UBITECH participates in the kick-off meeting (that takes place at January 15-16,2015 at Karlsruhe, Germany) of the PaaSword research project, officially started at January 1st, 2015. Funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, the 3-year PaaSword project focuses on the development of Cloud Security technologies and, in particular, in the implementation of an encrypted and physically distributed persistence as a Platform-as-a-Service capability for Cloud-enabled applications and services. More specifically, PaaSword introduces a holistic data privacy and security by design framework enhanced by sophisticated context-aware policy access models and robust policy access, decision, enforcement and governance mechanisms, which will enable the implementation of secure and transparent Cloud-based applications and services that will maintain a fully distributed and totally encrypted data persistence layer, and, thus, will foster customers’ data protection, integrity and confidentiality, even in the case wherein there is no control over the underlying third-party Cloud resources utilized.
Within PaaSword, UBITECH undertakes the technical lead of the project’s research activities, while UBITECH R&D team will heavily contribute and lead the technological choices towards the definition and design of the a holistic data privacy and security by design framework that will enable application developers to implement secure and transparent Cloud-based services, incorporating security and data protection features in the Cloud-based application itself at application design time. Moreover, UBITECH will significantly contribute in the definition of a context-aware policy access model and implement the XACML compliant context-aware security model for declaratively describing access control policies, which are easily interpretable into policy enforcement rules and will be used by the developer in order to annotate the Data Access Objects (DAOs) of his/her application. Finally, UBITECH will lead the development of all the appropriate mechanisms for forming the policies access, decision and enforcement middleware, which will encapsulate capabilities for maintaining the access policies model, for annotating and managing data access object annotations, for controlling their validity, for dynamically interpreting them into policy enforcement rules and for enforcing these policies at the application’s run time.
UBITECH has been awarded a new contract by RENAPER (Registro Nacional de las Personas) of the Ministry of Interior and Transport of the Republic of Argentina, so as to extent the functionalities provided by the Secure Data and Documents Exchange Platform of the organization (already implemented, delivered and set in productive operation by UBITECH). This new contract includes the design and implementation of the appropriate software modules that will be integrated in the RENAPER Secure Data Exchange Platform, so as to interoperate with the existing RENAPER Red Federal infrastructure and to provide the citizens with the modality of the electronic request of civil status certificates from the civil registry office of the respective provinces of Argentina, as well as the modality of the electronic payment of the fees foreseen in the federal legislation and the provincial regulations for issuing the requested civil status certificates.
UBITECH has been accepted as a member of the NetWorld2020, the European Technology Platform for communications networks and services that gathers players of the communications networks sector: industry leaders, innovative SMEs, and leading academic institutions. NetWorld2020 is closely related to the Association of the 5G-PPP, which was setup in order to have a legal entity that could sign the PPP contract with the EC. UBITECH is highly interested on actively participating at the NetWorld2020 activities and provide contributions with the potential to influence the research direction related to future communication systems in the area of mobile and wireless, within Horizon2020 and beyond, as well as to provide feedback to the NetWorld2020 Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) for the 5G domain.
The Linked2Safety project ended successfully in September 2014, and was graded excellent in its final review that took place in Brussels in November 2014. The Linked2Safety project concerned the development of a Next-Generation, Secure Linked Data Medical Information Space for Semantically-Interconnecting Electronic Health Records and Clinical Trials Systems Advancing Patients Safety In Clinical Research.
According to the analytical and aggregated data reported by the National Documentation Centre (EKT) with regard to the “Participation of Greece in the Information and Communication Technologies Programme of the 7th Framework Programme 2007-2013”, UBITECH ranks 11th among all Greek enterprises (9th among Greek SMEs) in the “top organizations by funding” list concerning the FP7-ICT related grants in the whole FP7 covering the period 2007-2013. In particular, UBITECH has successfully participated in the following FP7-ICT related co-funded research projects (that are taken into account in the aforementioned EKT report): GRANATUM, Linked2Safety, LinkedDesign, LinDA and FI-STAR.
A scientific paper entitled “MARK1 – A Decision Support System for the Early Detection of Malignant Melanoma” has been accepted for oral presentation at the 4th International Conference on Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare – “Transforming healthcare through innovations in mobile and wireless technologies” (MOBIHEALTH 2014), which is held in Athens, Greece, on November 3-5, 2014. Konstantinos Perakis, Thanassis Bouras and their co-authors present the conceptual architecture of a platform that can address the need for early and accurate detection of skin lesion through a screening solution that will be easily accessible to the general public with the guidance, supervision and inspection of the primary care physician. The proposed solution shall provide painless, effortless and efficient self-screening of skin lesions, for early, accurate detection of melanoma, independent of the patient’s location, safeguard sensitive patient data and maintain patient-doctor confidentiality, as well as ensure accurate diagnosis delivered by the specialist (physician), independent of the physician’s and patient’s physical locations. MARK1 goes beyond providing a pattern recognition system, and incorporates a self-screening application with a lightweight DSS which supports medical experts in reaching a diagnosis. MARK1 integrates clinical diagnosis rules based on Total Body Photography, a Decision Support and a content based image retrieval system to assist expert diagnosis, and the ubiquitous information access of the handheld modern devices.
UBITECH is participating at the eChallenges e-2014 Conference that is taking place in Belfast, Northern lreland at 29-31 October 2014. Specifically, UBITECH is actively involved with the organization of the workshop “Making (Linked) Open Data Available for Business” that is realized within the framework of the LinDA FP7 project. Two presentations entitled “Linked Open Data for EU SMEs: The case of Business Analytics” and “Business Value Creation from Linked Data Analytics: The LinDA Approach” are given by Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos during the workshop. The latter presentation is associated with a scientific paper, co-authored by UBITECH, that has been accepted for presentation at the conference. At this paper, Panagiotis Hasapis, Eleni Fotopoulou and Anastasios Zafeiropoulos – along with other LinDA consortium members – propose an approach for the extraction of Linked Data analytics, based on the exploitation of a set of tools for proper transformation and interlinking of public and private datasets and the realization of analysis over them. The proposed approach targets at enhancing the ability of public and private sector organizations to provide usable Linked Data, while offering SMEs the opportunity to perform advanced algorithmic analysis.
A scientific paper entitled “An innovative approach for the protection of healthcare information through the end-to-end pseudo-anonymization of end-users” has been accepted for oral presentation at the 1st International Conference on IoT Technologies for HealthCare (HealthyIoT), which is held in Rome, Italy, on 27-28 October 2014. Panagiotis Gouvas, Anastasios Zafeiropoulos, Konstantinos Perakis and Thanasis Bouras present the approach and conceptual architecture of SHIELD, an innovative methodological approach and network architecture-deployed within the framework of the FI-STAR project- targeting at the protection of healthcare information through the pseudo-anonymization of end-users. SHIELD suggests a new network and software architecture targeting at the provision of high quality pseydonymized context-aware services, and provides a holistic framework for the provision of such in the healthcare domain, based on: 1) the design of the networking architecture that guarantees the anonymity of end-users and the protection of their personal data, 2) the dynamic creation of unique pseudonyms for the SHIELD end users and 3) the deployment and operation of a PKI and issuance of digital certificates per pseudonymized end user.
UBITECH is participating at the 2nd European Conference on the Future Internet that is taking place in Munich, Germany at 17-18 September 2014. Specifically, UBITECH is actively present at the FI-STAR Stand, demonstrating the company’s activities in the FI-STAR project. Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos has presented the SHIELD Specific Enabler that is being developed by UBITECH R&D team for promoting, leveraging and enforcing the notion of pseudo-anonymization of end-users in the course of their interaction with the FI-STAR platform, services, applications and generic enablers. In the course of his presentation, more than 150 ECFI participants have visited the FI-STAR stand and learnt about UBITECH’s end-to-end pseudo-anynomization technologies, while Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos had a series of short interactive sessions and discussions with more than 30 visitors interested in the aforementioned demonstrated technologies.
A scientific paper entitled “A novel development paradigm for deploying applications over programmable infrastructure” has been accepted for presentation at the Workshop on Energy-efficiency, Programmability, Flexibility and Integration in Future Network Architectures (EPFI) at the 26th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 26), which is held in Karlskrona, Sweden, at September 12, 2014. At this paper, Panagiotis Gouvas and Anastasios Zafeiropoulos – given the inability of application developers to foresee the changes as well as the heterogeneity on the underlying networking and computational infrastructure – propose the design and development of novel software paradigms that facilitate application developers to take advantage of the emerging programmability of the underlying infrastructure and therefore develop reconfigurable by design applications.
