UBITECH has actively participated in the pre-conference meetings as well as the main conference activities at Net Futures 2016: Driving Growth in the #DigitalSingleMarket. UBITECH participated at the pre-conference meetings of the of the Clusters of European Projects on Cloud, providing contributions and ideas based on the work realized on relevant Horizon2020 projects. Specifically, UBITECH participated at the “Software Engineering for Services and Applications” clustering meeting on behalf of the ARCADIA project, the “Novel approaches and technologies for Cloud resource and service management (NATRES)” clustering meeting on behalf of the ARCADIA and INPUT projects and the “Data Protection, Security and Privacy in Cloud” clustering meeting on behalf of the PaaSword project.
Furthermore, the aforementioned project results were demonstrated in the relevant booths of the clusters at the exhibition area of the conference. In the booth of the “Software Engineering for Services and Applications” and the “Novel approaches and technologies for Cloud resource and service management (NATRES)” clusters, the ARCADIA and INPUT orchestrators were demonstrated, focusing on deployment and orchestration aspects of distributed and edge computing applications over programmable infrastructure. Finally, in the booth of the “Data Protection, Security and Privacy in Cloud” cluster, the data privacy and security by design solutions developed in the PaaSword project were demonstrated.
Through the exchange of ideas and the discussions with participants coming from the industrial, research and academia sector, valuable feedback was collected for further extension of the existing developments as well as ideas for implementation in the future.
Source: http://netfutures2016.eu
A white paper entitled “NATRES’ White-paper” has been co-authored by UBITECH and published at the webpage of the EU Cluster “Novel approaches and technologies for Cloud resource and service management (NATRES)”. This open-access document aims to support the activities of the cluster of projects and actions on Cloud partially funded by the European Commission through the FP7-Collaboration-ICT and H2020-LEIT-ICT programmes. It identifies the current research approaches and newest technologies in the field of resource and service management in Cloud environments, as well as the gaps that are not yet fulfilled by them. This information is considered essential to identify future research and development directions, as well as to help the initiation of new actions and projects in the field of resource and service management. UBITECH has contributed on the white paper on behalf of the ARCADIA and INPUT H2020 projects, providing information regarding the proposed approaches and the adopted technologies for novel resource and service management aspects, as well as the expected impact on the service market of the proposed actions results. The white paper is available 
UBITECH is actively involved in the organization of the First International Workshop on Programmability for Cloud Networks and Applications to be held in conjunction with the ITC 28 in Würzburg, technically co-sponsored by IEEE and VDE ITG, and in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM, since the workshop is supported and initiated by the two EC H2020 projects INPUT and ARCADIA, wherein UBITECH participates.
UBITECH participated and provided a presentation at the MARSOL Workshop “Investigation and Monitoring of MAR Sites” that was organized by ICCS and held in Lavrio at 16-18 March 2016. The workshop covered aspects of environmental monitoring technologies, focusing on the monitoring of hydrologic and water quality parameters that are crucial for Managed Aquifer Recharge facilities. These aspects have been examined through an integrated approach, including: New monitoring technologies (not commercially available); Commercial monitoring technologies that are cost and energy effective; Data gathering, transmission, management & storage; Critical environmental parameters in groundwater engineering (with respect to MAR facilities).
The Germany Institute of Standardization (Deutsches Institut für Normung – DIN) has initiated the process to develop a DIN SPEC (with the planned document number DIN SPEC 91337) in accordance with the PAS procedure dealing with “Unified Application Management Interface for Cloud Application Platforms”. This DIN SPEC will specify requirements for application programming interfaces (API) for applications on cloud platforms with the aim of optimizing the interoperability between platform-as-a-service solutions, tools and value-added services offered by third party providers. After publishing the respective business plan for four weeks on the DIN Website for comments and objections, the overall editing process has been officially launched with a kick off meeting that took place in DIN premises in Berlin, at March 17th, 2016. UBITECH has actively participated in the kick off meeting of DIN SPEC 91337, wherein the workshop members selected UBITECH’s R&D Director Dr. Panagiotis Gouvas for the role of the Workshop Leader.
UBITECH officially initiates its involvement and contribution in the CONFIG (COntrol Networks in FIve G) initiative, by participating in the Heidelberg meeting (held at February 10-11, 2016, in the offices of Eurescom) and positioning itself in the consortium for brining expertise related to security, context-aware authorization and resource access policy models, components certification. The CONFIG 5G project is running without public EU funding, based on the ideas and consortium built during the preparation of the first phase of the research and innovation projects of the European 5G Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) within the Horizon2020 framework, at Deutsche Telekom’s initiative.
The results of the second year of implementation of the LinDA* FP7-610565 project have been successfully demonstrated during the final project review on January 21st, 2016 at the European Commission in Luxembourg. These results include the final release of the LinDA workbench along with the performance evaluation of the LinDA tools, as well as the results from the operation of the LinDA pilots (fostering Business Intelligence Analytics, Environmental Analytics, Media Analytics) along with a set of suggestions for LinDA adopters.
A scientific paper entitled “Information Driven Cyber Security Management through LinDA” has been edited by UBITECH and accepted for publication at the book entitled “The success of European projects using new Information and Communication Technologies” that is going to be published by SCITEPRESS. This book aims at disseminating information about the projects presented at the European Project Space in the DATA 2015 conference. At this paper, Panagiotis Gouvas, Eleni Fotopoulou and Anastasios Zafeiropoulos – along with other co-authors – propose an approach for supporting information driven cyber security management through exploitation of linked data analytics technologies, as they are developed within the framework of the LinDA FP7 project. A cyber security data model is designed for cyber-attacks data representation, while a set of insights are produced upon data analysis over data collected in a small enterprise environment.
A scientific paper entitled “Linked Data Analytics in Interdisciplinary Studies: the Health Impact of Air Pollution in Urban Areas” has been edited by UBITECH and published at the IEEE Access Journal* in the Special Section for Smart Cities. At this paper, Eleni Fotopoulou, Anastasios Zafeiropoulos, Panagiotis Hasapis, George Tsiolis and Thanassis Bouras – along with other co-authors – propose a novel approach towards the production and consumption of linked data analytics in urban environments. The approach is based on the exploitation of linked data principles, enhancing the ability of managing and processing of data, in ways not available before. In addition to the description of the overall technical approach, the application of the proposed solution into a real-life scenario for examining the health impact of outdoor air pollution in urban areas within an international, national and regional perspective is detailed. A set of interesting results are produced along with their interpretation towards the provision of suggestions for policy making purposes. The paper has been prepared based on UBITECH’s work within the LinDA FP7 and ENTROPY Horizon 2020 project and is publicly available 
