"There is no spoon," says the little boy in The Matrix. "… you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, but only yourself." Armed with that nugget of wisdom, Neo begins his journey to change the nature of reality, by changing himself. When people have tried to explain the concept of blockchain, they have often stated that it allows for the decentralization of organizations and that it has the technological power to remove the centralized party. In other words, in blockchain-enabled networks: there is no decision-maker, no one to lead, no one to request access from, no one to control and no one to steer the evolution of these networks.

Chinese technology company Huawei has not had particularly good press recently. Countries including Australia have excluded it from construction of a 5G network, while the U.S. Justice Department recently laid criminal charges against the firm and its chief financial officer. It is understandable that in the midst of such woes, one might turn toward something harmless like classical music to wallow in sophisticated creativity, cultural tradition, and human mystery. In time for the Year of the Pig, Huawei recently presented a completion of Franz Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" in performance at London's Cadogan Hall. It was accomplished by "pairing technological innovations of Huawei's artificial intelligence" from its smartphone with the human expertise of film composer Lucas Cantor. What was the division of labor here?

We spoke to Ericsson IoT Head Jeff Travers during MWC 2019 about where the industry is heading and how emerging technologies are opening new possibilities. A running theme of this year's event was how technologies such as the IoT, 5G, AI, and blockchain are converging in powerful ways. Last year was a lot of talk about their potential, this year we're seeing more actual deployments. Transportation is one area where the IoT is having a major impact. The morning of our interview, Ericsson announced it's helped to build a '5G smart harbour' at the Port of Qingdao in partnership with China Unicom.

Now that it's here, all anyone can talk about are foldable phones. The next-generation network technology promises blazing speeds, smooth and stable connections and new possibilities for VR, self-driving cars and robotics. This being the big new thing for the mobile industry, all the players -- from phone makers and infrastructure vendors to chipmakers and wireless carriers -- have been desperate to demonstrate how ready they are. But at Mobile World Congress, there was far more buzz about the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X than about the early 5G devices being shown off. The lack of attention paid to all the 5G phones makes you wonder whether all the racing and chest-beating was truly necessary, and serves as a reminder that the next-generation wireless technology is still in its early days. Part of the problem is that 5G being "here" doesn't necessarily mean it's here for you.

Two divisions of the Chinese networking giant Huawei pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges that it stole trade secrets from America's third-largest wireless carrier, T-Mobile, in a bid to copy its technology. In federal court in Seattle, Huawei -- one of the world's biggest wireless equipment makers -- said it was not guilty of committing trade secret theft, nor of conspiring to hide such a plan. The case involves Huawei Device Co., Ltd. and Huawei Device USA. A jury trial has been set for March 2, 2020, before Chief Judge Ricardo S. Martinez of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The pleas follow a 10-count indictment unsealed last month alleging in part that the Huawei divisions tried to collect information about a robotic arm that T-Mobile used to simulate human touch on its smartphones.

New machine learning approach could give a big boost to the efficiency of optical networks February 25, 2019, Optical Society of America Credit: CC0 Public Domain New work leveraging machine learning could increase the efficiency of optical telecommunications networks. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, fiber optic cables offer the ability to transmit more data over longer distances compared to traditional copper wires. Optical Transport Networks (OTNs) have emerged as a solution for packaging data in fiber optic cables, and improvements stand to make them more cost-effective. A group of researchers from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona and the telecom company Huawei have retooled an artificial intelligence technique used for chess and self-driving cars to make OTNs run more efficiently. They will present their research at the upcoming Optical Fiber Conference and Exposition, to be held 3-7 March in San Diego, California, USA.

The Chinese tech giant Huawei has pleaded not guilty to U.S. charges that it stole trade secrets from T-Mobile. A company representative entered the pleas Thursday in federal court in Seattle, where a 10-count indictment was unsealed in January. Charges include conspiracy to steal trade secrets, attempted theft of trade secrets, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors say Huawei stole the technology behind a robotic device that Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile used to test smartphones. Huawei has also been charged in New York with bank fraud and sanctions violations.

The future is fast, according to the experts. But it feels like it is arriving a little slowly. Phone and network experts have spent the week trying to make the world excited about 5G and the possibilities it offers for data connections – though when the promised 10 times faster speed will arrive, and how, is a little more complicated than they would like to make it sound. The Mobile World Congress is the annual event where the phone and carrier industry gather together in a huge Barcelona conference centre and talk about the future. And everything they had to say about that future sounded mostly the same: 5G, the new data connections that are about to disrupt just about every industry, according to its proponents.

Wireless communication systems operate in complex time-varying environments. Therefore, selecting the optimal configuration parameters in these systems is a challenging problem. For wireless links, rate selection is used to select the optimal data transmission rate that maximizes the link throughput subject to an application-defined latency constraint. We model rate selection as a stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, where a finite set of transmission rates are modeled as independent bandit arms. For this setup, we propose Con-TS, a novel constrained version of the Thompson sampling algorithm, where the latency requirement is modeled by a linear constraint on arm selection probabilities. Since our algorithm learns a Bayesian model of the wireless link, it can be adapted to exploit prior knowledge often available in practical wireless networks. Through numerical results from simulated experiments, we demonstrate that Con-TS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art bandit algorithms proposed in the literature. Further, we compare Con-TS with the outer loop link adaptation (OLLA) scheme, which is the state-of-the-art in practical wireless networks and relies on carefully tuned offline link models. We show that Con-TS outperforms OLLA in simulations, further, it can elegantly incorporate information from the offline link models to substantially improve performance.

Washington says Huawei could be compelled by Beijing to spy on or disable foreign telecom networks that use its equipment. The Trump administration has been particularly focused on dissuading allies from using Huawei gear in their rollout of 5G--the next-generation mobile networks that promise to connect more things, including self-driving cars and factory components, to the internet. In a sign of the challenges ahead for U.S. officials, though, the trade show here has offered Huawei the opportunity to tout new deals with America's friends. It used this week's Mobile World Congress, rebranded this year as MWC Barcelona, to announce a high-profile agreement with the biggest carrier in the United Arab Emirates, one of America's closest Mideast allies, to build that country's first 5G network. Despite facing off on European soil, Huawei is benefiting from the sense of a home-court advantage here.