Autumn 2020 virtual conference: All video recordings in one place

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020
Held on 12th - 16th October 2020. 5 days of Physics goodness on

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Watch on YouTube: Playlist "Let's get Physical" conference, Autumn 2020

Opening Keynote

Prof Tim Whitley, BT, MD Applied Research and MD of ‘Adastral Park’

"Purposeful Innovation in the age of digital transformation"

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OPTICS

The full OPTICS session

 Full recording of Opening Keynote, Optics presentations and forum discussion

 

Recordings of individual Speakers

Prof Andrew Ellis, Aston University
"An 'academic' career in photonics"
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Ardel Iddin, ADVA
"Total Internal Reflections"
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Neil Parkin, BT, Optics Team

"Optical Research at BT"
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WIRELESS

The full WIRELESS session

 Full recording of  Wireless presentations and forum discussion

 

Recordings of individual Speakers

Maria Cuevas, BT, Mobile & 5G team

"Wireless Technologies: Emerging Challenges and Opportunities"

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Francis Mullany, Nokia Bell Labs, E2E Networking & Service Automation Lab 

"Why Can't Wireless Hardware Be more like Software?"

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Prof Robert Piechocki, University of Bristol 

"5G networks, self-driving vehicles, and digital twins”

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PGR SPOTLIGHT DAY 

The full PGR Spotlight session

Full recording of  the PGR Spotlight day

Recordings of individual Speakers

Opening Keynote

Richard Burguete, NPL, Postgraduate Institute Director

"The Postgraduate Institute of Measurement Science: Celebrating 5 Years of Collaboration "

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Lightning Talks

Frank Carver, University of Suffolk

"What do Software Developers Know About Sustainability?"

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Kakia Chatsiou, University of Essex 

"Political text classification using Neural Networks"

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Eleanor Crane, UCL/IBM

"From two qubit entangling gates to quantum algorithms, and the steps in-between"

no slides available

Yi-Tun Lin, University of East Anglia

"Physically Plausible Spectral Reconstruction" 

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Daniel O'Connor, UCL

Quantum annealing for network optimisation

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Hanna Steventon, University of  Suffolk

Smarter Suffolk: Sensors and data for public services

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Closing Keynote

Prof Mike Payne, Cambridge University, Department of Physics, The Cavendish Laboratory

"Reflections on a career in science"

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QUANTUM

The full Quantum session 

Full recording of the Quantum presentations and forum discussion

Recordings of individual Speakers

Prof Kai Bongs, University of Birmingham

"Quantum Technology - Sensors that Change the World"

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Cathy White, BT, Quantum Technology Research Team

"Quantum Technologies"

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Marco Menchetti, BT, Quantum Technology Research Team

"Atomic Clocks: The most precise instruments in the world"

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Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, CEO Nu Quantum

"Quantum, an Industry Perspective"

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DATA SCIENCE & AI

The full Data Science & AI session

Full recording of the Data Science & AI presentations and forum discussion

Recordings of individual Speakers

Detlef Nauck, BT, Head of AI & Data Science

"Data Science and AI at BT"

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Final Keynote

Prof Jesse Thaler

MIT, Director, NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions

"Collision Course - Artificial Intelligence meets Fundamental Physics"

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Maria Cuevas, BT: Speaker at our virtual Autumn 2020 conference "Let's get Physical"

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
WIRELESS

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020 - 5 days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Maria Cuevas is the head of the research core networks and services team in BT’s Research and Technology organisation. 

She has 17 years’ experience in the telecoms operator business, having held positions in design, architecture and research organisations. She has taken part in transformational projects in BT, including the development of an all-IP network architecture or the design of the first converged residential voice product offered by BT to their customers, amongst others. 

She has also participated in standards organisation, including ETSI and is a regular speaker at public conferences. At present, her team focuses on the evolution of 5G technologies to ensure that key requirements like convergence are supported by the next generation of telecoms networks, to ensure that operators can offer an excellent and seamless quality of experience to their customers.
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Wireless Technologies: Emerging challenges and opportunities
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Francis Mullany, Nokia Bell Labs: Speaker at our virtual Autumn 2020 conference "Let's get Physical"

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
WIRELESS

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020. Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Dr Francis (Frank) Mullany is an end-to-end communications research strategist with Nokia Bell Labs.  He is fascinated by the connection between innovative research and real-world impact. A key question for him is, how can communications technologies change the world for the better.

He received B.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electronic Engineering from University College Dublin, National University of Ireland, in 1992 and 1998, respectively.  In 1998, Frank joined Bell Labs, first with the Wireless Research Laboratory in the UK and then helped to establish, in 2004, Bell Labs Ireland in Dublin.  Between 2006 and 2013, he built up the RF Antennas and Front-End Technologies department.  

In 2013, Frank established the Internet of Things research program, before moving across to the CTO organization to lead Network Compliance, Reliability, Security and Corporate Standards organization in 2014.  He was also the acting site leader for Bell Labs Ireland that year.  In 2015, he returned to Bell Labs Research to take up his current strategy role, now with the E2E Networking & Service Automation Lab.

Why Can’t Wireless Hardware Be More Like Software?

Virtualization, programmability, cloudification, software-defined networking … all key buzzwords for the on-going revolution in communication networks.  But underpinning all that software flexibility and scalability is the physical reality of the underlying hardware.  In particular, hardware for wireless access networks often stays stubbornly rigid and static, despite years of work on tunability, software-defined radio, and cognitive radio.  Why is that?

This talk explores the underlying physical constraints of wireless networking and the challenge they pose for increased flexibility and agility in RF and baseband hardware.   Various technology approaches are assessed against the harsh realities of those challenges, providing pointers to the future of RF hardware tunability and baseband agility.

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Thought Leadership event, NG-CDI series: Prof Ning Wang, Dr Charalampos Rotsos, Peter Willis on “Intent-Based Networking”

2nd in a series on "NG-CDI: Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure" 

Thought Leadership events overview

Video replay: NG-CDI Archive

Speakers

Prof Ning Wang
Networks University of Surrey
5G Centre

Dr Charalampos Rotsos
Lecturer in Computer Networks 
University of Lancaster

Peter Willis, BT

Title: “Intent-Based Networking”

Date: 3rd November 2020, 13:00 - 14:00

Professor Ning Wang (Networks University of Surrey 5G Centre), Dr Charalampos Rotsos (Lecturer in Computer Networks, University of Lancaster) and BT’s Peter Willis (Software-Based Networks), presented “Intent-Based Networking”. 

This is the second in the series of thought leadership events, sharing the NG-CDI vision of a virtualised and integrated service infrastructure.

Presentation Overview

Increasing the rate of delivery and value of new services will depend on smarter ways to capture customer needs and translate these into service definition and delivery. The research is investigating the capture of customer intents in machine-readable ways. The research covers not only service creation and DevOps, but also methods to maintain or re-negotiate service levels in real-time in the face of changing network dynamics, using autonomous distributed agent architectures.

Background 

The aim of NG-CDI is to ensure that the UK remains the leading digital economy. The existing network is recognised as a critical piece of national infrastructure, never more so than under the current lock-down, which has made very apparent the nation’s dependence on the network. As the major telecommunications infrastructure provider in the UK, BT takes responsibility for continuing to build this infrastructure fit for the future.     

New technological opportunities present the opportunity to transform the speed of definition, deployment and management of new services. Autonomic technologies will enable the growing scale and complexity to operate economically. Since the start of NG-CDI, BT has initiated automation programmes across the whole business, and has begun the deployment of 5G networks to make services more seamless and ubiquitous. These initiatives provide a range of key exploitation routes for the work of the project, working against a range of timescales.     

Over the course of the next few months, we will be holding a series of thought leadership events to provide the NG-CDI vision of a virtualised and integrated service infrastructure (also see pdf)

• Service Assurance & Infrastructure Management (8th December; 11:00 – 12:00) Register here

• Anomaly detection (January 2021) tba

• Culture and governance (February 2021) tba

• Ambitious deep learning, resource optimisation (March 2021) tba

Thought Leadership event, NG-CDI series: Professor Nicolas Race on "Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure (NG-CDI)"

1st in a series on "NG-CDI: Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure" 

Thought Leadership events overview

Video replay: NG-CDI Archive

Prof Nicolas Race

Date: 7th October 2020, 12:00 - 13:00

Speaker: Professor Nicolas Race, Network Systems, University of Lancaster. Principal Investigator for NG-CDI.

Introduced by: Stephen Cassidy. System Science, BT Applied Research.

Title: "Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure (NG-CDI)"

The UK’s Digital Infrastructure is critical to the commercial and social activities and success of the country. It is essential that this infrastructure continues to be world leading. To keep ahead we need an infrastructure which responds quickly to changing needs, and at minimum cost. 

Stephen Cassidy

The creativity of the whole ecosystem will give rise to opportunities that we cannot predict. This means that services need to be configured in software rather than hardware to reduce the barriers to experimentation and scaling. Distributed autonomic technologies offer the opportunity to manage the expanding scale and complexity, and support faster ways to assess opportunities and risks, make decisions, and simplify service delivery. The operation of such an infrastructure will require new skills, cultures and practices.

Nick introduced and described the research underway to deliver these aims. He described the approaches being taken and how the different aspect of the architecture fit together.

Alistair Poustie, Rushmere Technology: Speaker at the Optics Forum of our Autumn 2020 virtual conference

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
OPTICS

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020: Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Dr Alistair Poustie is CEO and co-founder of Rushmere Technology, an optoelectronics company developing innovative products for the optical communications industry. 

He has been active in optical comms for 30 years, working for blue chip and startup companies: BT, Corning, CIP Technologies, Huawei and Rushmere. His areas of technical expertise include optical access systems, photonics hardware technology and optical processing. He has published over 150 technical papers, over 25 patents and has worked on many collaborative R&D projects in the EU, USA and UK. 

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a member of the IEEE and OSA. 

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Prof Andrew Ellis, Aston University: Speaker at our Autumn 2020 virtual conference

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Virtual Conference
OPTICS

Held on 12th - 16th October 2020: Five days of Physics goodness on 

- Optics
- Wireless
- PGR Spotlight day
- Quantum 
- Data Science & AI

Find out more.

Andrew D. Ellis was born in Underwood, U.K., in 1965. He received the B.Sc. degree in physics with a minor in mathematics from the University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K., in 1987. He received the Ph.D. degree in electronic and electrical engineering from The University of Aston in Birmingham, Birmingham, U.K., in 1997 for his study on all optical networking beyond 10 Gbit/s.

He previously worked for British Telecom Research Laboratories as a Senior Research Engineer investigating the use of optical amplifiers and advanced modulation formats in optical networks and the Corning Research Centre as a Senior Research Fellow where he led activities in optical component characterization. From 2003, he headed the Transmission and Sensors Group at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland, where he was also a member of the Department of Physics, University College Cork and his research interests included the evolution of core and metro networks, and the application of photonics to sensing. 

He is now 50th Anniversary Professor of Optical Communications at Aston University where he is also deputy director of the Institute of Photonics Technologies (AiPT), and he holds adjunct professorships from University College Cork (Physics) and Dublin City University (RINCE). He has published over 200 journal papers and over 28 patents in the field of photonics, primarily targeted at increasing capacity, reach and functionality in the optical layer.

Prof. Ellis is a member of the Institute of Physics and a Chartered Physicist and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. He served for 6 years as an associate editor of the journal Optics Express. Prof Ellis has been a member of the Technical Program Committee of ECOC since 2004 and two three year terms on the TPC of OFC. He is currently participating in the organization of ECOC 2019.
Photo credit to Jackie Ellis
LinkedIn

An "academic" career in photonics
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