Very successful Celtic Event 2007 and Celtic Call 5 Information Day

From 22 to 23 February, the Celtic Event in Berlin provided a glimpse of the future of telecommunications. Under the title “Facing the Challenges of Ubiquitous ICT – The Next Generation of Communication“, 200 international high-level experts discussed the latest Celtic results.

The Celtic Event was opened by Peter Möckel, managing director of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories. Mr Möckel stressed the importance of collaborative R&D for Deutsche Telekom. He showed how results from collaborative European projects, like, for example, Celtic project VIDIOS, are supporting the development of the company’s services and products. He said: “Celtic is the ideal programme to close the gap between short-term product development and long-term research.”

Another keynote was given by Dr. Volkmar Dietz, head of the communications technologies division at BMBF, the German Ministry of Education and Research. He presented an outlook on the new German research programme ICT 2020, which will strengthen the European orientation and the importance of telecommunication in German ICT research. Dr. Dietz announced the 100GET initiative on developing a 100-gigabit Ethernet network, in order to push back the US dominance in this sector. 100GET is a Celtic Call 4 project and will be launched in mid-2007.

In the parallel exhibition, 17 Celtic projects presented their results. As part of the one-billion-euro programme, 34 projects have already been started since 2003, and 18 more projects are expected to be launched this year. Currently, there are about 350 companies from 29 countries involved in Celtic projects, almost one-third of them small and medium-sized enterprises. By the end of 2007, Mr Jimenez expects that the number of participating companies will have reached 450. He is convinced that “these industry-driven projects will help Europe to stay on top of the technological development in ICT”.

At the Celtic Information Day a number of challenging new project ideas were presented. Several project partners are still looking for additional companies to join a possible consortium.

An important aspect that was also discussed during the event was the preparation of project proposals for the EU Framework Programme 7 and for Celtic. As both calls run largely in parallel it was recommended that a suitable proposal may be submitted to FP7 and, as a proposal outline also to Celtic. This could largely increase the success probability of a proposal in case it may not be accepted in FP7 but may still fly as Celtic proposal.

All presentations held at the Celtic Event can be downloaded under: http://www.celtic-initiative.org/Events/Celtic-Event07-Berlin/programme-1.asp

Presentations of the Information Day are accessible at: http://www.celtic-initiative.org/Events/InfoDay-07/programme.asp