What to expect from NTT Research ‘Upgrade’ 2023
For those that enjoy a bit of nostalgia, NTT stands for Nippon Telegraph & Telephone [Corporation] and the organisation – 日本電信電話公社 – has been around since the very early 1950s, when it was first established as a state monopoly.
Not usually on the Computer Weekly Developer Network’s (CWDN) annual conference roster, the CWDN team has already packed its bags in readiness for NTT Research’s global innovation summit.
The emotively named ‘NTT Upgrade’ is billed as a two-day event to analyse key enterprise software and cloud technology innovations around privacy, precision medicine, optical devices and the digital workplace.
NTT Research is of course a division of NTT and the Upgrade 2023 NTT Research Summit is in-person event on March 15-16, 2023 – and the event itself takes place at the NTT Experience Center (XC) and the Metreon, both in San Francisco.
The company – which Tweets at @NttResearch and @GlobalNTT – says that this year’s summit is organised under the theme ‘scaling the future’ and Day 1 will focus on the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) initiative.
Day 2 will feature sessions on breakthroughs in data privacy, precision cardiology, nonlinear optics, advanced encryption technologies, the digital workplace and the network edge.
What is IOWN?
As a technology notion, concept or vision, IOWN is a proposition (created by NTT) to enable high-speed, large-capacity communication and information processing infrastructures. It is hoped to ‘transcend current limitations’ while addressing the growing concerns on energy consumption of IT.
The company’s research and R&D teams span both the USA and Japan – the event keynotes will cover breakthroughs in basic research as well as a vision for future innovations.
Also, part of this event, moderator Paul Rand (host of the University of Chicago’s Big Brains podcast) will guide a speaker panel through a discussion of how to serve society through the pursuit of ideas with possible applications in business. This session will explore the journey of ideas from basic research to proof-of-concept and prototyping to expanding and potentially world-changing reach.
Wider session selection
Other sessions include presentations on privacy-preserving aggregate statistics to examine how modern businesses can meet the challenge of gathering necessary aggregate user statistics without being exposed to the personal data of individuals.
This talk will present new cryptographic solutions for safely performing this collection while simultaneously protecting against possible malicious users. Underlying these potential applications is a technology known as ‘zero knowledge on distributed data’.
Also here we will find ‘Probabilistic estimation of cardiovascular bio digital twin parameters’ by Iris Shelly, research scientist, Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab, NTT Research.
The MEI Lab aims to realise precision cardiology through the development of patient-specific digital twins. While the fundamental framework is a mechanistic model of cardiovascular physiology, an individual patient’s cardiovascular system is a unique and complex interaction of many variables.
Digital workplace sessions will examine how technology has empowered people to be more informed, mobile, collaborative and generally more productive while expecting their experience with technology and services to be compelling and rewarding.
Cutting edge, edge
Last (to mention here, but not least) let’s also make note of edge computing sessions. This event will feature presentations related to infrastructure and operations to provide practical use cases that leverage emerging edge technologies (e.g. edge computing, IoT, P5G, computer vision and location tracking) that support critical productivity, efficiency and performance needs.
Overall then, NTT appears to have presented a quite different event with specifically clarified use cases detailed in deep detail.
How these technologies play out in practical engineering terms for software application development professionals, cloud architects and data scientists is what we will be looking out for – and for a chance to shake a few (appropriately sanitised) hands in the now back to in-person world of conferences that we have of course all missed over the last three years.
