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.
Source: https://www.paasword.eu/2016/07/04/2nd-advisory-board-meeting-in-bucharest
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.
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.
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).
