Smart society brings digital community closer together

There is an exponentially growing demand worldwide for innovative applications that involve remote social interaction. Towards platforms that allow our real and virtual worlds to merge seamlessly in a highly intuitive way, creating an Extended Reality (XR). This greatly enhances remote collaboration and conferencing. And this XR technology also offers unprecedented opportunities for the media and entertainment, healthcare and mobility sectors.

Our digital infrastructure in the Netherlands is one of the most advanced in the world. And that offers great advantages and opportunities. The potential of XR applications is staggering. And the playing field of developers is constantly evolving. We are looking forward to the first large-scale communication service that manages to connect reality and virtuality in an accessible way. It is important for providers of large-scale communication services to claim their share as quickly as possible in order to remain relevant.

The pressure on developing and bringing to market new XR applications is enormous. If we in the Netherlands and Europe want to keep up with this rapid development, it will require close cooperation between consumer service providers, platform developers and digital infrastructure providers.

Choose us as your independent partner to significantly accelerate the essential time to market period for XR applications. We also have in-house specialists who will assist in finding the best project format, approach and partners for this type of complex innovation process. We work with organisations in a wide range of sectors on the development of new XR applications. These include healthcare, media and entertainment, communications and mobility.

New technologies, for example social XR, demand a lot more from the existing digital infrastructure, and will only become commonplace if they work accurately, cheaply and without too much equipment on a large scale and are available everywhere. If we want the Dutch digital highways to remain the vital arteries for tomorrow's digital services, we must innovate more and faster within our digital infrastructure.

We are working hard on innovations for an optimally functioning digital infrastructure, where demanding applications work error-free alongside all the other applications on the same network. In our test facilities we have network and ICT chains. We use these chains to test various innovations, applications and scenarios.

We are busy developing network slicing that allows service providers to easily deliver network functions tailored to specific industries or customers. Dividing mobile networks virtually into 'slices' creates an individual and unique network with all the associated benefits: less complexity, more individual control and flexibility, and guaranteed customised performance for the customer.

An advanced, flexible digital infrastructure will succeed only if we connect the existing digital networks and platforms and make them variably deployable. Examples include Clouds, Edge Computing, Data Centres, and so on. These are complex processes in which our service providers, network providers, platform providers and cloud services must cooperate fully, and in so doing, they will be able to strengthen their position and seize economic opportunities.

In such cooperation, we pull together with service providers from all sectors, such as telecoms, healthcare, business and agriculture. We also involve public authorities and industry. Finding the best project format, approach and partners for this type of complex innovation project is a skill in itself. That is why at TNO we work with Innovation Orchestrators.

How do you use new data sources and technological developments such as artificial intelligence (AI) to gain new insights and to better anticipate social developments? We have developed a methodology for policy makers: the Policy Lab. Using this methodology, we help the government to explore strategies and to investigate what the digitisation of society means for a policy.

Naturally, you want data to be stored safely and only temporarily. At present, the dependence on big data stored in non-European servers is too high. This is why, together with a large number of knowledge partners, we have joined the European cloud platform Gaia-X.

Gaia-X itself does not develop cloud infrastructures, but draws up 'ethical' guidelines, policies and technical documentation that enable businesses in the smart society to exchange and store data subject to European rules. This is the only way to make it possible for responsible data analytics to be stored on local platforms where the data is stored only temporarily.

Our public authorities can now assume a guiding role and take action to prepare our society even better for the challenges ahead, using ICT as the key technology. The use of data and algorithms for social applications is expected to increase. We can only build on this if we have the assurance of the right information and expertise, which is reliable and viewed in its proper context.

We work on innovative ICT solutions that both improve analyses and enable their responsible use. With Big (Open) Data in combination with Artificial Intelligence (AI), we can, for example, make smart cross-links. At all these levels, we work as a knowledge partner on the requisite innovations, often in public-private partnerships.