Message from TFIPP Secretariat

Mitsuji Matsumoto, Prof., Dr. Waseda University, Member, IEICE Standards Committee Member, Steering Committee, 2013/2014 ITU Kaleidoscope Conference

　ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference was successfully held at the Clock Tower Memorial Hall, Kyoto University on April 22-25, 2013. More than 180 delegates from 22 countries joined the conference. About 20 people used the remote participation facilities. The conference included the three days lecture presentation and one day Workshop to discuss the standardization of educational aspects. Here, I would like to introduce the overview of the Conference.

Summary

　ITU Kaleidoscope Conference is an annual international conference where the telecommunication Standardization engineers and researchers of academia such as universities and research institutes join to discuss the state-of-the-art technology together, which started in May 2008 and had the fifth this year as shown in Table 1. This year's theme was "Building Sustainable Communities".

Table 1 Brief history of ITU Kaleidoscope Conference

　The Conference topics cover not only ICT aspects, but also socioeconomic service issues. The wide range of discussions for the future standardization in the coming ten years was carried out. This year's conference had 99 papers on submission basis, and 30 papers were selected through the peer-reviewed paper selection process. Kaleidoscope 2013 was supported by NICT, NTT, KDDI, Hitachi, OKI, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Huawei Japan, Telkom SA allowing ITU to award cash prizes to the best papers, and Research in Motion where two BlackBerry PlayBooks were donated. Especially, the success of the Conference also is owed to the host, the MIC and to Kyoto University for their excellent logistics. See the details at http://www.itu.int/ en/ITU-T/academia/kaleidoscope/2013/ Pages/programme.aspx/.

Program

　At the opening ceremony, the welcome greeting was given by Prof. Hiroshi Matsumoto, President of Kyoto University. Successively, the opening address was given by Mr. Malcolm Johnson, Director of ITU Telecommunication Standardization, and the inaugural speech was given by Mr. Hideo Fuseda, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, representing host organizations in Japan.
　The Keynote Speech took place on the first day and the second day. On the first day following the opening ceremony, the Keynote Speech entitled “Digital Library for Creative and Sustainable Society” was given by Professor Emeritus Makoto Nagao, Kyoto University. The Keynote Speech on the second day was given by Prof. Akihiro Nakao, The University of Tokyo, with the title of “Deeply Programmable Network; Emerging Technologies for Network Virtualization and Software Defined Network (SDN)”.
　Then, the program of Lecture Presentation was divided into eight Sessions including one Poster Session. In the seven Lecture Sessions, 18 papers were presented. Relevant recommendations and conclusions derived from the Sessions, as drafted and presented by the Session Chairs, were published online in the program for the Wrap up Session on the Web. Best Paper nominators of the eight Sessions were already included in these Sessions.
　In the Concluding Session, each Chair of 8 Sessions, introduced the summary of each Session. Subsequently, the award ceremony of the Best Paper Award and Young Author Recognition Certificates was set up. The Best Paper Award was given to the three prize winners. At the Young Scientist Award, ICT-related textbooks were awarded as prizes. The selected papers are listed below.

Table 2 Best Paper Prize Winners in the Conference

Table 3 Young Author Recognition Certificate Winners

　All accepted papers are included in the Conference Proceedings, which can be freely downloaded on the Kaleidoscope 2013 Webpage.
　Three invited papers are entitled “Visible Light Communication Using Sustainable LED Lights” (by Shinichiro Haruyama, Keio University, Japan), “Hybridcast: a new media experience by integration of broadcasting and broadband” (by Hisayuki Ohmata, Masaru Takechi, Shigeaki Mitsuya, Kazuhiro Otsuki, Akitsugu Baba, Kinji Matsumura, Keigo Majima, Shunji Sunasaki, NHK, Japan) and “Open Standards: A Shrinking Public Space in the Future Network Economy?” (by William Melody, LIRNE.NET, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark).
　The event included two Special Sessions: the third edition of the “Jules Verne’s corner”(JVc), and the Workshop on “Responsible Innovation, Value Sensitive Design and Standardization for Smart Metering in The Context of Smart Grid”. The Sessions were well attended and appreciated by Kaleidoscope participants. The purpose of JVc, is to create the effect of the technology and the creation of technology would be introduced in the future to share thoughts that would support the development of communications concepts for the latter half of the 21st century. This year's theme was "Technological Tsunami: Imagining A World without Communications". Finally, Mr. Malcolm Johnson, Director of TSB mentioned this Kaleidoscope conference was meaningful and successful. It was introduced that the next meeting would be scheduled to be held in St. Petersburg, Russia. Furthermore, he said thanks to the Japanese organization of Kaleidoscope for their cooperation.

Side Event : Workshop on Standardization Education:

　The Showcase (April 22-23) and Workshop on Standardization Education (April 25) were provided as the side events. (1)Joint ITU-IEICE-CTIF-GISFI Workshop on Education about Standardization
　It was organized by ITU, IEICE, Aalborg University’s Center for TeleInFrastruktur(CTIF), and the Global ICT Standardization Forum for India (GISFI). This Workshop on Education about Standardization was held at Kyoto University on April 25, 2013. 45 participants from 11 countries joined the event. The objective of the Workshop was to collect elements to assist in the creation of guidelines for the Syllabus on Education about Standardization.
　At the Opening Plenary Session, Prof. Tetsuya Miki, representing the IEICE, Japan, and Prof. Ramjee Prasad, representing both CTIF and GISFI, delivered welcome remarks, recognizing the important role of international standards playing in the Information and Communication Technology(ICT) field, and the key contribution which academia makes by producing standards-minded graduates, . Mr. Malcolm Johnson gave his inaugural speech mentioning the ITU’s effort to increase the participation of academia in the work of the Union. With that in mind and with the aim of advancing standards education worldwide, this workshop was organized.
　Some initiatives were introduced by Japan, Korea, Macedonia and India. The attendees from government, business, standardization, and research sectors also listened to organizations supporting education on standardization including ICES, IEEE, EURAS and the Korean Standards Association. (2) Second Meeting of TSB Director's Ad hoc Group on Education for Standardization
　Following the joint workshop, the second meeting of TSB Director's Ad hoc Group on Education about Standardization which was established last year has been carried out under the chair of the TSB Director Mr. Malcolm Johnson. For education of standardization, ITU has been carrying out activities of the simulated conferences, etc. that worked with Kaleidoscope, to promote the standardization activities of the current area of interest. As a form of development in this activity, an ad hoc meeting was established as a Study Group of ITU-T standardization, the first ad hoc meeting was held in Denmark, Aalborg University in October last year. Mr Malcolm Johnson stressed the importance of and need for coordination among all relevant stakeholders that would greatly assist in the development of consistent, high-quality curricula for education on standardization. Isolated initiatives and experiments abound in this field, it is clear that the TSB Director’s Ad hoc Group on Education about Standardization (AHG-SE) was created as an inclusive platform to facilitate these discussions.
　In the ad hoc meeting, IEICE presented the questionnaire survey results to the universities and companies in Japan. In this regards, it was proposed to promote young students to increase understanding of international standardization and their motivation. In this regards, ITU proposed that ITU should support the young students to understand the international standardization. It was pointed that the comments submitted this time should be sent to the ITU secretariat by early September and it was decided that members should exchange their views through the Webpage to understand the activities of this group
(See it at http://www.itu.int/go/standardseducation/).
　After the meeting of both committees for International Standards Education, IEICE and IIEEJ will jointly start to study the societies related to the "evaluation method and evaluation criteria of the skills required for standardized human resources". Please visit the Final Report of this meeting at http://itu.int/go/standardseducation.

Mariusz Glqbowski, Prof. Dr., Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland Vice Chair, IEICE Europe Section

　It is our great pleasure to inform you of the coming academic event organized by IEICE Europe Section, “2014 IEICE Information and Communication Technology Forum (briefly, 2014 ICTF). This forum will encourage the collaboration of researchers between academia and industry. The Forum will gather the researchers, Professors, PhD students and experts from industry to exchange ideas and discuss major trends and challenges in ICT.

Summary of 20134IEICE-ICTF

　The 2014 ICTF (See it at http://www.ictf2014.pl/) will focus on presenting trends in the Future Communication Technologies and Applications. It will be held on May 28-30, 2014 in the beautiful city of Poznan in Poland.
　The Forum will be comprised of three days sessions, divided into blocks based on the subject. Keynote talks will be provided to address the challenges to the next-generation communication networking technologies and applications.
　The topics of interests will be grouped in three areas:
--“Communications” covering NGAN, NGN, wireless, optical, Green communications, IOT, Smart Grid
--“Electronics” covering DSP, image processing, coding, microwave devices/applications, low-power design, biomedical engineering
--“Engineering Sciences and Fundamentals” covering theory and application of mathematical systems sciences, non-linear phenomena, cryptography/information security, coding theories, VLSI systems applications, CAD, acoustics, healthcare and medical applications

Call for Papers

　The organizing committee of the 2014 ICTF invites you to submit original high quality papers to the forum. All accepted contributions will appear as full papers in the conference proceedings and will be published on the IEICE’s i-Scover based Digital Library. All paper registrations and submissions will be handled electronically via EDAS Conference System. The important dates for the forum are:
Full paper due: December 10, 2013
Notification of acceptance: February 10, 2014
Final camera-ready manuscript due: March 3, 2014
　The ICTF will also serve as a convenient “research introduction” function of the Section for general IEICE members to foster mutual collaborations. The 2014 ICTF will be organized by the committees in Table 4.

Table 4 Committees for the 2014 ICTF