Quèsaco, What is?, 5G, Frédéric Guilloud

What is 5G?

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5G is the future network that will allow us to communicate wirelessly. How will it work? When will it be available for users? With the Mobile World Congress in full swing in Barcelona, we are launching our new “What is…?” series with Frédéric Guilloud, Research Professor at IMT Atlantique, who answers our questions about 5G.

 

What is 5G?

Frédéric Guilloud: 5G is the fifth generation of mobile telephone networks. It will replace 4G (also referred to as LTE, for Long Term Evolution). Designing and deploying a new generation of mobile communication systems takes a lot of time. This explains why, at a time when 4G has only recently become available to the general public, it is already time to think about 5G.

What will it be used for?

FG: Up until now, developing successive generations of mobile telephone networks has always been aimed at increasing network speed. Today, this paradigm is beginning to change: 5G is aimed at accommodating a variety of uses (very dense user environments, man-machine communications, etc.). The specifications for this network will therefore cover a very broad spectrum, especially in terms of network speed, transmission reliability, and time limits.

How will 5G work?

FG: Asking how 5G will work today would be like someone in the 1980s asking how GSM would work. Keep in mind that the standardization work for GSM began in 1982, and the first commercial brand was launched in 1992. Even though developing the 5th generation of mobile communications will not take as long as it did for the 2nd, we are still only in the early stages.

From a technical standpoint, there are many questions to consider. How can we make the different access layers (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.) compatible? Will 5G be able to handle heterogeneous networks, which do not have the same bandwidths? Will we be able to communicate using this network without disturbing these other networks? How can we increase reliability and reduce transmission times?

Several relevant solutions have already been discussed, particularly in the context of the METIS European project (see box). The use of new bandwidths, with higher frequencies, such as 60-80 GHz bands, is certainly an option. Another solution would be to use the space remaining on the spectrum, surrounding the bandwidths which are already being used (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.), without interfering with them, by using filters and designing new waveforms.

How will the 5G network be deployed?

FG: The initial development phase for 5G was completed with the end of the projects in the 7th Framework R&D Technological Program (FP7), and particularly through the METIS project in April 2015. The second phase is being facilitated by the H2020 projects, which are aimed at completing the pre-standardization work by 2017-2018. The standardization phase is then expected to last 2-3 years, and 2020 could very well mark the beginning of the 5G industrialization phase.

 

Find out more about Institut Mines-Télécom and France Brevets’ commitment to 5G

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The METIS European project

The METIS project (Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for the Twenty-twenty Information Society) was one of the flagship projects of the 7th Framework R&D Technological Program (FP7) aimed at supporting the launch of 5G. It was completed in April 2015 and brought together approximately 30, primarily European, industrial and academic partners, including IMT Atlantique. METIS laid the foundations for designing a comprehensive system to respond to the needs of the 5G network by coordinating the wide variety of uses and the different technical solutions that will need to be implemented.

The continuation of the project will be part of the Horizon 2020 framework program. The METIS-II project, coordinated by the 5G-PPP (the public-private partnership that brings together telecommunications operators), is focused on the overall system for 5G. It will integrate contributions from other H2020 projects, such as COHERENT and FANTASTIC-5G, which were launched in July 2015: each of these projects are focused on specific aspects of 5G. The COHERENT project, in which Eurecom is participating (including Navid Nikain), is focused on developing a programmable cellular network. The FANTASTIC-5G project, with the participation of IMT Atlantique, under the leadership of Catherine Douillard, is aimed at studying, over a two-year period, the issues related to the physical layer (signal processing, coding, implementation, waveform, network access protocol, etc.) for frequencies under 6 GHz.

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Octave : sécuriser la biométrie vocale contre l’usurpation

Octave: trustworthy and robust voice biometric authentication

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Projets européens H2020Surely, voice biometric authentication would be an easier alternative to the large amount of passwords that we use daily. One of the barriers to exploitation involves robustness to spoofing and challenging acoustic scenarios. In order to improve the reliability of voice biometric authentication systems, Nicholas Evans and his team at Eurecom are involved since June 2015 — and for a two years duration — in a H2020 European project called Octave.

 

What is the purpose of the Objective Control of Talker Verification (Octave) project?

Nicholas Evans: The general idea behind this project is to get rid of the use of passwords. They are expensive in terms of maintenance: most people have many different passwords and often forget them. While simultaneously relieving end-users from the inconvenience of dealing with textual passwords, Octave will reduce the economic and practical burden of service providers related to password loss and recovery. Octave will deliver a scalable, trusted biometric authentication service — or TBAS. The project is about providing a reliable service that works in diverse, practical scenarios, including data-sensitive and mission-critical application.

 

Eurecom is leading the third work package of this H2020 European project. What is the role of the school?

NE: Our main mission is to ensure the reliability of the underlying automatic speaker verification technology. To do so, our work package has two objectives. First, insuring the proper functioning of the TBAS in a variety of environments. Indeed, the Octave platform should work properly whether it be deployed in a limited bandwidth and channel-variable telephony context or in a noisy physical access context. Eurecom’s focus is on our second objective, which is counter-spoofing.

 

How does your research team ensure the security of the system against spoofing?

NE: If I want to steal your identity, one strategy might be to learn a model of your voice and then to build a system to transform mine into yours. Anything like that would typically introduce a processing artefact. I could also try to synthetize your voice, but again this would produce processing artefacts. So, one of the highest level approaches to identify a spoofing attempt is to build an artefact detector. In order to do that, we apply pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms to learn the processing artefacts from huge databases of spoofed speech.

 

Portable telephone

 

So researchers have a large database of spoofed speech at their disposal?

NE: This is a very tricky issue. Ideally, we would use real data, that is to say real examples of spoofed speech. These don’t exist, however. Even if they did, they would most likely not contain many samples. Therefore, we have to generate these spoofed speech datasets ourselves. We try to imagine how an attacker would try to spoof a system and then we fabricate a large number of spoofed samples in the same way. Fortunately, we can do this much better than a spoofer might, for we can imagine many possibilities and many advanced spoofing algorithms.

However, this methodology results in an unfortunate bias: when we use artificially generated datasets of spoofed speech, then we are in a really good position to know how spoofers faked the voice, because… well, we were the spoofers. To design reliable spoofing detectors we must then try to use the databases blindly, that is to say we must try not to use our knowledge of the spoofing attacks – in the real world, we will never know how the spoofing attacks were generated.

Luckily a very large, standard database of spoofed speech is now available and this database was used recently for a competitive evaluation. Since participants were not told anything about some of the spoofing attacks used to generate this database, the results are the best indication so far of how reliably we might be able to detect spoofing in the wild. Eurecom co-organised this evaluation, ASVspoof 2015, with another Octave partner, the University of Eastern Finland, among others.

 

Who are the other partners working along Eurecom on the Octave project?

NE: Among our partners, we count Validsoft in the United Kingdom, a voice biometrics product vendor. Eurecom is working with Validsoft to validate Octave technologies in a commercial grade voice biometrics platform. This is not the only category of industrial partners that we work with. Whereas APLcomp are another of Octave’s product vendor partners, Advalia are custom solution developers. ATOS are Octave’s large-scale ICT integrators. Business users are represented by airport operator, SEA, whereas Findomestic, owned by BNP Paribas Personal Finance, represent the banking sector. These two partners, SEA and Findomestic, will help us with evaluation, by offering us the possibility to deploy the TBAS in their respective environments. Airports and banking ecosystems are really different, allowing us to ensure that Octave works in real, diverse conditions.

 

Learn more about the Octave project

 

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The Octave project:

The Objective Control of Talker Verification (Octave) project is a European project funded through the Horizon 2020 call on “Digital security: cybersecurity, privacy and trust”. It started in June 2015 and will last two years. The research program is segmented in eight work packages, among which the third, “Robustness in speaker verification”, is led by Eurecom. The school, part of the Institut Mines-Télécom, was contacted to work on Octave because of its experience on spoofing detection in voice biometric systems. Previous to Octave, Eurecom was involved in the FP7 project named Tabula Rasa.

List of Octave members:

carte partenaires Octave

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Brain, Alexandre Gramfort

Alexandre Gramfort translates our brain waves with algorithms

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Alexandre Gramfort is a young researcher at Télécom ParisTech and just received an ERC starting grant. This prestigious European prize and support acknowledges his research efforts in signal processing and machine learning. For the last eight years, Alexandre Gramfort has worked on mathematical tools to better extract, analyze and visualize brain signals, essentially using electroencephalograms and magnetoencephalograms.

 

In order to study the brain in a non-invasive way with a good temporal resolution, electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetoencephalogram (MEG) are standard techniques. They respectively measure the electrical activity of our neurones and the magnetic fields that this activity creates. For a patient, the EEG examination consists in nothing more than wearing a helmet with multiple electrodes on the head. The practitioner then visualizes signals and 3D models of the patient’s brain, in which coloured areas indicate the neuronal activity. As described here, everything seems simple…

But in fact, a whole crucial aspect of the imaging technique has been forgotten: signal processing. Indeed, to convert raw measurements into a dynamic visualization of the brain, mathematical and algorithmic tools are required. This step is at the heart of the research work done by Alexandre Gramfort at the LTCI — a mixed research unit Télécom ParisTech and CNRS.

The young researcher has been developing this subject for eight years. First during his PhD thesis at Inria on cerebral activity detection, completed in 2009. Then during his post-docs (CEA Neurospin, Harvard), and today in the “Audio, acoustic and waves” team at the LTCI. Alexandre Gramfort’s works in functional neuroimaging have been highlighted by the development of an open-source software: MNE. Now used in several places over the world, it allows its users to process EEG and MEG signals, from raw data to the visualization of active brain regions. MNE takes care of many aspects of the analysis of such signals, including machine learning.

 

Alexandre Gramfort, ERC Grant

MEG and EEG measurements and their localization inside the brain (red spot).

Laureate of an ERC starting grant

The quality of Alexandre Gramfort’s research has recently been acknowledged by the European Research Council (ERC) with a starting grant. Being worth 1.5 million euros, delivered over five years, these grants not only award works achieved by young researchers, they also encourage them to build their own teams. The Télécom ParisTech laureate thereby announced that he will recruit six PhD students or post-docs and one engineer.

“A huge part of the work lies in mathematical developments, algorithms and software, Alexandre Gramfort explains. In this research field, one has to deal with a large amount of data, and it is almost impossible to do it alone”. Thus, the increased workforce will allow the researcher to build up a team to address the data analysis challenges. Alexandre Gramfort is looking for different profiles, in order to cover the diversity of the required expertises, from data mining to software development.

Thanks to these new resources, research topics will be further explored. One challenge is to process data that are not currently useable due to spurious signals, called noise. “Noise can come from sensors, but also from patient’s brains” Alexandre Gramfort tells us. “When you measure the neuronal signal created by someone’s thought or action, there is not only one part of the brain that activates: everything else keeps working”.

When we asked about potential impact of his research, Alexandre Gramfort answered that “this type of research is very important for everyone working on acquiring and processing data”. Behind the algorithms lies the objective for neuroscientists to better understand brain mechanisms. In their sight: pathologies like epilepsy or autism. But Alexandre Gramfort prefers to temper the expectations: “functional brain imaging is essentially oriented towards diagnosis, not treatment. It is mostly about identifying biomarkers that could help to detect pathologies as early as possible”.

Source localization of continuous Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data

Additive manufacturing, a process for the industry of the future

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As a major component of the Industry of the Future project, additive manufacturing — or 3D printing — is leading to ever-increasing research on materials. Researchers at Mines Douai seized on the opportunity to explore this line of research a little over two years ago. Today, the many requests the school has received for research partnerships show the importance of issues surrounding additive manufacturing.

 

“Additive manufacturing probably constitutes the most promising market in the materials sector,” assures Jérémie Soulestin, a researcher at Mines Douai. According to this polymers specialist, it is a “mature” field, but is “still rarely addressed by plastics manufacturers.” The Polymer and Composite Technology & Mechanical Engineering Department (TPCIM), where Jérémie Soulestin works, has seized the opportunity offered by this field. For two years, additive manufacturing has been the focus of the research carried out by the department’s teams. Of course, 3D printing processes for materials are no longer new. “Other colleagues have been addressing the issue by using laser sintering for some years now,” admits Jérémie Soulestin. But the innovation lies in the new combinations of materials and processes.

Laser sintering uses dry powders that are melted by a laser in specific places. The drops that form remain malleable for a few moments before cooling down, making it possible to create the desired shapes. Additive manufacturing via laser sintering was one of the first 3D printing processes to emerge, and today it produces good results for metals and certain plastics, specifically polyamides. However, it cannot be used for all available materials. Therefore, scientists have chosen to seek other processes, in order to expand the range of possibilities.

 

A wide range of stakeholderss

Jérémie Soulestin explains that the TPCIM department is “ahead of the game, particularly in terms of machines.” In support of this claim, he mentions the recent acquisition of the Arburg freeformer. Theoretically, this 3D printer is capable of using a large range of plastic materials used in plastics processes. “This tool uses an approach that is at odds with other manufacturers offering machines adapted to a limited range of associated materials,” the researcher explains. This approach is also better adapted to the work of Mines Douai scientists, which has traditionally focused on injection processes. Unlike laser sintering, this new additive manufacturing technique is within the researchers’ field of expertise. It is also a very popular field of expertise as reflected by the many industrial collaboration projects, which have continued to increase in line with the new work on additive manufacturing.

“We work with partners with a wide range of profiles,” explains Jérémie Soulestin. And for good reason, since the new processes interest industrial stakeholders at different levels of maturity, who all recognize the increasingly important role additive manufacturing will play in the industry of the future. “Some companies come to us for business development purposes: they know this is important, without truly understanding the issues,” admits the scientist. However, he adds, “Others, like major companies, come to us with very specific subjects.” All sectors are concerned, such as aeronautics for the small-series production of part.

 

La freeformer d'Arburg offre, en théorie, une palette de matériaux bien plus large que les autres imprimantes 3D.

The Arburg freeformer offers, in theory, a much wider range of materials than other 3D printers. Credits: Arburg.


Additive manufacturing: added value

The reluctance expressed in the past — particularly regarding durability — is no longer valid today. Companies see additive manufacturing as representing “real added value” in comparison with other traditional processes (such as machining). “We no longer have the technological barriers we had a few years ago,” confirms Jérémie Soulestin. The technology, with its layer-by-layer concept, does have its limitations, “but the choice of materials and certain optimization concepts have made it possible to overcome these limitations,” the researcher stresses.

Today, the prospects for improving the processes lie essentially in expanding the range of useable materials. In plastics processes, the key issue is to be able to use a larger range than for polyamides, which form a large percentage of the available polymers. Another opportunity for research is in semi-crystalline polymers, which present more challenges in terms of mastering the solidification. The target seems clear: in the future, it should be possible to manufacture every part using an additive manufacturing process.

 

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Conference on Polymer materials for additive manufacturing

What are the prospects for additive manufacturing technology in the field of polymer materials? This is the question researchers and industrial stakeholders will be trying to answer at the conference on “Polymer materials for additive manufacturing – reality and prospects.” The conference, organized by the French Society of Plastics Engineers (SFIP), Mines Douai, and the French Society of Automotive Engineers (SIA), will take place on March 23 and 24 in Villeurbanne on the INSA Lyon campus, which is also a partner of this event.

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