so much of our lives are now controlled by algorithms (Artificial Intelligence software applying statistical techniques to huge data-sets), how do we know who is ultimately responsible for the decisions that are being made, and how can we challenge them?

 

The industrial panel session was chaired by Alex Healing, BT Research & Innovation’s Chief Researcher Visual Analytics. He was joined by Kevin Smith (Senior Technology Strategist, Vodafone); Igor Shaula (Solutions Architect, Intel) and Chris Roberts (Security Service Creation, Cisco). Each provided an interesting perspective, discussing:

• The future of security
• How it is important to include the security aspects into new technology designs
• Increased expectations from technology by the customer
• 5G network demands including fast, resilient, adaptable and secure
• Improving customer experience without breaching customer privacy
• Virtual Reality services
• Industry being responsible for Big Data

The BT Research and Innovation’s Security practice provided an in-depth Industrial case study, describing the challenges and changing threats of the landscape and by collaborating with industry and Universities, a whole host of hot topics can be addressed including: CLOUD environments; IoT Security; machine assisted cyber threat hunting; authentications; pattern based anomaly detection; Blockchain architecture; cryptography; flexible interactive visualisation; Intelligence Augmentation and Bitcoin.

 

An industrial panel, consisting of Huawei (Jerry Thompson and Michael Hill- King); ADVA Optical Networking (Uli Schlegel) and Sandvine (Matt Farmer) provided an insight into their perspectives on security, discussing embedded security in devices; CLOUD architectures; post quantum and terabit encryption; problems with IoT devices and how to learn from their behaviour and how they pull innovation from universities.

 

Throughout the conference and using the lessons learned from each of the panel sessions, breakout sessions were held discussing the most important scientific research challenges (to protect from attacks; to defend human rights and to enable society to prosper) and how the research of the post graduate researchers could contribute.

 

Key points captured:

• We must secure systems to help society prosper
• We need to understand how national crime agencies come into play
• We should approach security from a holistic point of view – developing technology to improve our lifestyle, thereby improving the world to become a better place
• The importance to educate and empower the user in responsible ways
• Making people more aware of their personal data and how it is used

Students identified ways in which their own research can contribute:

• Smart home environments and privacy – understanding what it means to individuals and groups of people e.g. families. Different components and cultural aspects need to be taken into consideration.
• Internet of Things (IoT) – develop algorithms which are fast and smart
• Looking at risk management and methods to make IoT more secure – making the most of the data and analytics currently collected

A tour around the "Network Operations Centre" provided Tommy Flowers Institute members the amazing opportunity to view the heart of BT’s operations and discussing the security of the centre.

 

BT Research & Innovation’s Head of University Research, Fraser Burton said, "Over the first year, the Institute has gone from strength to strength, with growing involvement across academia, industry and government. As the pace of change in the digital economy increases, we are increasingly using autonomic systems to support our decision-making and we need to ensure our future research leaders create and understand the powerful new tools that are now possible.

We look forward to an even more exciting second year, growing the capability of the ICT industry for the benefit of the whole of the UK".