The 15th Annual IIT Real-Time Communications Conference 2019, this year expanded its emphasis on the art, science and technology that support the rapidly evolving field of Real-Time Communications. Presentations examined the status of the real-time communications industry, explained emerging technologies and introduced new ideas and methods. Leveraging our unique academic setting, the Conference brought together a diverse range of telecom, IT, web and academic professionals from around the globe.
Videos of this year’s keynote talks as well as the presentation slides provided by many of our speakers are now available! The presentation videos are available as a YouTube playlist on the IIT School of Applied Technology YouTube channel. You can also access the videos and the presentation slides via the Speaker page of the conference website. To access this content from the Speaker page, scroll to an individual presentation and click on the title, to display the presentation abstract. At the bottom of each abstract will be links to view both the presentation slides and the presentation videos.
Highlights of the 2019 Conference
TADHack: On Saturday and Sunday, October 12-13, the IIT RTC Lab hosted TADHack Global‘s Chicago location in IIT’s Kaplan Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship. TADHack, the world’s largest telecom-focused hackathon took place in eight locations that ran in parallel around the world. From the $24K global pot, several prizes were awarded to Chicago location hackers, including Scamdrop (Chicago location winner), Utenz (hSenid Mobile, Chicago location winner and VoIP Innovations global runner-up), and TechBuddy (VoIP Innovations global 3rd place), each of which subsequently gave their demo pitches as part of Alan Quayle’s conference keynote the following Tuesday.
Tutorials: On Monday, October 14, we presented two half-day Tutorials covering some of the most important and timely topics in real-time communications today, taught by leading subject-matter experts. Vail Systems: The morning tutorial on “Enable an App with Voice and SMS”, taught by Alex Haynes and Jake Schmitz of Vail Systems, was a hands-on course that walked developers through the process of using Vail Systems API to create an application that answered a phone call, gathered input from a caller, and responded with a text. Microsoft: In the afternoon, Bernard Aboba of Microsoft gave the “WebRTC/ORTC” Tutorial, which covered the WebRTC 1.0 Candidate Recommendation now shipping in all browsers, as well as related APIs such as Media Capture, Screen Sharing and Content-Hints.
The three-tracked portion of the conference was held on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 15-16.
TADSummit Americas: We were delighted to welcome TADSummit Americas which joined the RTC conference this year as a collocated event. TADSummit is the premier annual thought-leadership event in the programmable telecom space covering areas such as CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, open source telecom software, Telecom APIs, and Cloud Communications. By partnering with TADSummit Americas, we were able to offer our registrants, speakers, and sponsors the opportunity to attend both conferences with a single registration, expanding our unparalleled reputation for delivering the broadest range of unbiased real-time communications content in one amazing event.
Programmable Telecom Networks Track: The “Programmable Telecom Networks” track, chaired by Chris Mayer, was added to this year’s agenda. It examined the rise of a new class of developer – network engineers armed with the ability to programmatically interact with the networks they administer. This track explored programmatic interfaces that enable network engineers to automate the creation of new network services (rapidly accelerating Telco network creation and service activation functions), and to monitor and scale existing network services in real time to meet the rapidly increasing demands of the applications that run on top of them, and offer developers the ability to better integrate their applications with the networks upon which they rely.
WebRTC Track: The WebRTC track, chaired by Arin Sime, was expanded this year to reflect the growth in the use of WebRTC, which has taken the HTML5 standard from the realm of niche telecommunications developers, and introduced it into enterprise application development, making communications technology accessible to a wider range of development teams. The track reviewed the current status of WebRTC from a standards- and market perspective, as well as explored best practices for implementing WebRTC, and examined leading use cases.
The “Internet of Things” track, chaired by Maureen Stillman, was expanded to reflect developments in this burgeoning field. The “NextGen Emergency Communications Services” track, chaired by Mark Fletcher, drew added attention this year as Public Safety communications centers are on the verge of the most meaningful upgrade in the last 40 years. The track highlighted the technology, current projects underway, and new best practices required for Next Generation emergency services. Finally, “IPTComm”, the academic conference whose juried papers are published by IEEE, was once again a featured track, co-chaired by Vijay Gurbani and Carol Davids.
A big thanks to our dedicated team of track chairs, as well as all our Sponsors, Exhibitors and Partners for making IIT RTC Conference 2019 a success!
Looking Ahead: We are already planning the 2020 Conference. The tentative date is October 12-14. Please let us know if this date conflicts with any events that might make it difficult for you or other members of the RTC community to participate. Contact Carol Davids, ([email protected]) , Warren Bent, ([email protected]) , or Tom Costello, ([email protected]) to share this and other information about the dates or content of next year’s event.
We also hope to coordinate with TADHack Global to host the Chicago location the weekend prior to the conference on October 10 -11. More details on these events will be forthcoming early next year.
The IIT RTC Conference is a globally recognized collaborative event, where industry and academia connect. Leveraging its unique academic setting, this annual conference brings together technical professionals and business executives from the data and telecommunications industry, standards bodies, policy and regulatory institutions, and academic educators and researchers to promote an open exchange of ideas to lead future development in the rapidly changing field of real-time communications.
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