The first round of EIT ICT Labs Master School students are now preparing for their Master thesis, the minor thesis in Innovation & Entrepreneurship as well as finding a suitable organization, company or startup for their internship period that will conclude the two year programme in ICT Innovation.
To support them and to provide them with the opportunities of the partner ecosystem a special day was held at the Stockholm CLC to present the research projects of Future Networking Solutions, lead by Henrik Abramowicz, and a view from Ericsson on where industry is heading and why they engage in the EIT ICT Labs activities.
The activities in the field of Future Networking Solutions, that dominates the Stockholm Node, contains after a merger with the projects relating to Internet Technology and Architecture, a wide range of topics. The main challenges are to find more cost effective and energy efficient networking solutions to meet the demands of increasing traffic volume as the users wish to be connected all the time, using any terminal and distribute rich media content. In particular the focus is on scalability of access networks, integrating Internet of Things into the public network, making use of Software Defined Networks and Virtualisation in the backbone networks and improving the performance of interaction between networks and applications.
Neiva Lundqvist, Ericsson, shared the challenges of the Mobile Backhaul activity and Sibel Tombaz, KTH presented the energy efficient aims of the project 5GrEEn – towards green 5G mobile networks. The Mobile Services Labs could present how research carried out also was resulting in commercial services with the creation of Pluricast, an EIT ICT Labs supported startup. Other new business are being created in the area connected to Mobile Visual Content, presented by Stefan Karlsson, KTH.
The Adoptive Streaming project was already familiar to many students that have participated in the recent research studies trying to identify what compression and quality users are willing to accept in order to be able to download content on the move and without delay.
The link between research and industry was highlighted by Ulf Wahlberg, VP Industry and Research Relations at Ericsson. Out of a total of 24 000 employees at Ericsson, 14 500 are employed in R&D activities in EU countries. Ericsson engages in the integration of education, research and business for many reasons. One of them is that research programs often provide good platforms for standard contributions and standards that are open and global ifacilitates business innovation and growth.
The EIT ICT Labs setup is brilliant as it integrates education which ensures the future research and competence base, said Ulf Wahlberg. The interaction with industry is very important and we are engaged to secure competence, to create an attractive environment for talent and to stimulate technology transfer.
Konrad Tollmar, KTH coordinator of the Master School programme in ICT Innovation for EIT ICT Labs concluded with a Q&A session on the formalities of the thesis work and internships. The students were assured that there are good matchmaking opportunities in the Stockholm Node network and could take the opportunity to learn more at two project thesis fairs organized the same week – one at KTH and another one at the Kista Science Tower with several other large, small and medium sized companies.
