Softwarization Sustaining a Hyper-connected World: en route to 5G

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IEEE NetSoft 2017

The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization

3-7 July 2017, Bologna, Italy

http://sites.ieee.org/netsoft

"Softwarization Sustaining a Hyper-connected World: en route to 5G"

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The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2017) will be held July 3 to 7, 2017 at the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy. IEEE NetSoft is the flagship conference of the IEEE SDN Initiative which aims to address “Softwarization" of networks and systemic trends concerning the convergence of Cloud Computing, Software-Defined Networks, and Network Function Virtualization. 

*** Scope ***

The telecommunications landscape will change radically in the next few years. Pervasive ultra-broadband, programmable networks, and cost reduction of IT systems are paving the way to new services and commoditization of telecommunications infrastructure while lowering entrance barriers for new players and giving rise to new value chains.  

While this results in considerable challenges for service providers, this transformation also brings unprecedented opportunities for the Digital Society and the Digital Economy related to emerging new services and applications.  Examples include Tactile Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, Cloud Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence. 5G will both exploit and accelerate this transformation. 

NetSoft 2017 aims to capture the theme of "Softwarization Sustaining a Hyper-connected World: en route to 5G" and serve as forum for researchers to discuss the latest advances in this area. 

NetSoft 2017 will feature technical paper, keynotes, tutorials, and demos and exhibits from world-leading experts representing operators, vendors, research institutes, open source projects, and academia.

Softwarization goes crowd-funded on Kickstarter

I remember that a few years ago in one of my first keynote at a Conference on SDN-NFV, I argued that SDN-NFV should be dealt together as deeply intertwined with the evolution of Cloud Computing towords the Edge and Fog Computing: all of them in fact are expressions, facets of a profound transformation (softwarization) Telecommunications, and many industrial sectors, with profound socio-cultural implications (not to mention the anthropological ones).

It took a few years, but then this vision has been widely adopted and spread. A next step was to argue that there is a need to develop a new research community and innovation that combines Softwarization with 'A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), through an “Artificially Intelligent Operating System: the increase of flexibility and complexity of future Telecommunications infrastructure will determine on turn a dramatic increase in "complexity" and stringent requirements of security: in my opinion, goals reachable only by "automating operations processes" with use of Machine / Deep-processing thus really making actionable the big data of the networks.

As a matter of fact today we are witnessing a revisited and growing interest on the A.I. (From the network to the Cloud to the terminals), also demonstrated by the investments of OTTS, who quickly realized the "value" is moving rapidly in that direction.

But the most radical leap is to fully realize that this transformation is also synonymous of "commoditization" of ICT, which passes not only through Open Source S / W and H / W (now there are a lot of initiatives in this direction), but also through new paradigms of innovation and entrepreneurial development "collective", such as through the crowd-funding.

Here it is one of the first interesting examples (there are many others): Softwarization is landing on kickstarter , which an approach that goes beyond the " hobby " context :

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/onetswitch/onetswitch-open-source-hardware-for-networking

Obviously not all of these initiatives (which are proposed on kickstarter ) are successful , even if they take the required funding, but in this case the trend, that this represents, will profoundly affect the activities of R & D and innovation for Telecommunications and ICT in the coming years

A convergence of SDN, NFV, ArtificialIntelligence and Cloud-Edge Computing towards 5G

A number of techno-economic drivers are radically changing Telecommunications and ICT scenarios. Service Providers will have to face unprecedented challenges and opportunities posed, for example, by the impressive increase of video traffic, by emerging of new service scenarios (e.g., Tactile Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, Cloud Robotics, A.I.) in a more and more competitive and dynamic market.

In order to face these challenges, Service Providers aim at making their infrastructure efficient, programmable, elastic and agile. In this context, SDN and NFV are two enabling technologies of an overall systemic transformation called IT-zation or Softwarization which is steering the evolution not only of Networks, but also of Service Platforms (e.g., Cloud and Edge Computing architectures) and even future terminals, machines and smart things. Overall it’s a systemic digital business transformation of several industries. 

Some key areas of transformation include: infrastructures architectural delayering, simplifications and optimization of the operational processes (e.g., through orchestrators and new paradigms of OSS/BSS capable of managing the complexity and heterogeneity of SDN and NFV infrastructures), development of flexible and programmable “platforms of platforms”. 

If mastering the software is recognized a must for a successful digital business transformation, standardization of open source software solutions and interfaces is still felt to be a hot issue. Eventually SDN and NFV are lowering the thresholds for new Players to enter in the Telecommunications and ICT ecosystems, so it is likely that Service Providers strategies will be more and more influenced by the dynamics of new Competitors (even Start-ups) entering their business segments, the analogous transformation of the Technology Providers, as well as the regulation rules.

Join us at ICIN2017 to shape the convergence of SDN, NFV, Artificial Intelligence and Cloud-Edge Computing towards 5G.

http://www.icin.co.uk/call.html

Softwarization and Archetypes

Carl Gustav Jung was a well-known Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. His work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, literature, and religious studies.

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including Jungian archetypes, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, and extroversion and introversion. Jungian archetypes are just like “empty forms” which are filled each of us: examples of archetypes are: the mother, the father, the child, the shadow, the wise old man, the anima and the animus. He never limited the number of archetypes, arguing that at different stages of our life other archetypes would emerge and with them interpretations which would be appropriate for these stages.

We know that the acceleration of ICT is likely to impact profoundly our socio-economic system. Not only Telecommunications but also other several industries will be disrupted. Ultra-broadband connectivity, with its low latencies, will embed A.I. pervasively into the reality so that machines and robots will work for us (or better instead of us).  

However the impact of ICT progresses on the collective unconscious and our archetypes has not been fully investigated yet. And this is where we’ll see the most impactful changes of our society, in my opinion. Just remind Jung's description of archetypes: "an image of instinct…a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives...".

Mark Stefik, a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, wrote an interesting book in 1996, titled Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors, (The MIT Press). At the time of the writing of this book the most familiar metaphor for the Internet was the "information superhighway", but he preferred four metaphors, each of which points to an archetype as its source: the Digital Library pointing to "Keeper of Knowledge;" Electronic Mail to "Communicator"; Electronic Marketplace, to "Trader;" and finally, Digital Worlds to "Adventurer." According to Stefik "these archetypes, with their deep and ancient roots in many cultures, represent what we see in others, but they are also parts of ourselves. This shared experience of cultural archetypes is part of what makes us what we are”.

There is another interesting book, from Daniel Taylor, The Healing Power of Stories dealing with the importance of good stories to build a community. Every community has its stories that bind all members together: as in the past the storyteller was an important member of each village. And stories are also full references to archetypes. We all can agree that the Web is playing a very important on that.

Remember also the concept of Meme, introduced by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene”: meme is the equivalent of the gene in the evolution of human culture. Memes can hides combination of archetypes. A successful meme can rapidly spread on the Web.

Current and future ICT will allow creating, programming and spreading on the Web new archetypes for millions of people, thus morphing the collective unconscious of the society. This can influence the culture, the behaviours, the dreams and the needs of people, profoundly. The archaic power of archetypes can transform the society and the industry. 

This is a major impact of Softwarization of Telecommunications, maybe (as ahead) even more than the ones on data privacy, security and the fears that robots will replace humans in several jobs !