The first Work Programme of Horizon 2020 invited proposals for Research and Innovation projects in the areas of cloud computing (ICT-07) and software technologies (ICT-09). In addition, innovation and entrepreneurship support in the context of cloud computing was addressed in ICT- 35f through the creation of a network of procurers that will define an innovation procurement roadmap. Finally, a coordinated call with Japan (EUJ-1) focused on technologies combining big data and the Internet of Things in the cloud. Altogether, the selected projects represent a critical mass of research and innovation activities to keep Europe at the forefront of the developments in cloud computing and software technologies.
Towards this vision, UBITECH participates and contributes with three projects, namely ARCADIA, INPUT and PaaSword. ARCADIA constitutes the only EC funded project that addresses exclusively theme 2 of the ICT-09 topic (i.e. software architectures and tools for highly distributed applications) and aims at designing and validating a framework for development and management of reconfigurable, highly distributed applications and infrastructures. PaaSword has a strong focus on Cloud security and 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. Finally, INPUT aims at designing a novel infrastructure and paradigm to support Future Internet personal cloud services in a more scalable and sustainable way and with innovative added-value capabilities. For more information, you can download the Software & Services, Cloud Computing H2020 Project Portfolio here.
UBITECH participated at the Industrial Panel of DATA 2015 that took place in Colmar, Alsace, France, July 20-22, 2015. The conference, as well as the Industrial Panel, was held in conjunction with ICETE 2015, ICINCO 2015, ICSOFT 2015 and SIMULTECH 2015. The panel entitled ‘Big data and efficient software: a new make or buy dilemma on data and software quality’ had the presence of Chiara Francalanci (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) as the panel chair; and Mirco Veltri (SAP, Italy), Dario Regazzoni (EMC2, Italy), Anastasios Zafeiropoulos (Ubitech Ltd., Greece) and Pascal Jansen (Thoughtworks, Italy).
According to the data reported by the National Documentation Centre (EKT) with regard to the “Participation of Greece in the 2014 Work Programme of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Programme of the Horizon 2020 (H2020) Framework Programme”, UBITECH ranks 1st among all Greek enterprises (5th among all Greek organizations) in the “top organizations by funding” list concerning the ICT LEIT related grants in 2014. In particular, UBITECH has successfully participated in the following ICT LEIT related funded research projects (that are taken into account in the aforementioned EKT report): PaaSword, ARCADIA and INPUT. For your convenience, you can download the EKT report (in Greek) 
The ARCADIA project, which is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 645372) and spans on the period January 2015 – December 2017, has published its first press release.
A scientific paper entitled “DISYS: An Intelligent System for Personalized Nutritional Recommendations in Restaurants” has been accepted for oral presentation at the 19th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics 2015 (PCI-2015), which is held in Athens, Greece, on October 1-3, 2015. Dimitris Ntalaperas, Konstantinos Perakis and their co-authors present the design of an intelligent application called DISYS that aims to offer personalized information to consumers when visiting a restaurant in order to support them to select a dish or a meal that is within their preferences but at the same time is healthy for them and in line with their dietary targets and their health conditions. DISYS is operated by restaurant managers who configure the meals and dishes their establishment offers, as well as the nutritional characteristics of each meal. Moreover, dieticians can support their customers by analysing their actions and interactions with the DISYS application with respect to food consumption habits.
A scientific paper entitled “Design of a decision support system, trained on GPU, for assisting melanoma diagnosis in dermatoscopy images” has been accepted for oral presentation at the 4th International Conference on Mathematical Modeling in Physical Sciences (IC-MSQUARE 2015), which is held in Mykonos, Greece, on June 5-8, 2015. Konstantinos Perakis, Thanassis Bouras and their co-authors present the design of a decision support system for assisting the diagnosis of melanoma in dermatoscopy images. Clinical material comprised images of 44 dysplastic (clark’s nevi) and 44 malignant melanoma lesions, obtained from the dermatology database Dermnet. Initially, images were processed for hair removal and background correction using the Dull Razor algorithm. Processed images were segmented to isolate moles from surrounding background, using a combination of level sets and an automated thresholding approach. Morphological (area, size, shape) and textural features (first and second order) were calculated from each one of the segmented moles. Extracted features were fed to a pattern recognition system assembled with the Probabilistic Neural Network Classifier, which was trained to distinguish between benign and malignant cases, using the exhaustive search and the leave one out method. Results showed that the designed system discriminated benign from malignant moles with 88.6 % accuracy employing morphological and textural features. The proposed system could be used for analysing moles depicted on smart phone images after appropriate training with smartphone images cases. This could assist towards early detection of melanoma cases, if suspicious moles were to be captured on smartphone by patients and be transferred to the physician together with an assessment of the mole’s nature.
A scientific paper entitled “PaaSword: A Holistic Data Privacy and Security by Design Framework for Cloud Services” has been co-authored by UBITECH and presented at the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2015), which was took place in Lisbon, Portugal from 20-22 May, 2015. At this position paper, Panagiotis Gouvas (UBITECH’s R&D Director), along with other co-authors, outlines significant security challenges presented when migrating to a cloud environment and describes a novel holistic framework that aspires to alleviate these challenges, corresponding to a high level description of the vision of the PaaSword H2020 project. The presentation raised interest among the audience especially regarding the context-aware security by design proposed scheme and the symmetric searchable encryption envisioned.
UBITECH participated at IPv6 for innovative government and public services workshop that took place in Athens, April 21st, 2015. The workshop was organized by the “Governments Enabled with IPv6” (GEN6) European IPv6 project along with the Hellenic IPv6 Task Force (HTFv6) that UBITECH is a member. In the workshop, a set of presentations were given with regards to IPv6 deployments in public administration networks across Europe, IPv6 experience from Telcos large-scale deployments in Greece as well as presentations related with the advantages of IPv6 for the IoT and next generation networking world. Representatives from Greek public bodies, academic institutions, SMEs and EU GEN6 partners participated at the workshop and presented their views on the subject. On behalf of UBITECH, Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos provided a presentation entitled “Rapid and adaptive applications deployment over programmable infrastructure – IPv6 considerations” based on the work initiated in the ARCADIA H2020 project, describing the IPv6 considerations with regards to the exploitation of IPv6 characteristics at the design and development of a smart orchestrator capable to deploy and dynamically re-configure applications/services provision over multi-IaaS infrastructure.
UBITECH participated at Net Futures 2015 that took place in Brussels, March 25-26, 2015, while a presentation was provided at the Network Apps Session. The session explored the challenged introduced and the opportunities opened up by the transition to Software Networks that the Telecommunications Industry is experiencing. Different actors (Operators, Manufacturers, SMEs and academia) are facing them from different angles. The session explored the interactions between the established manufacturers and the SMEs and if a Marketplace for Network Applications would be the right instrument to foster Network Innovation.
