UBITECH has actively participated in the kick-off meeting, in Murcia, Spain (September 22-23, 2015) of the ENTROPY research project, officially started on September 1st, 2015. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 649849) and spans on the period September 2015 – August 2018. The focus of ENTROPY is the design and development of an innovative IT ecosystem for motivating end-users’ behavioural changes towards the adoption of energy efficient lifestyles, building upon the evolvements in the Internet of Things, Data Modeling and Analysis and Recommendtion and Gamification eras.
Internet of Things technologies are exploited for the proper and energy efficient interconnection of a heterogeneous set of sensor nodes, the collection of data based on Mobile Crowd Sensing Mechanisms exploiting the power of the collection of data from a critical mass of interested people and the application of proper communication networking schemes with regards to data collection. Advanced Data Modeling and Analysis techniques are applied for the modeling of the collected data and the extraction of advanced knowledge by exploiting the power of Linked Data and Data Analytics. Focus is given on the development of personalised mobile applications and games targeted at providing energy related information to end users, triggering social interaction with relevant users, increasing their awareness with regards to ways to achieve energy consumption savings in their daily activities and adopt energy efficient lifestyles based on a set of recommendations and motives targeted to their culture.
In ENTROPY, UBITECH is responsible for the architectural and technical lead of the project and for the specification of the ENTROPY semantic models that will enable the modeling, aggregation and fusion of the sensory and crowdsourcing data, as well as for the implementation of Linked Data transformation, enrichment, linkage, generation, mining and analytics mechanisms and the overall coordination of the integration activities of the project.
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).
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.
