Go #InsideInnovation at Paris Innovation & Research Lab

We are trying to extract information from video feeds, so you can see that we can use these to track people or objects in a room or in a public space.

Graphic: Where innovation happens

Cisco Innovation Centers

France is a super vibrant community embarking on digitization with Cisco. The Paris Innovation Research Lab, PIRL as we call it, opened officially in 2015. The main topics on which we’re working is ICN, which is Information-centric networking, IPv6, IoT big data analytics, and Deep learning. We are reinventing the way the internet is built for the objects, the IoT. We are reinventing the way you interact with the data that all these objects are going to generate to be able to do data analytics and correlation between information. The Internet of Things touches everything so here in Paris, and in particular through the country digitization agenda, we decided to focus on smart cities.

Graphic: What innovation looks like

Cisco Innovation Centers

In a particular space, we can combine data from the WiFi HotSpot and all the people walking around with a connected device which can be very important for security issues or even business. We are providing the underlying infrastructure into a common platform, for a lot of applications to be invented and make the life of the citizen easier.

Graphic: How we power innovation

Cisco Innovation Centers

We’ve designed this space actually to enable collaboration for our innovators. This is really an entirely programmable environment. The whole lab is equipped with our Cisco APIs and SDK. A great tool for us to let the community develop their future startup projects on top of the Cisco platform. Just from the click of a simple HTML interface here, I can control the display on the lab, and immerse ourselves in different visualization of our project. We have a research program, and we have a number of PhDs and interns who are joining us in PIRL. We build partnerships with existing incubators and startup accelerators, giving them access to technology, resources, tools, and environments so that they can build new ideas and innovate. Ecole Polytechnique has had a long collaboration with Cisco for about a decade. At the heart of what we are doing is teaching and training to provide better-prepared engineers who can innovate for the future. There is also the ability to access specialist competencies from Cisco research engineers, specialized equipment that we need to conduct experiments. Polytechnique graduates go out and become CEOs and some of them go out and create start-ups and become entrepreneurs. We partner with NUMA. They have pioneered the whole start-up scene in Paris. NUMA is an accelerator. On a regular basis we have 300 different entrepreneurs living here and developing their start-ups. We strongly believe that innovation is not a matter of technology; it’s a matter of culture. We have created a program together called Data City which is really about focusing on start-ups who are going to push the boundaries of how you can create value based on the aggregation of smart city data. Being able to leverage Cisco’s expertise is exactly what we need. Where do we want to be in a year from now? The possibilities are endless. We are bringing new technologies into the Internet of Things so that it can scale and we can address infrastructure to build something sustainable. We are really at the eve of a new industry cycle. We want developing an application for smart city tomorrow to be as simple as developing an application for smart phone today.

Graphic: #InsideInnovation

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