Formerly | Centro Studi e Laboratori S.p.A. (1961-1964) Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni S.p.A. (1964-2001) |
---|---|
Company type | Subsidiary |
Industry | Telecommunications |
Founded | 1961 |
Founder | STIPEL |
Headquarters | , Italy |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Luigi Bonavoglia Basilio Catania Cesare Mossotto |
150k Euro (2000) | |
Owner | IRI-STET (until the 1990s), Telecom Italia (since the 1990s) |
Number of employees | 1200 (in 2000) |
Parent | IRI |
Divisions | Voice Technologies, Media Technologies, Fiber Optics Technologies |
Telecom Italia Lab S.p.A. (formerly Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni S.p.A.; CSELT) is an Italian research center for telecommunication based in Torino, the biggest in Italy and one of the most important in Europe.
It played a major role internationally especially in the standardization of protocols and technologies in telecommunication: perhaps the most widely well known is the standardization of mp3.
CSELT has been active from 1964 to 2001, initially as a part of the IRI-STET group, the major conglomerate of Italian public Industries in the 1960s and 1970s; it later became part of Telecom Italia Group. In 2001 was renamed Telecom Italia Lab as part of Telecom Italia Group.
CSELT became internationally known at the end of 1960s thanks to a cooperation with the US-based company COMSAT for a pilot project of TDMA (and PCM) satellite communication system. Furthermore, in 1971 it started a joint research with Corning Glass Works on optical fiber cables: as a result, in 1977 Torino was the first city having a metropolitan optic line (9 km of length, the longest at that time), [1] in collaboration with Sirti and Pirelli. An example of innovation in the fiber optics field, was the coupling techniques of the optic cables, named Springroove and patented in 1977 by CSELT, that allowed to build long paths of optic fibers suitable for a metropolitan network. [2]
In 1971, CSELT built the "Gruppi Speciali", [3] a time-division processing computer for telephone call switching. It was the second electronic switching system in Europe, following Britain's 1968 Empress, [4] but it was very advanced in its design: e.g. in 1975 was introduced for the first time an architecture-independent[ clarification needed ] automatic bootstrap from ROM composed from semiconductors, pushing a single button (and not by a long hand procedure input as in the past) and with the storage of the machine state of the switch, in order to have a quick automatic reboot of the switch in case of failure. [5]
In 1978, CSELT also gained notoriety due to its 3D images of the Shroud of Turin, supervised by Giovanni Tamburelli: those images, the highest-resolution ones available at that time, followed the first 3D images of the Shroud that had been provided by NASA earlier during the same year. Notably, that work made the native "3D structure" of the Shroud itself apparent for the first time. A second result from Tamburelli was the electronic removal from the image of what was term "blood" covering the man of the Shroud. [6]
1975 saw the release of MUSA , the first Italian speech synthezer, and one of the first in the world: later, the same group also contributed to research in speech recognition: both technologies were used for auto-responder systems in telco services. [7] Since 1975 the group of Voice Technology, led by Giulio Modena, carried on the advanced researchers in the field, publishing for Springer (together with the consortium of Esprit project) the book in 1990: Pirani, Giancarlo, ed. Advanced algorithms and architectures for speech understanding. Vol. 1. Springer Science & Business Media, 1990. Later, this work was transferred to the spin-off company Loquendo SpA. Starting from 1978, MUSA was able to sing Fra Martino Campanaro in Italian. At that time that was the only speech synthesis system of commercial interest available on the market apart the one provided by AT&T. [8] and the only one able to speak and sing in Italian.
At the end of the 1980s, Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, Vice-President of the Media Group at CSELT, founded and chaired the international MPEG group, [9] that released and test audio-video standards such as MPEG-1, MP3, MPEG-4 in cooperation with several companies worldwide: in March 1992 a working MPEG-1 system was demonstrated in CSELT. Work on image compression standards (such as JPEG) was also undertaken. All these innovations had a strong impact on media technology on a worldwide scale.
Several researches were carried also on later years in the field of optics circuits, microprocessor, antennas and all the fields of telecommunication as member of international standard group, such as W3C. In 1996 (with Telecom Italia Mobile) the first GSM pre-paid card in the world was released, [10] [11] and in 1999 the first UMTS call in a European city was tested. [12] [13]
In March 2001 CSELT was merged by incorporation in Telecom Italia Lab (TI Lab), a new S.p.A. 100% owned by Telecom Italia, when the successful speech and voice research group was spun off as Loquendo in January 2001, later (2011) sold to Nuance Communications. TILab combined part of the former CSELT with Venture Capital and Business Units. [14]
MP3 is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners; for example, compared to CD-quality digital audio, MP3 compression can commonly achieve a 75–95% reduction in size, depending on the bit rate. In popular usage, MP3 often refers to files of sound or music recordings stored in the MP3 file format (.mp3) on consumer electronic devices.
Karlheinz Brandenburg is a German electrical engineer and mathematician. Together with Ernst Eberlein, Heinz Gerhäuser, Bernhard Grill, Jürgen Herre and Harald Popp, he developed the widespread MP3 method for audio data compression. He is also known for his elementary work in the field of audio coding, the perception measurement, the wave field synthesis and psychoacoustics. Brandenburg has received numerous national and international research awards, prizes and honors for his work. Since 2000 he has been a professor of electronic media technology at the Technical University Ilmenau. Brandenburg was significantly involved in the founding of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) and currently serves as its director.
TIM S.p.A. is an Italian telecommunications company with headquarters in Rome, Milan, and Naples, which provides fixed, public and mobile telephony, and DSL data services.
Fastweb is an Italian telecommunications company that provides fixed and mobile telephony, broadband Internet and IPTV services. It is also one of the prominent companies in Italy providing FTTH connections, and is a subsidiary of Fastweb + Vodafone and part of the Swiss telecommunications group Swisscom.
Vodafone Italy is an Italian telecommunications company owned by Swisscom though Fastweb + Vodafone. The company's headquarters are in Ivrea (TO) and Milan.
Wind Telecomunicazioni S.p.A., more commonly known as Wind, was an Italian telecommunications company of the VimpelCom Ltd. group, which offered mobile telephony services and, through Infostrada, also fixed-line telephony services, Internet and IPTV.
Alcatel–Lucent S.A. was a multinational telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, France. The company focused on fixed, mobile and converged networking hardware, IP technologies, software and services, and operated between 2006 and 2016 in more than 130 countries.
Leonardo Chiariglione is an Italian engineer who has led the development of international technical standards for digital media. In particular, he was the chairman of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) from 1988 to 2020, which he co-founded together with Hiroshi Yasuda of NTT.
Valerio Zingarelli was the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Babelgum. He took up the position in July 2007, taking over from former CEO and co-founder Erik Lumer. Previously Zingarelli was an independent board member of Fastweb, the second largest Italian fixed line TelCo.
DMIF, or Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework, is a uniform interface between the application and the transport, that allows the MPEG-4 application developer to stop worrying about that transport. DMIF was defined in MPEG-4 Part 6 in 1999. DMIF defines two interfaces: the DAI and the DNI. A single application can run on different transport layers when supported by the right DMIF instantiation. MPEG-4 DMIF supports the following functionalities:
Loquendo was an Italian multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Torino, Italy, that provides speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker verification and identification applications. Loquendo, which was founded in 2001 under the Telecom Italia Lab, also had offices in United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, and the United States.
Società Finanziaria Telefonica was an Italian company that operated in the telecommunications sector. It was IRI's holding company for this sector.
Alberto Ciaramella is an Italian computer engineer and scientist. He is notable for extensive pioneering contributions in the field of speech technologies and applied natural language processing, most of them at CSELT and Loquendo, with the amount of 40 papers and four patents.
Eloquens™ is a text-to-speech software, whose first version was released in 1993 by CSELT. It was the first commercial speech synthesis software able to speak Italian.
Multichannel Speaking Automaton (MUSA) was an early prototype of Speech Synthesis machine started in 1975.
The Selenia Gp-16 was a general purpose minicomputer designed by the Italian company Selenia of STET group. It was followed by an upgraded version called Gp-160.
RIPAC was a VLSI single-chip microprocessor designed for automatic recognition of the connected speech, one of the first of this use.
Scuola Superiore Guglielmo Reiss Romoli (SSGRR) was the Telecom Italia’s Post-Graduate International Academy and research centre in information and communication technologies, founded in L'Aquila on 1976 by STET and that concluded its activities in 2009.
Gabriella Bosco is an Italian engineer and professor at the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications of the Polytechnic University of Turin. She is the current editor-in-chief of the Journal of Lightwave Technology, and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Elisabetta Ripa is an Italian businesswoman, CEO of Enel X Way since April 2022 and Advisory board of IAB Italia, a consultative body established to promote digital culture. As a successful Manager, Forbes included her among the 100 most successful Italian women in 2019.