On occasion of the final demonstration of the project outcomes and prototypes, the project is proud to announce and organize the MING-T Experts' Workshop 2009. The workshop is to provide a forum for discussion about the converged broadcasting and mobile telecommunications networks, and future trends and joint European/Chinese research.

The Expert Workshop and demonstration of MING-T project was held in Tsinghua University, Beijing, China on March 24, 2009. There are around 40 people from academia and industry attended the whole day event and they are coming from

• MING-T partners: representatives from University of Hamburg, University of Goettingen, Enensys, Nokia Siemens Networks, Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, and China Telecom,
• EU Officer in China (First Counsellor of European Union Delegation of the European Commission, also the Head of Information Society and Media Section), Ms. Alison Birkett (EU) and her colleague,
• Representatives from Nokia, France Telecom, Hitachi, Panasonic, Agilent, Tongfang Ltd. and also the visitor from Simon Fraser University of Canada.

The whole day event is divided into two parts, the morning session starts with a brief introduction of MING-T by Prof. Zhang, Jianwei, MING-T project coordinator, followed by the remarks from Ms. Alison Birkett and Prof. Xie, Weihe, the vice present of Tsinghua University which hosts this event. Ms. Birkett and Prof. Xie are all pleased to see the demo of MING-T and sincerely wish the continuous success for the MING-T project in getting funded for its next phase. There are four invited talks delivered by the experts from both university as well as the corporate research lab/center addressing the key issues as well as highlighting the future directions in this area.

The afternoon demo of the MING-T project attracts all the workshop audience, which highlights the research and implementation progress of the project. The demo consists of several typical MING-T application scenarios under the common MING-T software platform, and they are

• The scalable video coding with low- and high-priority streams to support the video transmission over the harsh and friendly environments,
• E-ballot application facilitating the interaction between the TV program broadcaster and the viewers,
• Smooth handover between two different broadcasting network, i.e., DTMB (Chinese terrestrial DTV standard) and DVB-H for the continuous service coverage,
• Outdoor demo on a driving vehicle showing how to support datacasting or file downloading using DTMB as the downlink (use the residual bandwidth without interrupting the existing video broadcasting service) and CDMA 1X as the uplink to send the request.

All the details of these demo related works can be referred to the MING-T documents as well as the MING-T sponsored publications.

After the successful demonstration, all the workshop participants spent the rest time of that afternoon, not only commenting on the MING-T project itself with much valuable suggestions but also sharing their visions in this area. The consensus is that the outcome of MING-T project is quite impressive and its idea will finally benefit the industry even though the current results are still in its preliminary stage from product point of view. It is really worthwhile for EU to further support MING-T’s efforts with more industrial involvement. Since most participants are the research people from the different organizations or companies, they suggested it is a good idea to invite the business people from the cooperation to witness the demo of MING-T, seeking for the business opportunities based on MING-T outcome in the future.

As one of the follow-up action, a group of guests from Nokia Siemens Networks Beijing, China including the CTO visited Tsinghua on Friday (March 27) to see the live demo of MING-T project. We look forward to more business interests in our MING-T results and are willing to cooperate with the industry to implement MING-T’s idea.

Experts ' Workshop Announcement and Agenda (.pdf)

See the above link for details about the workshop, including the final agenda.