ADAPT and Trinity College Dublin’s Marco Ruffini will deliver a keynote at the IEEE European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC), taking place in Spain this June, addressing the growing role of fibre sensing in operational telecommunications networks. Titled “When Networks Sense: AI-enabled Optical Networks for Situational Awareness and Resilient Infrastructure,” the keynote positions the global optical fibre footprint as a planet-scale sensing platform rather than solely a communications asset.
Ruffini will describe how fibre sensing is moving beyond niche monitoring applications into live telecom networks, where it can be combined with network telemetry and intelligent control systems. This integration supports large-scale situational awareness, enhanced infrastructure resilience, and increasingly autonomous, AI-driven decision making.
The presentation will cover key fibre sensing technologies and their use in seismic detection, environmental monitoring, and maritime awareness, including recent work on dark vessel detection using submarine fibre cables. The keynote will also examine the role of AI and machine learning in interpreting complex sensing data and conclude with an assessment of the scalability, control, and system integration challenges facing future intelligent optical networks.
