UBITECH has actively participated in the kick-off meeting, in Nieuwegein, Netherlands (October 8-9, 2015) of the SUBSOL research project, officially started on September 1st, 2015. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 642228) and spans on the period September 2015 – August 2018. SUBSOL targets at introducing a new way of thinking in terms of water resources management, promoting the sustainable development of coastal areas worldwide.
Coastal areas are the most productive and economically dominant regions of the world. The high water demand in these regions, however, puts tremendous pressure on their freshwater resources and ecosystems. This leads to problems like seasonal water shortage, saltwater intrusion, and disappearance of wetlands. Building on national, regional and European research and innovation programs, in the past five years, a set of innovative, practical concepts have been developed for protection, enlargement and utilization of freshwater resources in coastal areas. These subsurface water solutions (SWS) combine innovations in water well design and configuration, allowing for advanced groundwater management, and maximum control over freshwater resources. SWS have been successfully piloted by public-private partnerships. These full-scale pilots have demonstrated SWS capacity to support sustainable freshwater supply in coastal areas, energy reduction, food production, and financial savings.
In SUBSOL, UBITECH is responsible for designing and deploying the IT infrastructure in the Greek Pilot at the coastal site of the Schinias Natural Park as well as contributing in the development of the SUBSOL online platform targeted for sharing experiences and outcomes with stakeholder groups, that will be linked to existing networks, including EIP on Water.
UBITECH participated at the Cloud Forward 2015 Conference that took place in Pisa, Italy at 6-8 of October 2015. The Cloud Forward 2015 Conference brought together experts from industry and academia to consider the future of and beyond Cloud Computing. The conference reviewed experiences and discussed future directions to overcome problems and provide new opportunities for the utilisation of leading edge Cloud Computing by industry and academia and for ICT developers providing innovative solutions. Dr. Constantinos Vassilakis participated on behalf of the ARCADIA and INPUT Horizon 2020 projects on the clustering activities organized within the conference and mainly the “Software Engineering for Services and Applications” cluster and the “New Approaches for Infrastructure Services” cluster. A set of presentations were provided concerning the overall objectives and approach followed in the ARCADIA project, as well as the current status of the white paper that is under preparation within the “Software Engineering for Services and Applications” cluster for describing current challenges and trends in the software engineering world.
UBITECH participated at the Critical Infrastructure Protection workshop at PCI 2015 that took place in Athens, Greece at 2nd of October 2015. In the workshop, several research initiatives were presented with regards to risk mitigation for Critical Infrastructure protection, Critical Infrastructure security and resilience, software defined security mechanisms along with applied tools for supporting ports security and assessing the risks for ports’ supply chain services. On behalf of UBITECH, Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos presented a novel approach for designing and implementing software defined security mechanisms taking into account the opportunities that exist based on the evolvement of novel technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies. Main security threats, challenges and opportunities for the design of advanced security solutions were presented taking into account different NFV deployment models. For more information, please 
UBITECH participated at the “State of the art technologies in next generation data networks” workshop at PCI 2015 that took place in Athens, Greece at 2nd of October 2015. The workshop explored the challenges faced towards the transition to the Future Internet and the adoption of novel technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies. On behalf of UBITECH, Dr. Constantinos Vassilakis presented 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, as it is designed and being developed within the framework of the INPUT Horizon 2020 project. The INPUT technologies will enable next-generation cloud applications to go beyond classical service models, and even to replace physical Smart Devices, usually placed in users’ homes (e.g., set-top-boxes, etc.) or deployed around for monitoring purposes (e.g., sensors), with their virtual images, providing them to users “as a Service.” For more information, please contact us or find the presentation here.
LinkedDesign, a four-year initiative financed by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, today announced significant results achieved by developing and manufacturing administration leaders such as SAP, COMAU, Volkswagen Group, TRIMEK, Aker Solutions and HOLONIX, a subsidiary of the Milan Polytechnic and leading technology combination of the Internet of Things to Life Cycle Management of Products.
A poster entitled “Linked Data Analytics for Business Intelligence SMEs: A Pilot Case in the Pharmaceutical Sector” along with a relevant demo have been presented by LinDA consortium partners at the SEMANTiCS 2015 conference that was held in Vienna, Austria, on September 16-17, 2015. At this publication, Eleni Fotopoulou and Anastasios Zafeiropoulos – along with other co-authors – present the initial findings of the Business Intelligence Analytics (BIA) pilot operation of the LinDA project, which concerns the Over-The-Counter (OTC) medicines liberalisation in Europe. The pilot aims at examining the association among the usage of OTC medicines and pharmaceutical parameters, with other healthcare, socio-economic and political ones. Focus is given on the added value emerged, through the consumption and production of linked data for analysis purposes, as well as the challenges faced for the execution of such a pilot. For more information, you can download our poster 
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 infrastructure that will be integrated in the RENAPER Secure Data Exchange Platform, so as to provide the public servants of the civil-status offices and third party officials (like judges in courts) with secure mobile services for the real time examination of the originality, authenticity, validity and integrity of any printouts of digitally-signed civil-status certificates – that are generated by the RENAPER Secure Data Exchange Platform, delivered electronically to the citizen and handed out by the citizen in the course of a public administration process.
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.
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).
