Between 26–28 June 2018, Guimaraes city in Portugal hosted the eighth edition of the International Conference on Localization and GNSS. The conference was organized jointly by Centro de Computação Gráfica (CCG), the University of Minho, and Tampere University of Technology (TUT), and chaired by Prof. Adriano Moreira from the University of Minho and Professor Jari Nurmi from TUT. Dr. Filipe Meneses from the University of Minho and Dr. Estefanía Muñoz Díaz from DLR, Germany, were TPC Chairs. The conference was technically co-sponsored by IEEE through the Portuguese Section, the IEEE Communications Society and the IMS society (Portuguese Chapters), and by IEEE GRSS. The event brought together approximately 40 participants from the academy and industry for three days to the Conference Center in CCG, inside the University of Minho campus, located in the city of Guimaraes, in the northwestern part of Portugal.

There were four international keynote speakers, well known to the wireless localization and communication community. Dr. Kari Leppänen, the Director of 5G radio network technologies from Huawei Technologies (Finland) talked about the new positioning opportunities in 5G. Dr. Justyna Redelkiewicz Musial, the head of sector LBS and IoT from the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (GSA) discussed the innovations around Galileo and GNSS receivers. Dr. Fabian de Ponte Müller, a senior researcher in vehicular applications at DLR, Germany raised the issue of safety in vehicular environments during his presentation entitled attractively: ”Where is Your Guardian Angel? Locating and Protecting Vulnerable Road Users,” Jessica García Soriano from Ficosa international SA discussed the role and challenges of GNSS in autonomous driving.

Wireless localization research is nowadays tightly connected to the research on wireless communications, and this fact was also reflected in this implementation of ICL-GNSS. A special session on Industrial Internet, chaired by Dr. Helena Leppäkoski from TUT, emphasized several major current trends in the Industrial IoT, such as the 5G positioning and mmWave communications and reflected also the initial results of an ongoing Academy of Finland project on Positioning-aided Reliably-connected Industrial Systems with Mobile mmWave Access (PRISMA, http://www.tut.fi/prisma/). Another session focused on modernized GNSS algorithms, such as multi-frequency multi-system GNSS solutions, phase-screen models, or data-driven approaches in GNSS, and on indoor localization solutions via fingerprinting. Privacy and security aspects of the localization solutions were also discussed during the presentations at the conference. There were in total 18 oral presentations.

There was one award given at the event: the best paper award for the paper by Daniel Egea-Roca, Antonio Tripiana-Caballero, José A. López-Salcedo, and Gonzalo Seco-Granados, entitled “GNSS Measurement Exclusion and Weighting with Dual Polarized Antenna: The FANTASTIC project.” This year’s edition of the conference covered not only indoor and outdoor positioning aspects, but also 5G-related aspects in both the communication and navigation domains.

The social events complemented the interesting technical sessions and facilitated social networking of the participants. On the first evening, participants met together in an informal welcome reception held at the Centro Cultural Vila Flor. On the second day of the event, participants were guided on a tour around Guimarães city centre, an area classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage. A gala dinner followed the tour, where participants had the chance to taste local food while getting together for a relaxing time.

In 2018, the seventh edition of ICL-GNSS will be organized in Nuremberg, Germany. For more information, see www.iclgnss.org.