We are delighted to announce six exciting keynote presentations for the 2020 IIT RTC Conference, covering the most pressing topics and latest innovations in real-time communications, presented by leading subject matter experts! The conference takes place October 13 – 15, 2020. 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 Communications Fabric: 5G, COVID-19, and a vision for the future; Anne Lee, Nokia Bell Labs.
With roughly 2 billion live Internet wireless communications users in the world, the technology presents an extreme-scale solution to new avenues of services in telemedicine, work-from-home, and remote education cases, all of which are acting to combat the crises caused by Covid-19. While the pandemic may end in another year, some of its impacts on how we conduct our lives will be permanent. This presentation will talk about COVID-19 and 5G through the lens of the global Internet-based wireless communications network.
AI for Using Voice; Kristen Summers, IBM
Voice technology is becoming ubiquitous, and it generates enormous user excitement about the potential of AI. Meeting those user expectations requires far more than recognizing and generating the speech itself. This talk will position Natural Language Processing (NLP) within AI and analytics, focusing on the characteristics of well understood tasks and of capabilities that are farther in the future. It will demystify AI, and it will describe a range of types of NLP and related understanding to enable natural and engaging voice experiences, including the exciting new advances that are making far more understanding possible than in the past
Technology Policy During a Pandemic: Possibilities and Limits; Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University
Even as the pandemic is likely far from over, we can draw a number of lessons for policy issues and how computer scientists (and builders of real-time communication systems) can help countries weather both the health and the economic crisis. Join former CTO of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Levi Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University Henning Schulzrinne as he shares new opportunities for research, for service and for political engagement by computer scientists based on his perspective from having served in a Congressional office during the pandemic.
Edge Intelligence: The Convergence of Humans, Things, and AI; Schahram Dustdar, TU Wien, Austria
As humans, things, and AI continue to grow closer together, systems engineers and researchers are faced with new and unique challenges. In this talk, we analyze the role of Edge computing and AI in the evolution of cyber-human partnerships, and identify challenges that Edge computing systems will consequently be faced with. We take a closer look at how a cyber-physical fabric will be complemented by AI operationalization to enable seamless end-to-end Edge intelligence systems.
COVID19 and Video: Call Quality and Scalability from the Trenches; Emil Ivov, Varun Singh and Saúl Ibarra Corretgé, 8×8
During 2020, millions of people around the world have experienced an unprecedented change in their daily routines due to the global pandemic. This keynote will present data from millions of video and audio calls in over 1000 WebRTC apps to help paint a picture of some of the changes to usage and call quality. It will also share how a small but highly motivated team took on the challenges of 2020 and managed to accomplish their mission of providing the best meeting experience to an unprecedented amount of people, including the lessons they learned the hard way, and how they achieved the level of scalability required
NextGen Emergency Communications and the FCC; Lisa Fowlkes, FCC
The FCC’s Chief of Public Safety Homeland Security Bureau, Lisa Fowlkes will speak on current NG emergency services initiatives being addressed by the Commission.
Preliminary Speakers List
To learn more about the conference keynotes, as well as the rest of the 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. Note, this is a preliminary list, and additional presentations/speakers will continue to be added, so check back often for updates!
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: