CSELT

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Telecom Italia Lab S.p.A.
IRI
DivisionsVoice Technologies, Media Technologies, Fiber Optics Technologies

Telecom Italia Lab

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

Telecom Italia
Group. In 2001 was renamed Telecom Italia Lab as part of Telecom Italia Group.

Research areas

Transmission technology and fiber optics

CSELT became internationally known at the end of 1960s thanks to a cooperation with the US-based company

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]

Computer science

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]

Image processing: the Shroud of Turin

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]

Speech technologies

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.

The Audio-Video encoding Group

At the end of the 1980s, Dr.

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.

The last years

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

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]

Awards and recognition

  • In 1988, CSELT was awarded the Eurotelecom Prize by Juan Carlos I for being "one of the main architects of the Race program for advanced technologies for telecommunications in Europe".[15]
  • CSELT won the Telework Award, the first prize of the European Telework Week 1998, because of the experimental demonstration of the usefulness of CSELT technologies for disabled users, such as quadriplegics or blind people, with the combination of different voice technologies (remarkable for their high quality).[16][17]

Gallery

  • Processor built at CSELT, Turin.
    Processor built at CSELT, Turin.
  • Audio disk containing "Fra Martino campanaro" sung by MUSA
    Audio disk containing "Fra Martino campanaro" sung by MUSA

Bibliography

  • Pirani, Giancarlo, ed. (2013). Advanced algorithms and architectures for speech understanding. Vol. 1. Springer Science & Business Media.
  • Llerena, Patrick; Matt, Mireille, eds. (2005). Innovation policy in a knowledge-based economy : theory and practice. Berlin: Springer. .
  • Saracco, Roberto (2000). The disappearance of telecommunications. New York: IEEE Press. .

Bibliography about CSELT

References

  1. ^ Catania, B.; Michetti, L.; Tosco, F.; Occhini, E.; Silvestri, L. (September 1976). "First Italian Experiment with a Buried Optical Cable" (PDF). Proceedings of 2nd European Conference on Optical Communication (II ECOC). pp. 315–322. Retrieved 2022-08-18.
  2. ^ "Springroove: fiber optics coupling patented by CSELT in 1977. Video: Telecom Italia history archive". Archived from the original on 2016-12-12.
  3. .
  4. ^ https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/goodbye-hello-girls-automating-telephone-exchange
  5. ^ Ciaramella, Alberto. "Device for automatically loading the central memory of electronic processors". U.S. Patent No. 4,117,974. 3 Oct. 1978. https://www.google.com/patents/US4117974.
  6. S2CID 17987034
    .
  7. .
  8. ^ "Le voci di Loquendo". Il Sole 24 ore (in Italian). January 22, 2012.
  9. S2CID 34324315
    .
  10. Telecom Italia
    .
  11. ^ Gambaro, Angelo; et al. (August 1998). "The path of liberalisation in Italy". British Telecommunications Engineering. 17 (2): 29–32.
  12. S2CID 60940334
    .
  13. ^ "Cselt effettua la prima telefonata UMTS in ambiente urbano a livello europeo: il collegamento è effettuato tra una postazione mobile in Piazza S. Carlo a Torino e la sede di via Reiss Romoli". Telecom Italia – Archive (in Italian). Archived from the original on 2018-04-11.
  14. .
  15. ^ "Al Re piace lo CSELT". Stampa Sera (in Italian). 23 May 1988. p. 9.
  16. ^ "Status report European Telework - New Methods of Work 1999" (PDF). August 1999. Retrieved 9 June 2023.
  17. ^ Bonzo, Marialuisa (23 December 1998). "Premiato lo CSELT - Tecnologie per disabili". Tuttoscienze (La Stampa) (in Italian). p. 2.
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