- Dr. Fiona Williams
International Workshop on Machine-to-Machine Communication: Applications, Requirements, and Challenges for Future Networks
Dr. Fiona Williams – Brief biography
Dr. Fiona Williams is a Research Director of Ericsson, based in Aachen, Germany, driving innovations in communications networks and services and their use in Intelligent Transport Systems and Smart Energy Grids. She holds board positions in industrial and academic organizations at international level. In May, 2009, she was appointed to the Board of Governors of RWTH Aachen University and she has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, since being appointed to it in 2008. Representing Ericsson, she has been a Steering Board member of the European Future Internet Public-Private-Partnership and served as elected Chairperson of the Net!Works European Technology Platform for two consecutive terms and Vice-Chair for one term. As a founder of the Wireless World Research Forum, she served as the elected Treasurer and officer of the Swiss based organization from 2001 until 2007. She has led large-scale collaborative projects in the national and European context over many years and has build up research and IPR activities in a wide range of technical disciplines for Ericsson, bringing results through to business innovation in products and services and as spin-off companies, where appropriate.
She moved to Germany in 1991 from Ireland, where she was responsible for the start-up and operations of an Ericsson-Eircom joint venture advanced technology company. She served as an Ericsson appointed Director of the company from 1998 to 2006. She studied for her B.Sc.(Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees at the National University of Ireland and as a visiting Fellow at Imperial College, London.
Abstract
"The proportion of energy being generated from renewable energy sources, such as wind and sunshine grows, is planned to grow rapidly in the coming decade, as part of global efforts to address climate change. Integrating renewable energy efficiently in the energy grid requires implementing new and updated communications and control systems in the energy network. Modern communications networks and services offer solutions to the communications requirements of the new Smart Energy environment.
In the FINSENY project, a consortium of European research and industry organizations, from the energy and ICT sectors, have teamed-up to define the ICT requirements of a range of use case scenarios and to develop a functional architecture for communication in the smart energy domain. The presentation will provide an overview of the motivation of the project and of the insights into ICT requirements and architectures emerging from the on-going work of the project. "