ETSI IoT week highlights how ICT standards can help sustainability

Sophia Antipolis, 17 October 2022

Last week ETSI hosted the 2022 ETSI IoT Week event, focused on “Pursuing the Digital and Green Transformation”. 52 speakers from industry, research, universities, cities and other SDOs demonstrated, with concrete examples, how ICT standards can help reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the European Green Deal to an audience from 22 countries around the world.

This year, as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of our partnership project oneM2M, the event offered an up-to-date overview of the major European and global trends in IoT services, technological innovations and deployments. The various sessions during the week addressed semantics and ontologies, digital twins, IoT and the Edge, IoT and AI, IoT for a better life, including the digital and green transformation and eHealth, and horizontal ETSI IoT standards for the vertical business sectors. On the first day, a tutorial session targeted IoT applications developers who were taught what ontologies are, and how they are built and extended.

The conference comprised several panel sessions to exchange with the audience and point at challenges such as AI ethics, particularly in eHealth, where it was highlighted that engineers should think of ethics when starting work on algorithms for AI. The Securing AI ETSI group was created to address this issue.

A poll of the audience produced a very interesting status of the use of the green transformation among stakeholders. To the question “How important do you consider the green and energy consumption KPls to be in your development/research/standardization?”, while 52% answered that the green transformation is one key challenge, the focus today seems to remain on other fundamental challenges. To the question on “Do you expect standards to enable/accelerate loT and Edge Computing solutions to be applied to reducing the energy and carbon footprints on vertical sectors?” 76% answered yes, but that it will depend on other factors.

The presentations from the event can be downloaded HERE.