Nokia Bell Labs prize awarded to new processor technology, pioneered by student and professor team from University of California at Berkeley

Nokia announced this year’s Nokia Bell Labs Prize, the global competition to recognize game-changing innovations that attracted more than 250 applications from 31 countries around the world. The 2019 prize has been awarded to a student and Professor team from the University of California at Berkeley. 

PhD student Tianshi Wang and Prof. Jaijeet Roychowdhury received US$100,000 for winning the competition, and the opportunity to pursue an expanded collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs. 

The pair won the prize for their work on “A Classic Spin on Quantum Computing." Their innovation is in a new type of processor element that will be significantly more efficient in computing the answers to discrete optimization problems. Their innovation will complement conventional digital processors (CPUs and GPUs) by tackling a variety of computationally hard problems of importance in many diverse areas, including 5G communication systems; complex tasks in planning, scheduling and control; and even the discovery of new drugs.

“The Bell Labs Prize is a unique opportunity for innovators around the world to collaborate with Bell Labs researchers to expand the potential of their innovations,” said Marcus Weldon, Nokia Corporate CTO and president of Nokia Bell Labs. “The competition is highly competitive, reducing more than 250 applicants to 5 finalists, who must convince their Bell Labs mentors and the judging panel that their innovation has the potential to change the world. This year’s winners have certainly met that criteria, by pioneering a new processor technology that will allow a large set of complex optimization problems to be solved with unprecedented efficiency and at low cost. It is truly impressive work and we will be closely collaborating with the team to help them realize this potential.”

The 2019 Nokia Bell Labs Prize competition was launched in April. Proposals were reviewed by Nokia Bell Labs researchers and evaluated based on three criteria, including whether the idea has a "10X innovation potential" to change the world; the proposal's technical merit; and the overall feasibility of the proposed idea.

The proposals were narrowed down to a select group of outstanding candidates who were given the opportunity to partner with Nokia Bell Labs experts to help expand the impact of their proposals. Five finalists were invited to the final judging event held this week at Nokia Bell Labs headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey. 

The judging panel was comprised of Weldon, Nobel Laureate Robert Wilson, world-renowned computer scientist and Bell Labs alum Al Aho, as well as previous Nokia Bell Labs Prize winners Samory Kpotufe (2018) and Kaushik Sengupta (2017).

Second place and $50,000 went to Dr. Sheng Xu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Nanoengineering at University of California at San Diego for his submission, “There is plenty of room under the skin: A wearable’s perspective.” His team have developed an easy-to-use ultrasonic patch that can provide noninvasive, continuous and unobtrusive monitoring of deep tissues. This innovation will not only impact consumers, who will have access to data on their hearts, lungs, livers, and GI tracts, but also healthcare systems allowing non-invasive continuous patient monitoring and ultrasonic imaging.

Third place and $25,000 were presented to Maximilian Arnold, Sebastian Cammerer, Sebastian Dörner, Stephan ten Brink of Stuttgart University in Germany for their innovative work on “Leveraging 5G Infrastructure for a Robust Positioning System.” Their indoor positioning system uses existing wireless communications networks to determine location which will allow ubiquitous, low cost tracking of all things, with simpler calibration than existing systems, and therefore has the potential to become a foundational part of the next industrial revolution.

Nokia and VMware expand partnership to ease large-scale, multi-cloud operations; accelerate VMware Ready for NFV Certification for Nokia’s portfolio of network functions

Nokia and VMware expanded on Thursday its alliance that includes the development of integrated solutions to support communications service providers’ (CSPs) drive for operational improvements and cost efficiency through large-scale, multi-cloud operations.

After years of working with virtual or cloud-based network functions in limited production deployments, CSPs need to build out these functions at scale to handle the increasing use of new data-intensive applications for tomorrow’s 5G and edge computing use cases. Success of this strategy is dependent on seamless interoperability and efficient operations of cloud-based network functions.

VMware and Nokia have a broad mutual customer base globally, across both companies’ portfolios. Through the expanded partnership announced today, the two companies will advance the interoperability between Nokia software applications and VMware’s Telco Cloud, including VMware vCloud NFV. 

Nokia and VMware will also increase their investments in a deeper partnership with technology collaboration and advanced research & development to develop integrated solutions. As a result, CSPs will be able to more easily meet their business and use case objectives, using VMware cloud infrastructure that is engineered to work together with Nokia virtualized and containerized network functions.

Nokia and VMware have been working together to create seamless cloud redundancy by running Nokia’s applications, such as Nokia Service Management Platform, on VMware’s Telco Cloud platform and VMware HCX, an application mobility platform designed for simplifying application migration, workload rebalancing, and optimized disaster recovery across data centers and clouds. 

This will enable customers to embrace a multi-cloud strategy to unify network and IT environments and connect them to private enterprise clouds, edge clouds, and public clouds.

Nokia will continue to focus on the technical certification of Nokia VNFs and software applications on VMware vCloud NFV platform through a dedicated, on-site VMware Ready for NFV Certification Lab. The new lab includes performance characterization to enable CSPs to properly configure their technology environments for the best results. 

With the Certification Lab, Nokia and VMware will serve customers in an accelerated fashion, keeping pace with new features and releases and enabling better roadmap alignment between the two companies’ portfolios.

Several Nokia software applications, such as Nokia CloudBand Application Manager and Nokia Smart Plan Suite, along with virtual IMS, virtual packet core and session border controller are already certified for operations in VMware cloud environments. These and others can be found on VMware Solution Exchange.

“We are pleased to see Nokia and VMware come closer together to enable a more seamless deployment of Nokia VNFs and CNFs on VMware’s Telco Cloud platform,” said Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, senior vice president, strategy and technology innovation, Deutsche Telekom. “We see great value in these two companies’ portfolios featuring greater interoperability and believe the contribution this expanded partnership will make to a viable ecosystem will help us accelerate our digital transformation.”

“With the advent of 5G and edge computing, customers are adopting VMware’s container-ready Telco Cloud supported by innovative efforts like Project Maestro multi-domain orchestrator,” said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president and general manager, Telco and Edge Cloud, VMware. “We are delighted to partner with Nokia to enable faster deployment of Nokia virtual and containerized virtual functions on VMware cloud infrastructure, ultimately helping our customers prepare their telco cloud networks for the future.”

“In today’s digital era, communications service providers expect software solutions to be cloud-native and hardware-agnostic, with multi-vendor and multi-network capabilities built in,” said Bhaskar Gorti, president of Nokia Software. “The expanded partnership we are announcing today gives Nokia and VMware greater scope and capacity to accelerate innovation and best anticipate and deliver against the expectations of our mutual customers.”

Nokia and Innventure come together to deliver disruptive satellite communication technology

Nokia and Innventure have established on Monday an alliance designed to accelerate commercialization of disruptive Nokia Bell Labs satellite communications technology and intellectual property in areas beyond Nokia core businesses. The collaboration with Innventure will be led by Nokia Technologies, the company's licensing arm.

Innventure and Nokia will focus initially on Adaptive Bandwidth Management (ABM) technology, which improves bandwidth utilization, security and resilience of satellite systems. The technology and inventions originate from Nokia Bell Labs. 

Over its more than 90-year history, many of the foundational technologies that underpin digital devices, systems and communications networks such as 5G have been invented by Nokia Bell Labs. Innventure will acquire rights to the ABM technology from Nokia and be responsible for further development and commercialization of this technology.

Innventure identifies, starts and manages early-stage new companies with disruptive technologies sourced from leading multinational pipeline partners. The firm evaluates these technologies through its proprietary DownSelect process to determine which technologies have substantial market opportunities. Nokia becomes Innventure’s third multinational technology partner to use Innventure’s unique commercialization platform. 

“We are thrilled to work with Nokia to bring the company’s transformative innovations to new markets, businesses and customers. Nokia has a strong pipeline of positively disruptive technologies,” said Mike Otworth, founder and CEO of Innventure. “We have already progressed our evaluation of the Adaptive Bandwidth Management technology to the point that we have secured global commercialization rights for Innventure.”

“Nokia continues to explore new ways to help others benefit from Nokia innovations, while creating value from our industry leading portfolio of technologies and innovation,” said Jenni Lukander, President of Nokia Technologies. “Innventure’s approach has strong potential to further develop selected Nokia innovations on a commercial level.”

F5 Networks, Rakuten Mobile come together to support cloud-native mobile network, prepare for 5G-ready service rollout

F5 Networks announced that it has partnered with Rakuten Mobile, the mobile network subsidiary of Rakuten Group, to support the company’s October launch of the initial fully virtualized, cloud-native mobile network and its future deployment of 5G. The carrier will leverage F5’s network functions virtualization (NFV) capabilities to optimize its new mobile network and accelerate its path to 5G services in 2020.

Through this partnership, Rakuten Mobile, Inc. is collaborating with F5 to scale and evolve their cloud-native network design architecture to increase scalability and flexibility without sacrificing control. 

F5 has provided a full-suite N6/SGi-LAN solution consisting of virtualized CGNAT, SGi Firewall, DNS Transparent Cache, and IP Traffic Optimization Functions to deliver enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) services. 

F5’s NFV capabilities and offerings enabled Rakuten Mobile to simplify and optimize service orchestration; ensure application availability, performance, and security; deliver improved freedom and agility in deployment of services; and enable a higher throughput, low-latency network and allow predictable scaling for services.

Earlier this year, F5 announced several new solutions and enhancements designed to allow service providers to launch 5G services. These offerings enable service providers to maximize the investments in their current 4G networks, while optimizing their infrastructures with the scale to securely deploy emerging 5G.

Rakuten has also been making headlines in Japan with its forays into 5G innovation, in partnership with firms such as Nokia, Altiostar, Cisco, Mavenir, Intel, Qualcomm, Quanta and NEC. The fact that Rakuten, unlike existing telecommunication companies, has no outdated and legacy infrastructure to maintain is a significant advantage.