The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector has a significant weight of the economy at world, EU and Wallonia scales. This sector evolves very quickly and the Internet of tomorrow is a key element in the EU economic strategy. In this context, it is important for companies to keep up with the rapid progress of Internet technologies. Key progresses are made in Cloud Computing, Big Data and the Internet-of-Things (IoT). In the Technological Foundations project, the partners aim at analysing, modelling, classifying and improving the technologies emerging from recent research in Cloud Computing, Big Data and IoT in order to ease the take up for Walloon companies.
In particular, the research group in Electronic Circuits and Systems (ECS) at UCLouvain focuses on the study, implementation and optimization of smart objects and smart sensors for the IoT. Specific attention is devoted to model and reduce their power consumption and their carbon footprint, including their production. Sustainability aspects of the IoT are analysed together with emerging paradigms such as edge computing and embedded machine-learning.
The project Technological Foundations is part of the IDEES FEDER portfolio that aims at advancing ICT solutions developed in Wallonia to better serve the local economy based on the future Internet. IDEES stands for The Internet of Tomorrow for the development of Companies, Economy and Society (Internet de Demain pour développer les Entreprises, l’Économie et la Société in French) and groups four interleaved projects.
1. Technological Foundations as the first project.
2. The goal of the second project is to implement Co-Innovation Processes with companies in order to accelerate the adoption and optimize the benefit of these technologies, within relevant sectors.
3. The third projects deploys Pilot Projects within specific sectors in order to validate the benefit of these new technologies, in several configurations.
4. Finally, a Demonstration Area is implemented in order to inform about the research context, to ease interactions and experimentation, and showcase the developed technological capabilities and research results.