Author: ubitech

A scientific paper entitled “Design of a decision support system, trained on GPU, for assisting melanoma diagnosis in dermatoscopy images” has been accepted for oral presentation at the 4th International Conference on Mathematical Modeling in Physical Sciences (IC-MSQUARE 2015), which is held in Mykonos, Greece, on June 5-8, 2015. Konstantinos Perakis, Thanassis Bouras and their co-authors present the design of a decision support system for assisting the diagnosis of melanoma in dermatoscopy images. Clinical material comprised images of 44 dysplastic (clark’s nevi) and 44 malignant melanoma lesions, obtained from the dermatology database Dermnet. Initially, images were processed for hair removal and background correction using the Dull Razor algorithm. Processed images were segmented to isolate moles from surrounding background, using a combination of level sets and an automated thresholding approach. Morphological (area, size, shape) and textural features (first and second order) were calculated from each one of the segmented moles. Extracted features were fed to a pattern recognition system assembled with the Probabilistic Neural Network Classifier, which was trained to distinguish between benign and malignant cases, using the exhaustive search and the leave one out method. Results showed that the designed system discriminated benign from malignant moles with 88.6 % accuracy employing morphological and textural features. The proposed system could be used for analysing moles depicted on smart phone images after appropriate training with smartphone images cases. This could assist towards early detection of melanoma cases, if suspicious moles were to be captured on smartphone by patients and be transferred to the physician together with an assessment of the mole’s nature.

Source: http://www.icmsquare.net/

A scientific paper entitled “PaaSword: A Holistic Data Privacy and Security by Design Framework for Cloud Services” has been co-authored by UBITECH and presented at the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2015), which was took place in Lisbon, Portugal from 20-22 May, 2015. At this position paper, Panagiotis Gouvas (UBITECH’s R&D Director), along with other co-authors, outlines significant security challenges presented when migrating to a cloud environment and describes a novel holistic framework that aspires to alleviate these challenges, corresponding to a high level description of the vision of the PaaSword H2020 project. The presentation raised interest among the audience especially regarding the context-aware security by design proposed scheme and the symmetric searchable encryption envisioned.

Sources:
– http://closer.scitevents.org/TechnicalProgram.aspx?y=2015
– https://sites.google.com/site/paaswordeu/news/firstpaperaccepted

UBITECH participated at IPv6 for innovative government and public services workshop that took place in Athens, April 21st, 2015. The workshop was organized by the “Governments Enabled with IPv6” (GEN6) European IPv6 project along with the Hellenic IPv6 Task Force (HTFv6) that UBITECH is a member. In the workshop, a set of presentations were given with regards to IPv6 deployments in public administration networks across Europe, IPv6 experience from Telcos large-scale deployments in Greece as well as presentations related with the advantages of IPv6 for the IoT and next generation networking world. Representatives from Greek public bodies, academic institutions, SMEs and EU GEN6 partners participated at the workshop and presented their views on the subject. On behalf of UBITECH, Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos provided a presentation entitled “Rapid and adaptive applications deployment over programmable infrastructure – IPv6 considerations” based on the work initiated in the ARCADIA H2020 project, describing the IPv6 considerations with regards to the exploitation of IPv6 characteristics at the design and development of a smart orchestrator capable to deploy and dynamically re-configure applications/services provision over multi-IaaS infrastructure.

Source: http://gen6.sch.gr/index.php/el/activities/workshops

UBITECH participated at Net Futures 2015 that took place in Brussels, March 25-26, 2015, while a presentation was provided at the Network Apps Session. The session explored the challenged introduced and the opportunities opened up by the transition to Software Networks that the Telecommunications Industry is experiencing. Different actors (Operators, Manufacturers, SMEs and academia) are facing them from different angles. The session explored the interactions between the established manufacturers and the SMEs and if a Marketplace for Network Applications would be the right instrument to foster Network Innovation.

On behalf of UBITECH, Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos provided a presentation entitled “Enabling rapid and adaptive network applications deployment” where a novel software development paradigm was provided targeted at facilitating developers to develop infrastructural agnostic applications that can be deployed over programmable infrastructure and dynamically configured during execution time. Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos also participated at the panel discussion followed after the session’s presentations as well as to the discussion with the audience.

The key message extracted from the session is the following: The Future Internet is about Future Internet “Software”. There is a need for novel programming paradigms and open APIs in the area of SDN but foremost, we need to build a reference architecture that scopes what we mean by the term “Network App”. Once this is in place, we will be able to explore the impact of this paradigm change in the European Telecommunications eco-system and exploit the full potential for Operators, Manufacturers and SMEs.

Source: http://netfutures2015.eu/programme/network-applications-how-to-unleash-the-full-innovation-potential-of-sdn-and-nfv/

UBITECH has participated in the CloudWATCH Concertation meeting at Net Futures 2015 that took place in Brussels, March 25th, 2015. The objective of the concertation meeting was to look at future directions for software services and cloud in Europe, highlighting new opportunities for novel research and innovation to ensure Europe remains a world leader. The meeting was oriented towards all the active projects that are part of Unit E2 Software Services and Cloud. Representatives from these projects provided existing research and innovation outcomes, while a short presentation of all the relevant projects that were funded from the H2020 Call 1 projects was provided. UBITECH presented the ARCADIA H2020 project, while was also active towards disseminating the work initiated in the PaaSword and INPUT H2020 projects.

Source: http://www.cloudwatchhub.eu/turning-cloud-research-innovative-software-services

UBITECH has participated in the kick-off meeting of the SAGE-CARE research project in Darmstadt, Germany (February 12-13, 2015), officially started on December 1st, 2014. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 644186) and spans on the period December 2014 – November 2017. The focus of SAGE-CARE is the semantically integrating, linking and analyzing genomic, research and Electronic Health Records data for cancer management.

Within SAGE-CARE, UBITECH aims to solve the privacy dilemma found at typical large scale data storage and management systems wherein end-users lose (most probably) control of their data, by encrypting sensitive data before it is stored, focusing on data protection in terms of confidentiality and avoiding any unauthorized information retrieval. To guarantee a high level of data protection, an innovative encryption scheme is adopted so as to encrypt directly the top secret and confidential data. Context-based access control makes the misuse of terminals for unauthorized data access impossible. In particular, as SAGE-CARE focuses on creating a holistic informatics platform for rapidly integrating genomic sequences, electronic health records (EHRs) and research repositories to enable personalised medicine strategies for malignant melanoma treatment, UBITECH intends to realize a secure medical data space, which enables the browsing of anonymized patients’ clinical care data and information sources and EHRs, in a standardized and homogenized way, creating a private, secure Linked Data space of semantically interconnected medical data and resources.

UBITECH participates in the Genoa kick-off meeting (February 2-3, 2015) of the INPUT research project, officially started on January 1st, 2015. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 644672) and spans on the period January 2015 -December 2017. The INPUT Project aims at designing a novel infrastructure and paradigm to support Future Internet personal cloud services in a more scalable and sustainable way and with innovative added-value capabilities.

The INPUT technologies will enable next-generation cloud applications to go beyond classical service models, and even to replace physical Smart Devices, usually placed in users’ homes (e.g., set-top-boxes, etc.) or deployed around for monitoring purposes (e.g., sensors), with their virtual images, providing them to users “as a Service”. Virtual and physical SDs will be made available to users at any time and at any place by means of virtual cloud-powered Personal Networks, which will constitute an underlying service model. The INPUT Project will foster future-proof Internet infrastructures that will be “smarter”, fully virtualized, power vs. performance optimized, and vertically integrated with cloud computing, with a clear impact on OPEX and CAPEX of Telecoms, of Service Providers, and of end-users. At the same time, it will extend the programmability of network devices to make them able to host cloud service applications, which will cooperate with the ones in users’ terminals and datacenters to realize the aforementioned cloud services.

UBITECH will contribute to the definition of abstractions and the development of mechanisms for the support of “in-network” programmability in network devices, to the design and definition of the Service NorthBound Interfaces, and to the implementation of SDN-based network abstractions to support applications development and network-wide policy programming with energy-proportionality (as extension of current SDN and NFV primitives). Finally, UBITECH will lead all activities towards the realization of the set of proof-of-concept personal cloud applications that can be used as use-cases to validate the increased service flexibility and efficiency of the INPUT platform. In particular, UBITECH will undertake the responsibility of the development of the Personal Cloud Service Platform as well as the Service and the User applications for the collective sensor implementation.

UBITECH has hosted in Athens (January 26-27, 2015) the kick-off meeting of the ARCADIA research project, officially started on January 1st, 2015. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 645372) and spans on the period January 2015 – December 2017. The focus of ARCADIA is the design and development of novel software paradigms that facilitate the developers of highly distributed applications to take advantage of the emerging programmability of the underlying infrastructure and therefore develop reconfigurable-by-design applications.

An extensible Context Model will be developed and used by developers directly at the source-code level. Proper Context Model will be assisted and validated by IDE plug-ins in order to re-assure that the generated executable files contain meaningful semantics. According to ARCADIA’s vision, the generated executables should be on-boarded by a Smart Controller that will undertake the tasks of translating annotations to optimal infrastructural configuration. Such a controller will enforce an optimal configuration to the registered programmable resources and will pro-actively adjust the configuration plan based on the Infrastructural State and the Application State. The Context-Model and the aforementioned ARCADIA toolset will be complemented by a Development Methodology that will assure that developed Highly Distributed Applications are Reconfigurable-By-Design. The framework is planned to be validated and evaluated on three use cases that will be deployed over testbeds that host heterogeneous programmable infrastructure.

In ARCADIA, UBITECH is responsible for the scientific and technical coordination of the ARCADIA project and for the reference implementation of the “Configuration and Deployment Manager” as well as the “Metadata Interpreter” of the aforementioned Smart Controller. Furthermore, UBITECH will contribute towards the realization of the demonstration use-cases and participate to the dissemination and standardization activities of the project.

The results of the 1st year of implementation of the LinDA* FP7-610565 project have been successfully demonstrated during the periodic project review on 29/1 at the European Commission in Luxembourg. Among these, the first release of the LinDA workbench, which is now ready for deployment into the LinDA Pilots, as well as the setup of the pilots (fostering Business Intelligence Analytics, Environmental Analytics, Media Analytics) that are going to be executed and validated during the second year of the project.

UBITECH’s contribution to the project regards mainly the design and development of the Linked Data Analytics and Data Mining Component of the LinDA workbench as well as the leadership of WP4 that regards the LinDA pilots. In more detail, the Linked Data Analytics and Data Mining Component supports the realisation of analysis based on the consumption and production of Linked Data. A library of basic and robust data analytic functionality is provided through the support of a set of algorithms, enabling SMEs to utilise and share analytic methods on Linked Data for the discovery and communication of meaningful new patterns that were unattainable or hidden in the previous isolated data structures. Specifically, integration of the Weka open-source tool and the R open-source project for statistical computing is realised, while the following algorithms are supported per category: (i) Classification Analysis Algorithms (J48, M5P), (ii) Association Analysis Algorithms (Apriori), (iii) Statistics/Forecasting Analysis Algorithms (Linear Regression, Multiple Linear Regression, Arima), (iv) Geospatial Analysis Algorithms (Morans I, Kriging, NCF correlogram), and (v) Clustering Algorithms (KMeans Partitioning, Ward Hierarchical Agglomerative, Model Based Clustering). High priority is given to the user friendliness of the provided interfaces based on the design of specialized workflows per algorithm category (e.g. workflows for supervised learning techniques such as classification and regression/forecasting algorithms and unsupervised learning techniques such as clustering and pattern discovery (association) algorithms).

For more information, please visit the project’s website or contact us.

* The LinDA project addresses one of the most significant challenges of the usage and publication of Linked Data, the renovation and conversion of existing data formats into structures that support the semantic enrichment and interlinking of data. The set of tools provided by LinDA will assist enterprises, especially SMEs which often cannot afford the development and maintenance of dedicated information analysis and management departments, in efficiently developing novel data analytical services that are linked to the available public data therefore contributing to improve their competitiveness and stimulating the emergence of innovative business models.

UBITECH has participated in the Brussels kick-off meeting of the FALCON research project, officially started on January 1st, 2015. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 636868) and spans on the period January 2015 – December 2017. The aim of FALCON is to monitor the real usage of the products and services in operation and the consumers’ feedback on social media, in order to extend product and service lifespan and optimize the use of the necessary resources all along their lifecycle. The innovative FALCON open environment will optimize the use of collected information enabling a concurrent, collaborative and productive product-service design process.

Within FALCON, the main pillars for product-service design are based on the combination of two significant information sources: (i) the Product-Service Usage Information derived from the Product Embedded Information Devices; and (ii) the consumers’ feedbacks from social media. In this context, UBITECH undertakes the leadership of the “data extraction and management” research activities, contributing heavily to the technological choices towards the definition, design and implementation of a set of data wrappers facilitating the data acquisition from multidisciplinary data sources, namely a) sensors, b) structured data repositories, and c) social media networks. Additionally, UBITECH is responsible for the required activities towards the processing, enrichment and linkage of product data with social media and further with additional data sources, e.g. DBpedia, Geonames and LinkedGeoData, so as to take under consideration additional environmental and geo-referenced information.

Finally, UBITECH will be responsible to publish the aforementioned products’ and services’ datasets utilizing Linked Data technologies and to deploy a Linked Data access mechanism and policies for linked sensor data so as to facilitate the execution of declarative queries on top of a linked sensor data infrastructure under the defined access rights schemes that will be applied for the various users’ types.