Special Session 3 : “SLICES-RI: Experimenting the Next-Generation Digital Technologies”
Date, hour and room to be defined
Session chair:
- Marie-José Montpetit (SLICES-RI, )
- Antonio de la Oliva (Univ. Carlos III de Madrid, ES)
The rapid evolution of digital technologies demands a paradigm shift from isolated system development to integrated experimentation and reproducibility. Emerging use cases, such as digital twins, autonomous systems, immersive communications, smart cities, and space–air–ground–sea integrated networks, require experimental platforms that seamlessly combine communication, sensing, computing, data and intelligence. This is what SLICES-RI wants to embody, constructing one of Europe’s most advanced scientific instruments in the field of digital sciences, fostering and cultivating cutting-edge research, data-driven science, and scientific data-sharing, fully endorsing Open Science and FAIR principles.
This special session aims to highlight SLICES-RI as an enabler of end-to-end experimentation across 6G architectures, advanced sensing, cloud–edge computing, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), and non-terrestrial networks (NTN). Using Blueprints, experimentation over SLICES in these critical technologies allows experimenters to bridge the gap between theory, simulation, and real-world deployment, while fostering reproducible research, standardization, and technology transfer. SLICES-RI elevates the data dimension by integrating automated data collection, curation, and open-access storage guaranteeing that experimental data remains FAIR at every stage. Furthermore, the infrastructure utilizes precision-engineered metadata aligned with open science standards to enable seamless machine-actionability and maintain rigorous adherence to regulatory and ethical mandates.
The session will bring together the different platform designers, who built the foundations of the infrastructure, and researchers with diverse expertise, to share insights on design methodologies, experimental results, open challenges, and best practices in building and operating SLICES-RI as the next-generation digital experimentation infrastructure.
In 2026, SLICES-RI started pre-operation, providing European researchers with new experimental services and available infrastructure to significantly impact the research ecosystem in Europe. In this special session, we will provide an overview of the services available to researchers across Europe, indicating how to access them and what kind of experiments can be done with the existing infrastructure, focusing on how European Research projects, including HE SNS. JU can benefit of the SLICES-RI.
Programme
The main objectives of this special session are to:
- Present SLICES as a state-of-the-art experimental services supporting 6G and future digital ecosystems
- Explore integration of sensing, communication, computing, and AI within unified experimental infrastructures
- Discuss cloud-native and orchestration for large-scale experimentation
- Address non-terrestrial networking (satellite, HAPS, UAVs) and its integration with terrestrial networks
- Share lessons learned, performance evaluations, and real-world experimental results
- Identify open research challenges and future directions for experimental digital platforms
The special session will cover the different services and infrastructure available for researchers across Europe, the session will be handled by invited speakers from SLICES-RI:
- Introduction to SLICES-RI
- National nodes and how to contact them
- The concept of blueprint
Current services available: basic infrastructure, federated learning, post-5G, sensing
- Current infrastructure available: anechoic chambers, SDRs, etc.
- Next steps, how can I use the SLICES-RI for my project or research (for free!)
- Experience from aligned project, 6G-XCEL
