Real Time Communications Conference & Expo at Illinois Tech

The 17th Annual IIT Real-Time Communications Conference 2021 was held virtually on Oct. 12-14 using the real-time communications methods offered by Signal Wire Events to deliver this premier global thought-leadership event for industry and academic experts in the rapidly changing field of real-time communications to a remote audience. While disappointed to again miss the face-to-face meetings in the corridors, at lunch and in the sponsors’ booths, we were delighted to discover how much progress in the tools to enable such a successful event had been made in just a year’s time!

For the first time in 2021, we were delighted to have the conference hosted by IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology. IEEE and its members inspire a global community to innovate for a better tomorrow through its more than 419,000 members in over 160 countries, and its highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities. By partnering with IEEE, the RTC Conference and Expo at IllinoisTech broadened its exposure to a wider audience, resulting in a record high for conference registration, while expanding on its reputation for delivering the broadest range of unbiased real-time communications content in one amazing event. 

This year’s conference 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 that will shape the future. 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 Illinois Tech 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.

A big thanks to our dedicated team of track chairs for making IIT RTC Conference 2020 a success! 

Looking Ahead: We are already planning the 2021 Conference. The tentative date is October 10 – 13, 2022. 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.

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, academic educators and researchers to promote an open exchange of ideas to lead future development in the rapidly changing field of real-time communications.

Stay tuned to our Conference website and mailing lists for further updates. Or follow us on:

Twitter – LinkedIn – Facebook

When: Tuesday October, 12 – Thursday October, 14

Where: Virtually on SignalWire Events – Register now at no charge!

We are delighted to announce five exciting keynote presentations for the 2021 RTC Conference at Illinois Tech, covering the most pressing topics and latest innovations in real-time communications, presented by leading subject matter experts! Registration is free of charge for the conference, taking place virtually October 12 – 14, 2021 via SignalWire Events. Everyone working at the intersection of voice, video, messaging, mobility, the Cloud and the Web has things to share, things to learn and people to meet at this year’s conference.

Keynote addresses

The Challenges of Building for Developers; Anthony Minessale, SignalWire

When the RTC Conference at Illinois Tech held its inaugural event back in 2005, building real-time communications applications and services was a daunting task even for the most accomplished developers. Since that time, many tools have been created to make real-time communications programmable, resulting in immense benefits to society. But building for developers isn’t easy. Come hear the Founder of FREESwitch and SignalWire describe his journey of paving the way to empower developers, and what still needs to be accomplished. 

CalOES Self Assessemnt of a Statewide NG911 Deployment – The Good, the Bad, and the Lessons Learned; Mark Fletcher, 911inform, LLC; Budge Currier, California Governors Office of Emergency Services; Laurie Flaherty, US Department of Transportation; Brooks Shannon, RapidDeploy

Developing standards for NG 9-1-1 differs greatly from actually building an NG 9-1-1 solution. Join this panel of experts for the lessons learned building a NG 9-1-1 solution in California to support 450 PSAP’s handling 27 million 9-1-1 calls annually

AI/ML are not sufficient: How to Program Billions and Billions of IoT Devices; Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University

As IoT transitions to a general-purpose network of sensors and actuators, identifying nodes by MAC or IP address is likely to result in functionality that is brittle and hard to maintain over time. Join former CTO of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Levi Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University Henning Schulzrinne as he describes a prototype effort to leverage well known SQL models to retrieve data, and create abstractions that do not depend on network architecture and hardware modules, improving the utility of large, multi-administration networks of IoT devices.

What analyzing call center conversations can teach us about good conversational AI; Mariano Tan, Prosodica

Getting speech technology to work well is hard. Natural human communication is spontaneous, fragmented, and disorganized while technology wants to be predictable, structured, and organized. Join Prosodica’s CEO Mariano Tan as he describes lessons learned from analyzing millions of real human conversations to provide insights into how we might improve our speech technologies, and describes a speech analytics architecture that utilizes digital signal processing, distributional semantics, and prosodics to support better recognition, mitigate bias, and reliably model intent.

A new approach to telecom: The benefits of operating a service provider like an IT company; Azita Arvani, Rakuten Symphony

While 5G promises to facilitate the transformation of countless verticals, the telecom industry can benefit from its own transformation. Join Rakuten Symphony General Manager Azita Arvani as she shares how to minimize a telco footprint while optimizing service, how to move traditional telco functions to the cloud, and how becoming the world’s first cloud native Open RAN-based mobile network has resulted in substantial automation, programmable infrastructure, and cost savings that are passed on to customers.

Conference Speakers List and Schedule

To learn more about the conference keynotes, as well as the rest of the incredible slate of confirmed presentations and speakers, please visit the Speakers page of the conference website where you can access additional information, including all the presentation abstracts, and speaker bios. Then check out the full Conference Schedule for a listing of the dates and times.

A Big “Thank You” to our Sponsors

We’re excited to be able to bring this awesome content to the real-time communications community completely free of charge as a result of the support of our Conference Sponsors. We’re honored to welcome SignalWire, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon as Platinum Sponsors, Google as a Gold Sponsor, and Vail Systems, Millicast, and webRTC.ventures as Silver Sponsors. Thank you for making the RTC Conference at Illinois Tech possible!

About the Conference

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.

Follow us

Stay tuned to our Conference website and mailing lists for further updates. Or follow us on:

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

When: Tuesday October, 12 – Thursday October, 14

Where: Virtually on SignalWire Events – Register now at no charge!

IIT Real Time Communications Conference

Welcome to 2021, and the potential end of “The Great Pandemic” – we hope. While the world struggled through a period of forced innovation and connectivity, thoughts and ideas that once seemed impossible, became reality. Few other industries saw such dramatic change as did public safety. The reason? No matter how dangerous conditions were, citizens still needed help when they were hurt; accidental fires still raged in homes and forests; hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and natural disasters did not take a vacation. Emergency services operations were forced to continue in an environment that was as alien to them as anything they had ever experienced.

IT innovators and engineers were challenged to “MAKE IT HAPPEN”. Overnight, untested theories, and unproven concepts were thrust into production, albeit still with caution. And, while caution was not thrown to the wind, it was balanced against the dangers present in current systems as decisions were being made. The effort was to use new and emerging technologies to directly benefit Public Safety. Under this pressure, innovative ideas were given the opportunity to mature, and be fine-tuned as operational challenges were met head-on, and in most cases overcome.

The Next Generation Emergency Services Track will highlight, not just the technologies, but their innovative utilization and use cases specific to the Public Safety sector. In addition to developers and engineers, this track will include IT administrators, addressing the means by which they achieved workflow and operational stability. Our speakers will describe how they implemented unfamiliar technologies, and the levels of trust in these new technologies that was required and generated during this difficult year.

Join us as this track continues to highlight the intersection of public safety and new technologies and the challenges presented as make these technologies operational. Next Generation emergency services is no longer a future technology. It is here and thriving in both the public and private sectors.

Track Highlights

• CalOES Self Assessment of a Statewide NG911 Deployment – The Good, the Bad, and the Lessons Learned – Mark Fletcher, 911Inform, LLC; Budge Currier, California Governors Office of Emergency Services; Laurie Flaherty, US Department of Transportation (DOT); Brooks Shannon, RapidDeploy – Track Keynote
• Fulfilling the Promise of i3: A Vision for i4 and the ECC – Billl Mertka, Synergem Technologies
• End-to-end NG911 – Scenario testing: Across the country and across the Atlantic – Carol Davids, IIT; Brooks Shannon, RapidDeploy; Joseph Cusimano, IIT; Bonny Angell, T-Mobile; Jeanna Green, T-Mobile; Wolfgang Kampichler, Frequentis AG
• Don’t Be Left in the Dark: Keeping 911 Going with Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery and Resiliency – Brooks Shannon, RapidDeploy
• The real world of NG 9-1-1 from three different interconnected perspectives – Mark Fletcher, 911Inform, LLC; Elisabeth English, EE and Associates, LLC; Martha Buyer, Law Offices of Martha Buyer, PLLC; Roberta Fox, FOX GROUP Technology

About the Conference

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.

Follow us

Stay tuned to our Conference website and mailing lists for further updates. Or follow us on:

Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

When: Tuesday October, 12 – Thursday October, 14

Where: Virtually on SignalWire Events – Register now at no charge!

The RTC Conference and Expo at IllinoisTech – October 12 –14, is a venue for connecting the future to today in real-time where thought leaders from industry and academia gather to discuss, debate and shape the future of the rapidly changing real-time communications field. Everyone living at the intersection of voice, video, messaging, mobility, the cloud, and the Web – technical developers, innovators, engineers, academic researchers, product managers, marketers, entrepreneurs – has things to learn, things to teach and people to meet at this conference.

Presentations have been placed into the following conference tracks:

• WebRTC & Real-Time Applications
• Internet of Things
• Programmable Real-Time Networks
• Next Generation Emergency Communications
• VoiceTech
• IPTComm (juried papers track)

Track descriptions can be found on the Program page of the conference website, while the Conference Speakers page of the website provides a listing of speakers and their presentations, and the Conference Schedule provides a conference agenda.

We’re excited this year’s conference is being hosted by IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology. IEEE and its members inspire a global community to innovate for a better tomorrow through its more than 419,000 members in over 160 countries, and its highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities. By partnering with IEEE, the RTC Conference and Expo at IllinoisTech broadens its exposure to a wider audience, while expanding on its reputation for delivering the broadest range of unbiased real-time communications content in one amazing event. Take advantage of this opportunity to learn from, 300+ fellow real-time communications leaders from across the globe by registering to join us at this Fall’s conference!

Global hackathon focused on programmable communications
September 25 9:30 AM – 8:00 PM
September 26 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

TADHack is just around the corner! There’s still time to register for the Chicago location of TADHack Global 2021, taking place September 25 – 26. and we have several announcements to share.

First, we have a new location to announce. TADHack Chicago will now be held at:

IIT Research Tower
10 W. 35th St.
6th Flr.
Rms. 6C 7-1 & 6D 6-1
Chicago, IL. 60616

The Research Tower at Illinois Tech is the tall building on the northwest the corner of 35^th and State. It is located one block west of the 35^th-Bronzeville-IIT stop on the Green Line ‘L’, or two blocks east of the Sox-35^th stop on the Red Line ‘L’. Alternatively, there is free parking available right across the street in the lot on the northeast corner of 35^th and State (accessible off of State, just north of 35^th).

This year, we have an awesome line-up of sponsors to hack on, including:

• Symbl.ai (conversation intelligence, https://symbl.ai)

• Jambonz (open source CPaaS, https://jambonz.org)

• SubSpace (the network for real-time applications, https://subspace.com/)

• AWA (https://awa.network – stealth start-up coming out at TADHack)

• Telnyx (voice, SMS, verify (two factor authentication), phone numbers, fax, IoT, identity, WebRTC, https://telnyx.com/)

The week before TADHack is the best time to review the TADHack Global Sponsors Intro Videos AND sign up for their developer resources. This will save you some time Saturday morning, and get you hacking as soon as possible!

In addition to the previously announced $20K global prize pot, we also have two new bonus prizes to announce:

• Telnyx and Symbl.ai have team up to offer an additional $4K bonus prize for AI-Driven Communications

• Telnyx is offering an additional $2.5K bonus prize for 2FA with Verify

Communications is fundamental to the human condition. Now it is programmable, and we are only beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible using it to improve people’s lives. Please come join us at TADHack where you’ll have fun, meet amazing people from around the world, learn important new skills, and perhaps even change the world with your hack. Oh, and don’t forget all the awesome food and swag. TADHack is for everyone!