Recently, the deployment of vertical services at the edge of communication networks and the effective design of network slices have attracted a great deal of attention. Few real implementations however exist and several aspects still need to be investigated in this realm.

This talk will describe the NFV-based testbed that was developed within the EU 5G-TRANSFORMER project, implementing a road safety and a video streaming service at the edge of the network and leveraging heterogeneous wireless connectivity. We will present the main hurdles we faced, the solutions we found, and experimental results. Additionally, the talk will highlight some critical aspects related to efficient and automized service deployment in NFV-based systems, and how they can be modeled and optimized.

1G was a great step creating the vision of ubiquitous voice telephony, but we needed 2G to deliver (like international roaming). 3G was a great step towards ubiquitous cellular data, but we needed 4G to fix the challenges. 5G will be an infliction point in bringing cellular to new applications. However, do we need to use the 5G system to understand what is really needed, and have to wait for 6G as a fix? And is this fix required to make the Tactile Internet a reality?

As we see 5G unfold, expectations on the economic and societal impact are very high. Many new opportunities shall emerge for new business opportunities. Besides Gb/s data rates, true NFV-enabled services, the Tactile Internet is the most highlighted promise of 5G, enabling remote control applications over cellular. We shall review opportunities and their technical requirements and some research results. This helps to build an understanding to detect missing pieces.

With the (mobile) Internet we engineers have shaped the political landscape. How can take on responsibility towards an envisioned “Digital Democracy”? It might be the next wild and open opportunity for entrepreneurship and change in company economics as well as politics.

Security in the enterprise in a key requirement for running businesses today – it’s become a boardroom conversation in many companies. The recent increase in the rate and the severity of cyber-attacks has forced organizations across the board to rethink their security strategy and ensure data security at the highest levels. Almost 43% of all global companies have been experienced a breach and close to 66% take months or sometime even up to a year to recognize that they have been breached. We have seen many high profile attacks in recent times, the impact of which is profound – major sites going down because of DDoS attacks, customer credit and debit card information being stolen, millions of email accounts being swiped, insiders hacking and accessing sensitive information, and so on. It’s become extremely important for the network to intercept and secure the enterprise. This talk will focus on the ways the network can be leveraged to achieve this outcome.

I will give a perspective on rigorous design and verification, by reflecting on some design and verification efforts I have worked on with my collaborators over the years. I will recall our experiences using

1. SLAM and Static Driver Verifier: A program verifier applied to check if Windows drivers satisfy safety properties,
2. P: A design language for asynchrony, used to model and do code-generation for asynchronous systems,
3. Trusted Cloud: a system for confidential computing in Azure, and
4. HDEF: a system for heterogeneous extraction of entities from heterogeneous data by combining program synthesis and machine learning.

I will draw lessons learned from these experiences both from foundational and practical perspectives.