Welcome Remarks: We are going on-line!Dear friends, presenters and supporters of iPOP Conference, the world has been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We were obliged to postpone the iPOP2020 event, planned for physical conference in May 28-29, to a virtual conference to be held September 10-11, 2020, following the guidelines of the CDC and local government advice. This impact, however, just start for new life and business style. Today, we use video conferencing and hold university classes remotely from home or remote office. Evidently, this requires sufficient bandwidth and quality and better human interfacing. This is a trend which has started and is giving rise to new businesses such as virtual university, virtual office and eventually remote delivery by autonomous vehicles - New areas for future iPOP events to focus on. This year marks the 16th anniversary of this International conference, which has been founded and sponsored by Photonic Internet Labs (PIL) and ISOCORE. Since its inception, the conference has enjoyed well attendance with diverse and involved participants. Thanks to support of industry the event has been a real success. This year we are going to realize virtual iPOP 2020 with virtual presentation, virtual booth demo and virtual interoperability, all realizing by advanced network and cloud systems, given the short time to prepare but a new challenge for the state-of the art high-performance network applications. This year we are augmenting the existing central theme of the conference with 5G network and smart city which including backbone, platform and services. In addition, we have network topics such as SDN, NFV and service chaining with the focus on reliable, manageable, flexible and cost-effective carrier and/or service provider networks. In the past few years these networks have mostly focused on datacenter, mobile access network integration like 5G and include AI and data analytics aspects. Integrating network and processing functions, sophisticated control and managing functions are newly created features in NTT networks which was announced as IOWN, a new paradigm for networking. The iPOP conference venue happens to be at the heart of IOWN technology. Almost 3 years ago at the iPOP opening ceremony, Prof. Yamanaka indicated that iPOP which started as IP+ OPTICAL, now it stands for Intelligent and Processing over Optical networks. Optical networking puts lower restriction on distance, bandwidth, and delay, allowing easily integrating some functions in the network. This integration of data processing with data transport in networks underscores an importance step. With topics such as multi-layer, multi-technology operation, integrating AI, cloud computing, edge computing, 5G networks with low latency, IoT, and reliable access. iPOP now features advanced physical and sophisticated processing technologies. The technical program committee has put together an exciting program consisting of virtual technical sessions with emphasis on presentations on SDN, Orchestration with data/network, PCE (Path Computation Element) with data analytic and its applications, and advance data-center network with Optical Devices. In addition, there will be technology virtual showcases and other demonstrations virtually are new challenges. We hope that you would be able to join us online at iPOP 2020 with virtual presentations and remote technical discussions. We look forward to your remote participation and support to make the event a great success!
June 8, 2020
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