The results of the first eighteen months of the ARCADIA H2020- project have been successfully demonstrated during the first project review on 9th of September at the European Commission in Brussels. These results include the first release of the ARCADIA Framework, consisting of the ARCADIA Orchestrator (called Smart Controller) and the ARCADIA Development toolkit. Through the ARCADIA Development Toolkit, the software developer is able to design and develop reconfigurable-by-design applications. Through the ARCADIA Orchestrator, a Service Provider is able to deploy and manage reconfigurable-by-design applications over programmable infrastructure, by enforcing in parallel a set of defined policies.
UBITECH, with the role of technical coordinator of the project, was actively involved in the design of the overall framework and the implementation of a set of components consisting the ARCADIA Orchestrator as well as the ARCADIA Development Toolkit. Indicatively, UBITECH developed the Policies Enforcement and Optimisation Engine, the Deployment and Execution Manager, the set of Monitoring mechanisms, the Overlay Networking mechanisms, as well as the set of Repositories for storing the developed components, applications and policies and the ARCADIA Dashboard. Work in progress regards the development of the Resource Manager and a set of virtual functions that can be enabled in an automated manner (e.g. load balancer supporting horizontal scalability characteristics).
A video highlighting the main features of the ARCADIA Framework implemented by UBITECH is available here.
Following an intense period of work towards the design and development of a set of innovative features, the first integrated version of the ARCADIA Orchestrator is made available by UBITECH. The ARCADIA Orchestrator supports the deployment and management of distributed reconfigurable-by-design applications over programmable infrastructure. Such applications are developed following the ARCADIA software development paradigm and denoted in the form of a service graph. The ARCADIA Orchestrator support the automated and policy-aware deployment and management of such applications over programmable infrastructure, by exploiting a set of novel technologies. Such technologies include an optimisation framework based on Drools for optimal placement of reconfigurable-by-design applications over programmable infrastructure, a policies enforcement framework based on a Drools rules-management system (Expert System), a set of Software Defined Networking (SDN) mechanisms for overlay routing establishment, a set of novel virtualisation technologies for applications packaging in the form of VMs or unikernels, a set of annotations validation and interpretation mechanisms during runtime and the interconnection of the Orchestrator with a web-based development environment. It should be noted that the ARCADIA Orchestrator is supporting the placement and management of applications denoted in the form of service graphs, including network applications denoted in the form of Virtual Network Functions Forwarding Graphs (VNF-FGs), as defined by the ETSI NFV specifications. A video highlighting the main features of the ARCADIA Orchestrator is available 
A joint paper of UBITECH with the National Technical University of Athens (Greece), the University of Bonn and Fraunhofer FOKUS has been accepted for publication at the Information Systems Frontiers – Springer Journal of Research and Innovation. In this paper, entitled “Challenges and opportunities in renovating public sector information by enabling linked data and analytics”, Ms. Eleni Fotopoulou, Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos and their co-authors have investigated the challenges of linked data tools adoption from the Public Sector organizations in view of the current state-of-the-art of linked data technologies and presented a linked data technical framework that aims to hide the underlying complexity of the SPARQL syntax while preserving or even strengthening the power of the linked data paradigm. This framework can be used in order to minimize the required adoption effort of linked data technology and offer more options and flexibility to the end-users of Public Sector Information. It could be argued that the power provided through the combination of linked data technologies and analytics can facilitate the Public Sector to realise advanced analysis and gain insights in the context of policy formulation.
The FALCON consortium successfully demonstrated the results of the first 18 months during the first project review on 7th of July at the European Commission in Brussels. These results included the first release of all prototypes comprising the FALCON Virtual Open Platform that capitalizes on user experiences and user data collected via the Internet of Things and social media for improvement of product-service systems. The primary objective of the Virtual Open Platform is to seamlessly connect product-service usage information to design and development processes, facilitating: (a) gathering customer feedback though social media; (b) collecting usage information through Product Embedded Information Devices (e.g. sensors, embedded systems); (c) comprehensive processing of the collected data and customer feedback; and (d) deployment of identified information in the product-service development phase. In the course of the review meeting, UBITECH has presented the main results and findings the work-package that UBITECH leads, i.e. WP2 entitled “Data Collection, Extraction and Sharing”, and proceeded with a live demonstration of the already implemented data collection software infrastructure incorporating a set of mechanisms (wrappers) for data, streams, information and knowledge gathering from sensors, devices and social media, as well as of an analytics toolkit for generating business intelligence insights on top of the aggregated datasets.
On June 29th, the PaaSword consortium and the PaaSword Advisory Board met at Siemens in Bucharest, Romania. The consortium presented the first results from the PaaSword project to the Advisory Board consisting of: Prof. Dr. Jens-Matthias Bohli (NEC Labs Europe; HS Mannheim), Marina Bitmann (Data officer, KIT), Tom Flynn (CEO, TFC Research and Innovation) and Daniele Cattedu (Managing Director, EMEA, Cloud Security Alliance). In a live demonstration, UBITECH presented among others the Context Model editor and the Access Policy editor for flexible, context-sensitive Policy Governance, which is used to develop secure Cloud applications. PaaSword framework is designed to help the PaaSword Administrator, the Product Manager or even the Cloud Application developer instantiate and customize the semantic background (i.e. the PaaSword Context Model) based on which PaaSword Access Policies can be defined – in the Access Policy Editor. The instantiation and customization of the semantic background is performed using the web-based Context Model Editor. The Context Model Editor provides a UI through which a user primes the Context Model. Recall that the Context Model provides the necessary underlying ontological infrastructure, i.e. the concepts, properties and instances, in terms of which the attributes of a policy are specified. Through this editor, users can perform many actions, which are automatically interpreted to RDF data format and then stored to PaaSword models triple store.
A joint study of UBITECH, with the Medical Image and Signal Processing Laboratory of the Department of Biomedical Engineering of the Technological Educational Institute of Athens, Greece and the Department of Medical Physics of the University of Patras, has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Image Analysis and Stereology of the International Society of Stereology (with Impact Factor 0,971). In this study, Dr. Konstantinos Perakis, Mr. Spuros Mantzouratos and their co-authors present an ensemble classification scheme, employing the mutual information, the cross-correlation and the clustering based on proximity of image features methods, for early stage assessment of melanomas on plain photography images. The proposed scheme performs two main operations. First, it retrieves the most similar, to the unknown case, image samples from an available image database with verified benign moles and malignant melanoma cases. Second, it provides an automated estimation regarding the nature of the unknown image sample based on the majority of the most similar images retrieved from the available database. Clinical material comprised 75 melanoma and 75 benign plain photography images collected from publicly available dermatological atlases. Results showed that the ensemble scheme outperformed all other methods tested in terms of accuracy with 94.9±1.5%, following an external cross-validation evaluation methodology. The proposed scheme may benefit patients by providing a second opinion consultation during the self-skin examination process and the physician by providing a second opinion estimation regarding the nature of suspicious moles that may assist towards decision making especially for ambiguous cases, safeguarding, in this way from potential diagnostic misinterpretations.
UBITECH is actively involved in the organization of the Special Session on “Software engineering approaches aligned with the Softwarization of Networks and Services” that is going to be held at the European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC’2016*) in Athens at the 29th of June 2016. The special session will provide an overview of on-going work in the EU Horizon 2020 projects ARCADIA and INPUT that UBITECH participates, presentation of related initiatives, and contributions from other researchers and projects. The main goal is to share bleeding-edge knowledge, to cluster complementary activities, and to stimulate the synergy and cooperation from different technology domains and research projects.
UBITECH participated at the ICT for Energy Efficiency Contractors meeting that was organized by the Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME) at 23-24 of May 2016. The main objective of the meeting was the exchange of information and identification of synergies among the ICT for Energy Efficiency funded Horizon 2020 projects of the 2014 and 2015 calls, as well as the collection of views regarding challenges that have to be faced in the future. UBITECH participated on the meeting on behalf of the ENTROPY H2020 project.
A new paper of UBITECH, with the title “PaaSword: A Holistic Data Privacy and Security by Design Framework for Cloud Services”, has been accepted to be presented at the SecureCloud 2016 conference (held on May 24-25, at the Aviva Stadium, Dublin) that is organized by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and had (this year) a 26,6% of acceptance rate. The presentation of Dr. Panagiotis Gouvas and his co-authors focus on the PaaSword framework (supported by the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme of the European Commission), which intends to maximize and fortify the trust of individual, professional and corporate users to Cloud services and applications, by providing storage protection mechanisms, which improves confidentiality and integrity protection of users’ data in the Cloud while it does not affect the data access functionality. Specifically, PaaSword introduces a holistic data privacy and security by design framework with main aim to protect users’ sensitive data stored in the Cloud, based on a searchable encryption scheme enhanced with sophisticated context-aware access control mechanisms, as well as on an innovative approach for key management that maximizes customers’ control over their data. PaaSword intends not only to adopt the CSA Cloud security principles, but also to extend them by capitalizing on recent innovations on distributed encryption and virtual database middleware technologies that introduce a scalable secure Cloud database abstraction layer combined with sophisticated distribution and encryption methods into the processing and querying of data stored in the Cloud.
Dr. Panagiotis Gouvas, the R&D Director of UBITECH, gives a speech at the Nordic Game Conference, transferring his professional experience from the development of security solutions, his significant background in JEE and telecom, and his research work related to the development of secure, interoperable and portable applications across different cloud providers. His speech entitled “Evolution of the PaaS Ecosystem and the Impact on Games” incorporates the experience and technological know-how gained by the UBITECH’s R&D team in the PaaSword H2020 and PaaSport FP7 projects, which aim to address many challenges related to security and portability in PaaS ecosystem – wherein the game industry provides a continuous source of challenges and requirements. The Nordic Game conference, constituting the most relevant games industry conference in Europe and including a program filled with the best speakers from the global industry, access to international exhibitors and 2000+ professionals, world-class hospitality and a host of networking events, is held annually in Malmö, Sweden. The 2016 edition will take place on 18-20 May at Slagthuset, a beautiful venue near the Malmö city center.
