Grants designed to attract research talent for its incorporation into research groups within the Madrid Region. Modality 1.

The objective of these grants is to promote the short-term incorporation of prestigious researchers from foreign R&D organizations to the RD&I centers of the Madrid region, in order to strengthen those research teams that develop their work in areas of strategic interest. The ultimate aim is to promote scientific excellence by attracting first line researchers from the international academic and research communities to carry out R&D activities in the Madrid region.

 Summary of NetSense

Through generations, including upcoming 5G, mobile networks have invariably remained bounded to their original function of a complicated distribution system, transporting bits of information from one (mobile) point to another. The present project proposal, entitled “Mobile Network Sensing”, or NetSense in short, questions this limiting traditional view: instead, it reckons for the first time that mobile networks constitute a ubiquitous infrastructure that can operate as a worldscale, pervasive, costeffective platform for remote sensing. Indeed, mobile network metadata provide a unique combination of finegrained individuallevel information and unparalleled global coverage, which yields an enormous potential to revolutionize a multitude of sensing application domains.

Recognizing the untapped richness of mobile network metadata, NetSense proposes the groundbreaking vision that mobile networks shall integrate remote “network sensing” as a native primary function, at the same level of traditional communication service support. To this end, NetSense will develop and evaluate unconventional passive measurement probes and control plane that natively support realtime, largescale, privacypreserving remote sensing functions, and that are transparent to conventional network operations for communication.

The successful execution of the NetSense project will demonstrate the feasibility and potential of network sensing as a new primary purpose for mobile network infrastructures, effectively turning one of the largest, most pervasive infrastructures ever built into a global remote sensing platform. Achieving such an ambitious objective will affect the mobile network ecosystem as a whole, will enable new lifeenhancing sensing applications, and will unlock new markets, with substantial impacts on science, technology and society.