UBITECH participates in the “Collaborative European Research Conference” (CERC 2016), which is held in Blackrock Castle Cork on the 23rd of September 2016, constituting the result of a long standing research collaboration between Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) and the Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, with a research paper introducing an approach for the anonymization of sensitive clinical and genetic data based on data cubes structures. In particular, in this paper, Mr. Ntalaperas presents a methodology for transforming data corresponding to patient clinical and genetic data to an equivalent data set that contains the informational content of the original data set regarding the medical data, but from which all information regarding personal data has been filtered out. The methodology builds upon the data cubes technologies combined with cell-suppression and perturbation techniques that ensure that the produced data cube cannot be reversed engineered, while also retaining the same statistical characteristics as the original data set.
Joint paper accepted for publication at the “Expert Systems With Applications” Journal of Elsevier
A journal paper of UBITECH, in collaboration with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the International Hellenic University and the Centre of Research & Technology Hellas, has been accepted for publication at the Elsevier Journal of Expert Systems with Applications (Impact Factor: 2,981). In this paper, Panagiotis Gouvas and his co-authors present a the recommendation algorithm that has been developed on top of a unified PaaS semantic model, for providing the application developer with recommendations about the best-matching Cloud PaaS offering. The algorithm consists of: a) a matchmaking part, where the functional parameters of the application are taken into account to rule out inconsistent offerings, and b) a ranking part, where the non-functional parameters of the application are considered to score and rank offerings. ?he algorithm is extensively evaluated showing linear scalability to the number of offerings and application requirements. Furthermore, it is extensible upon future semantic model extensions, because it is agnostic to domain specific concepts and parameters, using SPARQL template queries.
Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417416305164
New paper presentation at SEMANTiCS 2016 focusing on energy-efficient lifestyles through behavioral change
A joint paper with the Semantic Technology Institute and the University of Murcia introducing a semantic approach towards implementing energy efficient lifestyles through behavioural change is presented at the main track of the SEMANTiCS 2016 conference held in Leipzig, at September 12-15, 2016. In this paper, UBITECH’s R&D team with their co-authors present a novel semantics-empowered approach for motivating end-users towards the adoption of energy efficient lifestyles, based on recommendations provided through personalised applications and serious games. As a foundation of our approach, we have designed two semantic models to represent energy consumption and behavioural characteristics of consumers. The Energy Efficiency Semantic Model represents energy consumption data collected from a heterogeneous sensor network, while the Behavioural Semantic Model focuses on energy consumption profile of end-users.
New paper presentation at the PROCON 2016 workshop focusing on reconfigurable-by-design highly distributed applications over programmable infrastructure
UBITECH participates in the “First International Workshop on Programmability for Cloud Networks and Applications” (PROCON 2016), which is held in conjunction with the ITC 28 in Würzburg, technically co-sponsored by IEEE and VDE ITG, and in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM, and supported and initiated by the two EC H2020 projects INPUT and ARCADIA, with a paper introducing a Novel Reconfigurable-by-Design Highly Distributed Applications (HDAs) Development Paradigm over Programmable Infrastructure. The proposed framework relies on the development of an extensible Context Model which will be used by developers to produce annotated source-code and generate HDAs as service chains of application tiers and network functions containing meaningful semantics. A Smart Controller responsible for on-boarding the HDAs will undertake the tasks of translating annotations to optimal infrastructural configuration. Such a controller will enforce an optimal configuration to the registered programmable resources and will pro-actively adjust the configuration plan based on the Infrastructural State and the Application State to meet objectives and apply policies. Driving a HDA through its entire lifetime proves highly beneficial for all stakeholders since the synergy of the introduced applications’ reconfigurability and the underlying infrastructure’s programmability, facilitates the development of new fine-grained strategies able to fulfil new and complex requirements.
Source: http://procon-workshop.com
Successful first review for the ARCADIA H2020 research project
The results of the first eighteen months of the ARCADIA H2020- project have been successfully demonstrated during the first project review on 9th of September at the European Commission in Brussels. These results include the first release of the ARCADIA Framework, consisting of the ARCADIA Orchestrator (called Smart Controller) and the ARCADIA Development toolkit. Through the ARCADIA Development Toolkit, the software developer is able to design and develop reconfigurable-by-design applications. Through the ARCADIA Orchestrator, a Service Provider is able to deploy and manage reconfigurable-by-design applications over programmable infrastructure, by enforcing in parallel a set of defined policies.
UBITECH, with the role of technical coordinator of the project, was actively involved in the design of the overall framework and the implementation of a set of components consisting the ARCADIA Orchestrator as well as the ARCADIA Development Toolkit. Indicatively, UBITECH developed the Policies Enforcement and Optimisation Engine, the Deployment and Execution Manager, the set of Monitoring mechanisms, the Overlay Networking mechanisms, as well as the set of Repositories for storing the developed components, applications and policies and the ARCADIA Dashboard. Work in progress regards the development of the Resource Manager and a set of virtual functions that can be enabled in an automated manner (e.g. load balancer supporting horizontal scalability characteristics).
A video highlighting the main features of the ARCADIA Framework implemented by UBITECH is available here.
UBITECH releases the first version of the ARCADIA Orchestrator
Following an intense period of work towards the design and development of a set of innovative features, the first integrated version of the ARCADIA Orchestrator is made available by UBITECH. The ARCADIA Orchestrator supports the deployment and management of distributed reconfigurable-by-design applications over programmable infrastructure. Such applications are developed following the ARCADIA software development paradigm and denoted in the form of a service graph. The ARCADIA Orchestrator support the automated and policy-aware deployment and management of such applications over programmable infrastructure, by exploiting a set of novel technologies. Such technologies include an optimisation framework based on Drools for optimal placement of reconfigurable-by-design applications over programmable infrastructure, a policies enforcement framework based on a Drools rules-management system (Expert System), a set of Software Defined Networking (SDN) mechanisms for overlay routing establishment, a set of novel virtualisation technologies for applications packaging in the form of VMs or unikernels, a set of annotations validation and interpretation mechanisms during runtime and the interconnection of the Orchestrator with a web-based development environment. It should be noted that the ARCADIA Orchestrator is supporting the placement and management of applications denoted in the form of service graphs, including network applications denoted in the form of Virtual Network Functions Forwarding Graphs (VNF-FGs), as defined by the ETSI NFV specifications. A video highlighting the main features of the ARCADIA Orchestrator is available here.
Paper on renovating public sector information by enabling linked data and analytics accepted for publication at the Information Systems Frontiers
A joint paper of UBITECH with the National Technical University of Athens (Greece), the University of Bonn and Fraunhofer FOKUS has been accepted for publication at the Information Systems Frontiers – Springer Journal of Research and Innovation. In this paper, entitled “Challenges and opportunities in renovating public sector information by enabling linked data and analytics”, Ms. Eleni Fotopoulou, Dr. Anastasios Zafeiropoulos and their co-authors have investigated the challenges of linked data tools adoption from the Public Sector organizations in view of the current state-of-the-art of linked data technologies and presented a linked data technical framework that aims to hide the underlying complexity of the SPARQL syntax while preserving or even strengthening the power of the linked data paradigm. This framework can be used in order to minimize the required adoption effort of linked data technology and offer more options and flexibility to the end-users of Public Sector Information. It could be argued that the power provided through the combination of linked data technologies and analytics can facilitate the Public Sector to realise advanced analysis and gain insights in the context of policy formulation.
Source: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10796-016-9687-1
Successful 1st Review for the FALCON Research Project
The FALCON consortium successfully demonstrated the results of the first 18 months during the first project review on 7th of July at the European Commission in Brussels. These results included the first release of all prototypes comprising the FALCON Virtual Open Platform that capitalizes on user experiences and user data collected via the Internet of Things and social media for improvement of product-service systems. The primary objective of the Virtual Open Platform is to seamlessly connect product-service usage information to design and development processes, facilitating: (a) gathering customer feedback though social media; (b) collecting usage information through Product Embedded Information Devices (e.g. sensors, embedded systems); (c) comprehensive processing of the collected data and customer feedback; and (d) deployment of identified information in the product-service development phase. In the course of the review meeting, UBITECH has presented the main results and findings the work-package that UBITECH leads, i.e. WP2 entitled “Data Collection, Extraction and Sharing”, and proceeded with a live demonstration of the already implemented data collection software infrastructure incorporating a set of mechanisms (wrappers) for data, streams, information and knowledge gathering from sensors, devices and social media, as well as of an analytics toolkit for generating business intelligence insights on top of the aggregated datasets.
Successful 2nd Advisory Board Meeting of PaaSword in Bucharest
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
Joint paper early stage melanoma detection accepted for publication at the Journal of Image Analysis and Stereology
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.
