5G and the smart city

Posted November 20, 2020

written by Tracy Di Maio, ISSY MEDIA

The IoRL project was going to be technically discussed into deep during a full day workshop due on 26th October. Given the medium-long term involvement of the city of Issy-les-Moulineaux and ISEP, and bearing in mind the devotion of our city to innovation and exposure to international projects, we wanted to foresee an additional session at the end of the day to wrap up on the IoRL project and share the outcome from our perspective.

Also, this event made the link with the demonstration of the lifi device leaning on 5G prior to the BMSB 2020 event taking place some days ahead, end of October, again at ISEP premises.

Objective

The objective of the Round Table was to wrap up after a full day workshop dedicated to the IoRL project that took place online. In particular, we wanted to draw conclusions and share these on the part of the project linked to Issy-Les-Moulineaux whereby ISEP, Issy Media and the ‘Musée Français de la Carte à Jouer’ were actively involved.

Participants

There were 5 speakers in total who physically attended and intervened at ISEP premises, except for Mr Bienaimé (5GPPP) who connected remotely:

Eric Legale, General Director at Issy Media: he made the introduction to the conference by giving a quick background on the project. He illustrated its aim to improve li-fi and mentioned the 20 international partners involved, some examples of how li-fi was deployed amongst a few partners (practical ones were shared on the metro in Madrid, buildings in United Kingdom and supermarkets in China) and sponsors. He also introduced the other speakers.
Dr Xun Zhuang, Professor and Researcher at ISEP: he explained how ISEP actively took part of the project and mentioned how IoRL was part of the 5G projects co-financed by the European Union.
Denis Butaye, Director of the “Musée Français de la Carte à Jouer” : he focused on the deployment of li-fi within the Museum. He explained how the architecture of the Museum made it very hard to set up a network connection within its walls and hence how the idea of using lifi was the good solution to improve visitors’ experience, making it enhanced, personalised and more comfortable.
Jean-Pierre Bienaimé, General Secretary of 5GPPP: he gave an overview of the 5G deployment in Europe.
Jean-Pierre Casara, Head of 5G projects at Orange, shared a view on 5G from the network operator perspective.

We are satisfied with the attendance of the conference. There were 12 people physically present in the meeting room (Florent Aziosmanoff – Living Art, Pierre Ferrer – Pferrer Conseil, Ariel Gomez – Smart City Mag, Xavier Mazingue-Desailly – IXemel, Patricia Morshedi, Ioana Ocnarescu -Strate Design, Johan Roirand – Metropole Advisory, Benoît Rolland – Orange, some ISEP students).

Pictures

Below are two pictures of the speakers (the first one clearly shows the IoRL logo, the second one shows all speakers at once however the logo is less visible) and two of the audience :

How did it work

The organisation of the conference was more demanding than usual due to the current COVID19 situation.

First assessment

As a first step we visited the ISEP premises to make our first thoughts in terms of practical organization. We estimated that the meeting room could welcome up to a maximum of 60-70 people (bearing in mind the minimum space to respect between one and the other for sanitary reasons) and we established what marketing material was required.

Technical set up

As for the technical set up of the conference, this was also a little complex. We had to find a solution to cover both the facts that the audience of the IoRL online workshop were English speaking and connected remotely from multiple locations, whilst the Round Table was going to be held in French by people both physically present and not. On top of that, we wanted the conference to be transmitted live with English subtitles. We therefore reached out on one side to Issy TV and on the other to Ubiqus (a service provider we had previously used accommodating simultaneous translation). All parties were aware of the urgency to set this up and a solution was found quite quickly after a number of phone and email exchanges centralised by Issy Media : it was established that Ubiqus would make available 2 interpreters from their own premises and these would be connected to a remotely located real time transcriptor. Issy TV would be in charge of picking on the transcription flow in order to show it live on screen during the conference.

We initially wished to transmit the session live using Microsoft Teams however we ended up transmitting via Zoom because ISEP was supporting this channel. We had 2 laptops : one to support and project the slides, the other to moderate the Zoom meeting. We also had an Ipad at the welcome table to confirm the attendance of enrolled people as they arrived onsite.

Other than the technical set up we had to foresee sanitary measures: we had 3 pots of hydroalcoholic gel, an additional hands free distributor provided by ISEP just close to the reception table with the masks exposed distantly one from the other.

Invitations

Invitations were made available and sent on 3 ends. They were the result of combined efforts between ISEP and Issy Media : indeed, ISEP designed the invitation and drafted its content whilst Issy Media created the online Eventbrite for people to enroll to the conference (https://www.eventbrite.fr/e/billets-quels-seront-les-usages-de-la-5g-pour-les-smart-cities-125521870293)

The invitation and link were sent out on 3 ends :

ISEP who sent it to their own contacts
Issy Media who made it available on its social network (LinedIn page of Issy Media, Facebook page of So Digital and retweeted on Issy Media website
Adam Kapovits from the IoRL project who added the invitation to the agenda of the IoRL workshop of the same day

Picture of the preparation (technical set up and audio test exercise) :

Picture of the decoration of the room:

Marketing material

We produced the following material :

Masks with the IoRL logo : we ordered 100 of them as we counted a maximum of 70 people physically present in the room and took an extra marge for staff and just in case
2 identical kakemonos which we played one at the entrance of the campus and one just outside the conference room
100 flyers of the event
2 banners we planned to install at each side of the speakers’ stand (we ended up using only one as the other could not be captured by the camera)
a consolidated presentation including all slides to support the speakers’ speech (only Dr Xun and Mr Bienaimé provided these)

Flyer web link: https://bmsb2020.isep.fr/pdf/flyer-final-jpc-oled.pdf