The pandemic has changed our normal life, and during the last year, social distancing, quarantine, and isolation have been induced, but has made it possible to consolidate Telework, E-commerce, Telemedicine, and of course, E-learning. For the latter, many congresses, symposiums, summits and professional courses have been offered in a virtual way during 2020. All of these opportunities have allowed students and professionals to access valuable information.
In this sense, our chapter has found an effective opportunity by developing the second version of Teleweek and Telecom, with the main aim to allow researchers to share results of their work with academia, and at the same time to keep our IEEE ComSoc members updated in knowledge related to trending topics about communications and related technologies.
The IEEE ComSoc Ecuador Chapter has consolidated their collaborative work with the IEEE ComSoc Student Chapters, and with professional members, who have presented an extraordinary availability to collaborate with the proposed activities by the IEEE ComSoc Ecuador Chapter. With the opportunities that ComSoc provided with the Virtual Distinguished Lecturer (VDL) Program in order to share relevant topics for their members, we have decided to take advantage of the VDL program in order to recruit/maintain members.
TeleWeek 2021
This event was co-organized with the support of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), and we presented five researchers associated with the Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas – ESPE, Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, and Universidad de las Américas. Three of the five talks were given by our professional members. These talks were given from April 5 through 9.
The figure below shows the professionals who were part of TeleWeek, with themes related to communications fields. Our first talk was with Eng. Fernando Lara, who talked about “Machine learning applied to telecommunications: practical cases”. The topic of the second talk was “Supervised learning applied to failure detections” by Dra. Mariela Lozada. Another interesting topic was related to emergency systems, entitled “A management proposal of launching emergency warning alert by using digital terrestrial television”, by Dr. Gonzalo Olmedo. On our fourth presentation day, Dr. Henry Carvajal spoke on the topic “Non Orthogonal Multiple Access in 5G”. Finally, TeleWeek was closed with a presentation on the topic “Artificial intelligence and 5G networks’’ by Dr. Andrés Cornejo. The reached audience for Teleweek reached a peak of 45 people, with a mean of 30 people per day. The main audience was from Ecuador.
Telecom 2021, Celebrating the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day
After TeleWeek, we celebrated World Telecommunication and Information Society Day. Telecom 2021 was organized in coordination with the ComSoc Student Chapters of the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana of Cuenca - UPS, Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral - ESPOL, and the Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas – ESPE. A total of 12 researchers participated in talks related to 5G, IoT, and Smart Cities, among other topics.
Telecom 2021 was divided into five days from May 17 through 21, and scheduled in order to make possible the major participation of all IEEE ComSoc members. The first day was hosted by the IEEE ComSoc Ecuador Chapter, and we had the honor of presenting our Distinguished Lecturer Dr. Giovanni Geraci with the talk entitled “The future of UAV cellular communications”. This talk was followed by a Workshop presenting the benefits of being part of IEEE ComSoc, hosted by Nury Ramírez (ComSoc Director), and Andrés Navarro (Industry Relations Committee).
On the second day, we had the participation of three researchers from UDLA, ESPE and UPS universities. We started with Dr. Henry Carvajal, who spoke on the topic “Key aspects and challenges in 6G networks”. Then Dr. Vinicio Carrera spoke on the topic “Non supervised learning as a tool for digital signal processing (DSP)”, during which non supervised algorithms to solve computational problems related to DSP were discussed. Finally, day ended with Eng. Juan Jara, who spoke on the topic “Smart cities: an approach in pandemic times”. On this day the UPS Cuenca ComSoc student chapter was in charge of event organization.
On the third day, ESPE’s ComSoc student chapter was in charge of event organization. The day started with Dr. Luis Escobar presenting a talk on the topic “Mobile robotics and its application to Industry 4.0”. Then an interesting topic related to “SDR’s application in experimental learning during pandemic” was presented by Mg. Manuel Quiñónez. Finally, Eng. Guillermo García gave a talk on the topic “Edge computing in the 5G era”. These researchers are affiliated with ESPE and UTPL universities.
On the fourth day, we had the participation of researchers and volunteers in charge of the day belonging to ESPOL university. The day started with Dr. Darwin Alulema, who gave a talk on the topic “IoT system integration based on services and models”. Then Eng. Carlos García spoke about “Digital Transformation and Smart Cities”, during which he explained how Smart Cities could improve the lives of citizens in the main cities. Finally, we had the participation of Engs. David Medina and Diana Placencia from ComWare, who spoke on the topic “Social engineering, how to detect it”.
On our final day, we decided to have an extended meeting with members and non-members, in order to obtain information about “what do you want from my membership”. We organized a workshop, and we used some interesting tools to make possible collaborative working.
Telecom Expectations
We had the same expectations for developing a new version of Telecom, but we had an audience a little bigger than Teleweek, reaching a peak of 60 people, with a mean of 45 people per day, in comparison with the previous version in which around 300 persons participated each day. This is an effect of having many conferences, workshops, and summits around the world. In fact, on these same dates, we had at least three talks in order to celebrate the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day. This demonstrates the effectiveness of virtual education, but as an audience, we had the opportunity to select a talk at our convenience. In this sense, it is recommendable to schedule our talks among our countries, regions and in general around the world.