Category: News

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.

This workshop covers the scientific areas around Cloud Networks, Programmability inside Networks, Cloud and Fog Computing principles, Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization, and Software Engineering approaches for Highly Distributed Applications. The following topics fall within the target area of the workshop: energy efficiency and cloud/network management approaches; personal cloud and network virtualization technologies; architectures for SDN and NFV in legacy and 5G networks; user mobility and application/service proximity; personal cloud services and the Internet of Things; management and monitoring of QoS/QoE over programmable networks; cloud and network operating systems; software development approaches over programmable infrastructure; software engineering for DevOps; distributed applications deployment and orchestration frameworks; service chaining approaches based on building of microservices; virtualization technology, management of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and enablers; architectural models, prototype implementations and applications; Internet of Things architectural models, prototype implementations and applications; extensions to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS concepts and interfaces.

Authors are invited to submit papers, which fall within the areas mentioned above or are related to them. The paper submission deadline is the 2nd of May 2016. The workshop is co-chaired by Dr. Florian Wamser from University of Würzburg, Dr. Roberto Bruschi from Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT), and Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos from UBITECH.

Source: http://procon-workshop.com

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 workshop featured in-door sessions as well as participation in active field work and site visits. The event has had 21 presentations of the project partners who lead the eight demo sites involved, as well as external experts and various Greek and German agents related to the branches of metallurgy, hydrogeology, geophysics, ICT, instrumentation, etc. The workshop included expositions of the efficiency of various monitoring technologies such as direct push, wireless sensors, time and frequency domain technologies, management parameters based on ICT, smart sensors, etc.

UBITECH provided a presentation entitled “Data Management, Fusion and Analytics over Heterogeneous Environmental Data” providing details regarding novel techniques for data aggregation and management of environmental data as well as mechanisms and semantic models for representation of water observations data. The presentation is available here.

Source: http://www.marsol.eu/files/agenda_marsol_greece_10mar16_1.pdf

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.

Source: http://www.din.de/en/wdc-proj:din21:244843175

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.

Continue reading UBITECH kicks off its participation in CONFIG 5G initiative, contributing in security, context-awareness, authorization, trusted execution aspects

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.

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.

Continue reading Excellent final review for the LinDA FP7 research project

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 here.

* IEEE Access is an award-winning, multidisciplinary, all-electronic archival journal continuously presenting the results of original research or development across all of IEEE’s fields of interest. IEEE Access received the 2015 PROSE Award for Best New Journal in STM (science, technology, and medicine) and one of its articles was awarded the 2015 Donald G. Fink Prized Paper Award, while it has been accepted into the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science) and anticipates its impact factor to be announced in June 2016.

The “Linked Data and Analytics for SMEs” Workshop & Hackathon 2015 is organised in the context of LinDA (http://www.linda-project.eu) FP7 research project by UBITECH in collaboration with the project partners NTUA and CP. The Workshop & Hackathon are going to take place at Innovathens at 20/11/2015.

The purpose of the Workshop & Hackathon is to explore and showcase the added value of Open and Linked Data for the business sector, in terms of effort and cost reductions, new business values introduction and increase in efficiency and flexibility of data-driven SMEs. In the workshop, the project results are going to be demonstrated, focusing at the LinDA workbench that has been developed as a complete toolsuite for SMEs to manipulate linked data simply, while boosting the data management to higher levels of competitiveness, through advanced analytics and visualizations. The presentation of the project’s results, in issues pertaining to healthcare, energy and media industries, will lay the foundations for deliberation among representatives of SMEs, entrepreneurial groups, public entities, NGO members, data analysts and researchers.

As already mentioned, the event is comprised of two sections; the Workshop (10:00 – 14:30), where business representatives will have the chance to discuss, over real-life scenarios, the opportunities and challenges of the exploitation of linked data tools and their impact on business operations, and the Hackathon (10:00 – 17:00), where developers will work together towards utilizing the LinDA workbench to develop proof-of-concept applications.

You can find the agenda of the event here. To participate to the Workshop event please register here.

The vision of the MARK1 project is to address the need for early and accurate detection of malignant melanoma, through the intelligent and automatic scanning of the entire human body, facilitating the automatic focus on areas suspicious for skin cancer, while coupling the automation process with human experts supervision and guidance, as well as to enable the follow up and monitoring for further analysis or treatment whenever and wherever necessary, through a screening solution that will be easily accessible to the general public and location-independent. In the context of the project, the consortium partners led by MEDISP organized a scientific workshop. The goals of the MARK1 workshop were to increase the level of public awareness regarding melanoma early detection, increase the overall visibility of the MARK1 project to the scientific community and present the scientific results following the application of MARK1 to real world data. Two radio interviews were performed during the day of the event. The first interview was given at radio station PROTO PROGRAMMA (http://www.ert.gr/proto), whereas the second at radio station ATHINA 984 (http://www.athina984.gr). In addition to the radio interviews, the organisation of the workshop kickstarted a series of publications of the project scope and results in several web media, the complete list of which (in Greek) can be found here.

The vision of the MARK1 project is to address the need for early and accurate detection of malignant melanoma, through the intelligent and automatic scanning of the entire human body, facilitating the automatic focus on areas suspicious for skin cancer, while coupling the automation process with human experts supervision and guidance, as well as to enable the follow up and monitoring for further analysis or treatment whenever and wherever necessary, through a screening solution that will be easily accessible to the general public and location-independent. 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.

In the context of the project, the consortium partners led by MEDISP organized a scientific workshop on Wednesday, 11 November 2015. The goals of the MARK1 workshop were to increase the level of public awareness regarding melanoma early detection, increase the overall visibility of the MARK1 project to the scientific community and present the scientific results following the application of MARK1 to real world data. The workshop was held at the premises of the Biomedical Engineering Department of TEI of Athens. The target audience of the workshop comprised of individual scientists and researchers, research organizations & research groups, higher education institutes, health care centers and organizations, experts & professionals and general public. About 100 people participated at the workshop, including students, academics, researchers, physicians and representatives from private sector companies. The workshop main website can be found here. The program included three keynote speeches, a round table discussion and a demonstrator stand. A program brochure was composed and distributed digitally and as a hard copy to target audience and can be found here.