I attended the IEEE PIRMC-13 conference held in London during the period 8-11 September 2013 where I provided, in the conference venue, a poster presentation of our paper titled Study on the Effects of Backhual Solutions on Indoor Mobile Deployment “Macrocell vs. Femtocell” and a detailed power-point presentation of our second paper titled Evaluation of Spectrum Access Options for Indoor Mobile Network Deployment, in spectrum sharing workshop that proceeded the main PIMRC conference sessions. The IEEE PIMRC conference has been organized to include keynote speakers sessions, tutorials, technical sessions, workshops, and panel sessions, which differ in the depth and breadth of the discussed topics.
Moreover during late October (Florence, Italy, 20 – 23 October 2013) I had the chance to present three papers on behalf of my co-authors at the European Regional International Telecommunication Society (ITS). In contrast to the IEEE conference, where the attendees were mostly engineers, the audience and presenters at the ITS conference came from diverse backgrounds and disciplines such as law, engineering, economics, social sciences etc. This diversity in the audience has made the presentation of the papers results, in a manner attractive to all attendees, a real challenge (thanks for the guidance and experience rendered to us by my professor Jan Markendahl before the conference and which have proved to be invaluable in this situation).
My overall impression is that the two conferences have been invaluable and useful platforms to get acquainted, informed and updated from the industry, academia, policy and regulatory bodies, vendors and operators on the emerging trends in the ICT area. I do remember here the statement of prof. Melody during the Political Economy of Information and Communication Technologies summer school “you should avoid hidden assumptions in interdisciplinary research work…during my PhD study that economist assume that technology doesn’t change.. The interdisciplinary type of research work in ICT area requires an understating of the continuous interaction between a numbers of driving forces such as technology, market and services developments and policies/regulations”.
