Science and fun at Future Internet Conference Week

The city of Turnhout sent two people to examine examples of Living Labs, to gain more insight in setting up a living lab themselves, focusing on healthcare. “Our visit was very worthwhile,” claims Kelly Verheyen.

"We are preparing a Living Lab ourselves. We are looking for partners and best practices. This day offered us a great deal of inspiration and a wealth of good examples.”

Gerbrand Nootens (UGent) was also mainly interested in Living Labs and SmartCities. “This is not really my domain, so it took some time before I caught on. When they started discussing real projects, that’s when it got interesting for me.” Nootens also visited the exposition and was impressed by a number of 3D-presentations.

Professor Kim of the Seoul University (South-Korea) took a number of his colleagues along to gauge the state of research in Western Europe. After just two days, he found it too early for final conclusions although he was surprised to hear that Europe is still discussing study curricula on IPv6.

“That’s something we dealt with a couple of years ago.”

Being first time visitors, professor Kim and his colleagues were very much charmed by the city of Ghent. They were keenly looking forward to being on the boat trip Tuesday evening, bringing them from the Bijloke site to the Handelsbeurs, where the Future internet Conference Week dinner took place.

Tomasz Zernicki of Telcordia Poland visited Ghent for the first time, but doubted he would have much time for tourism.

“Future Internet is really broad as a theme. It can discuss physical networks, higher layers in the network, or even multimedia. This makes it exciting yet complex. It’s also quite hard to choose what sessions to attend.”

 “Visiting Ghent? I’d love to, but I’m bound to get complaints from my wife for not bringing her here,” jokes Jean-Christophe Deprez of Charleroi research organization CETIC.

“CETIC sent a number of employees here scattered over the week. There will always be one of us around. CETIC is involved in a number of European research initiatives, so our interest is broad this week. For myself, I was especially looking out for information on Living Labs, that’s something we have little experience with in Wallonia.”

Frederic Mortier of SPF Finance was especially impressed by the I-Scan-project. “That offered a good overview of what local authorities are working on. It inspires to work out the same kind of initiatives for our federal government, or all intermediate levels. In our service (land register), we are great producers of data. It’s quite interesting to see how other governments are dealing with the same challenges.”

(José Delameilleure)

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