Software and AI-enabled networks: critical systems of the 21st century?

Speaker:
Nicolas Demassieux | Senior VP Orange Labs Research
Nicolas Demassieux leads the research of Orange. With his team, he drives the vision, strategy and execution of research programs involving 700+ engineers and PhD students in multiple countries. A strong advocate of an integrative research culture, fully digital and human, he is involved in the domains of connectivity, infrastructure virtualization, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Security and Trust, with application domains such as digital personal life, digital societies (cities, agriculture, transport, health, industry…), digital enterprises and digital emerging countries. Inspired by his humanist vision Nicolas is passionate about ethics, sustainable digital technology, interactions between the digital ecosystems, the society of human beings, and the evolution of our complex physical and biological planet.

Abstract:
Telecommunication Networks have revolutionized all aspects of our everyday life. As highlighted in recent times (COVID-19), digital is no longer an option, but a necessity. The availability of high performance, energy efficient, ubiquitous and affordable networks is a necessary precondition for enabling communication among citizens, open access to information, remote work, access to education, health care and public services. Their strategic role is obviously becoming more and more crucial when considering essential services such as energy, water, gas, transport, health, public safety, etc. As a result of the digital transformation, citizens and the digital economy across all industry sectors, will continue to develop a critical dependency upon telecommunication networks. As a result,  the resilience of our networks is becoming crucial. Resilience goes far beyond the robustness of components (hardware and software). Resilience also results from network architectures for fault tolerance or robustness against attacks.  Application and service should be designed for maintaining their critical functionalities even over a degraded network. Longer term, resilience depends on  the reliability of supply-chains for key components and on the ability to overcome an interruption of service of 3rd party service providers. We need to think about the resilience of complex systems. This addresses internal complex systems such as 5G networks which are composed of multiple layers that are dependent on each other, but also dependencies between systems of different actors such as energy systems, telecommunication systems, transport systems.