UBITECH has participated in the CloudWATCH Concertation meeting at Net Futures 2015 that took place in Brussels, March 25th, 2015. The objective of the concertation meeting was to look at future directions for software services and cloud in Europe, highlighting new opportunities for novel research and innovation to ensure Europe remains a world leader. The meeting was oriented towards all the active projects that are part of Unit E2 Software Services and Cloud. Representatives from these projects provided existing research and innovation outcomes, while a short presentation of all the relevant projects that were funded from the H2020 Call 1 projects was provided. UBITECH presented the ARCADIA H2020 project, while was also active towards disseminating the work initiated in the PaaSword and INPUT H2020 projects.

Source: http://www.cloudwatchhub.eu/turning-cloud-research-innovative-software-services

UBITECH has participated in the kick-off meeting of the SAGE-CARE research project in Darmstadt, Germany (February 12-13, 2015), officially started on December 1st, 2014. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 644186) and spans on the period December 2014 – November 2017. The focus of SAGE-CARE is the semantically integrating, linking and analyzing genomic, research and Electronic Health Records data for cancer management.

Within SAGE-CARE, UBITECH aims to solve the privacy dilemma found at typical large scale data storage and management systems wherein end-users lose (most probably) control of their data, by encrypting sensitive data before it is stored, focusing on data protection in terms of confidentiality and avoiding any unauthorized information retrieval. To guarantee a high level of data protection, an innovative encryption scheme is adopted so as to encrypt directly the top secret and confidential data. Context-based access control makes the misuse of terminals for unauthorized data access impossible. In particular, as SAGE-CARE focuses on creating a holistic informatics platform for rapidly integrating genomic sequences, electronic health records (EHRs) and research repositories to enable personalised medicine strategies for malignant melanoma treatment, UBITECH intends to realize a secure medical data space, which enables the browsing of anonymized patients’ clinical care data and information sources and EHRs, in a standardized and homogenized way, creating a private, secure Linked Data space of semantically interconnected medical data and resources.

UBITECH participates in the Genoa kick-off meeting (February 2-3, 2015) of the INPUT research project, officially started on January 1st, 2015. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 644672) and spans on the period January 2015 -December 2017. The INPUT Project 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.

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”. Virtual and physical SDs will be made available to users at any time and at any place by means of virtual cloud-powered Personal Networks, which will constitute an underlying service model. The INPUT Project will foster future-proof Internet infrastructures that will be “smarter”, fully virtualized, power vs. performance optimized, and vertically integrated with cloud computing, with a clear impact on OPEX and CAPEX of Telecoms, of Service Providers, and of end-users. At the same time, it will extend the programmability of network devices to make them able to host cloud service applications, which will cooperate with the ones in users’ terminals and datacenters to realize the aforementioned cloud services.

UBITECH will contribute to the definition of abstractions and the development of mechanisms for the support of “in-network” programmability in network devices, to the design and definition of the Service NorthBound Interfaces, and to the implementation of SDN-based network abstractions to support applications development and network-wide policy programming with energy-proportionality (as extension of current SDN and NFV primitives). Finally, UBITECH will lead all activities towards the realization of the set of proof-of-concept personal cloud applications that can be used as use-cases to validate the increased service flexibility and efficiency of the INPUT platform. In particular, UBITECH will undertake the responsibility of the development of the Personal Cloud Service Platform as well as the Service and the User applications for the collective sensor implementation.

UBITECH has hosted in Athens (January 26-27, 2015) the kick-off meeting of the ARCADIA research project, officially started on January 1st, 2015. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 645372) and spans on the period January 2015 – December 2017. The focus of ARCADIA is the design and development of novel software paradigms that facilitate the developers of highly distributed applications to take advantage of the emerging programmability of the underlying infrastructure and therefore develop reconfigurable-by-design applications.

An extensible Context Model will be developed and used by developers directly at the source-code level. Proper Context Model will be assisted and validated by IDE plug-ins in order to re-assure that the generated executable files contain meaningful semantics. According to ARCADIA’s vision, the generated executables should be on-boarded by a Smart Controller that 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. The Context-Model and the aforementioned ARCADIA toolset will be complemented by a Development Methodology that will assure that developed Highly Distributed Applications are Reconfigurable-By-Design. The framework is planned to be validated and evaluated on three use cases that will be deployed over testbeds that host heterogeneous programmable infrastructure.

In ARCADIA, UBITECH is responsible for the scientific and technical coordination of the ARCADIA project and for the reference implementation of the “Configuration and Deployment Manager” as well as the “Metadata Interpreter” of the aforementioned Smart Controller. Furthermore, UBITECH will contribute towards the realization of the demonstration use-cases and participate to the dissemination and standardization activities of the project.

The results of the 1st year of implementation of the LinDA* FP7-610565 project have been successfully demonstrated during the periodic project review on 29/1 at the European Commission in Luxembourg. Among these, the first release of the LinDA workbench, which is now ready for deployment into the LinDA Pilots, as well as the setup of the pilots (fostering Business Intelligence Analytics, Environmental Analytics, Media Analytics) that are going to be executed and validated during the second year of the project.

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. Specifically, integration of the Weka open-source tool and the R open-source project for statistical computing is realised, while the following algorithms are supported per category: (i) Classification Analysis Algorithms (J48, M5P), (ii) Association Analysis Algorithms (Apriori), (iii) Statistics/Forecasting Analysis Algorithms (Linear Regression, Multiple Linear Regression, Arima), (iv) Geospatial Analysis Algorithms (Morans I, Kriging, NCF correlogram), and (v) Clustering Algorithms (KMeans Partitioning, Ward Hierarchical Agglomerative, Model Based Clustering). High priority is given to the user friendliness of the provided interfaces based on the design of specialized workflows per algorithm category (e.g. workflows for supervised learning techniques such as classification and regression/forecasting algorithms and unsupervised learning techniques such as clustering and pattern discovery (association) algorithms).

For more information, please visit the project’s website or contact us.

* The LinDA project addresses one of the most significant challenges of the usage and publication of Linked Data, the renovation and conversion of existing data formats into structures that support the semantic enrichment and interlinking of data. The set of tools provided by LinDA will assist enterprises, especially SMEs which often cannot afford the development and maintenance of dedicated information analysis and management departments, in efficiently developing novel data analytical services that are linked to the available public data therefore contributing to improve their competitiveness and stimulating the emergence of innovative business models.

UBITECH has participated in the Brussels kick-off meeting of the FALCON research project, officially started on January 1st, 2015. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 636868) and spans on the period January 2015 – December 2017. The aim of FALCON is to monitor the real usage of the products and services in operation and the consumers’ feedback on social media, in order to extend product and service lifespan and optimize the use of the necessary resources all along their lifecycle. The innovative FALCON open environment will optimize the use of collected information enabling a concurrent, collaborative and productive product-service design process.

Within FALCON, the main pillars for product-service design are based on the combination of two significant information sources: (i) the Product-Service Usage Information derived from the Product Embedded Information Devices; and (ii) the consumers’ feedbacks from social media. In this context, UBITECH undertakes the leadership of the “data extraction and management” research activities, contributing heavily to the technological choices towards the definition, design and implementation of a set of data wrappers facilitating the data acquisition from multidisciplinary data sources, namely a) sensors, b) structured data repositories, and c) social media networks. Additionally, UBITECH is responsible for the required activities towards the processing, enrichment and linkage of product data with social media and further with additional data sources, e.g. DBpedia, Geonames and LinkedGeoData, so as to take under consideration additional environmental and geo-referenced information.

Finally, UBITECH will be responsible to publish the aforementioned products’ and services’ datasets utilizing Linked Data technologies and to deploy a Linked Data access mechanism and policies for linked sensor data so as to facilitate the execution of declarative queries on top of a linked sensor data infrastructure under the defined access rights schemes that will be applied for the various users’ types.

UBITECH participates in the kick-off meeting (that takes place at January 15-16,2015 at Karlsruhe, Germany) of the PaaSword research project, officially started at January 1st, 2015. Funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, the 3-year PaaSword project focuses on the development of Cloud Security technologies and, in particular, in the implementation of an encrypted and physically distributed persistence as a Platform-as-a-Service capability for Cloud-enabled applications and services. More specifically, PaaSword 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, even in the case wherein there is no control over the underlying third-party Cloud resources utilized.

Within PaaSword, UBITECH undertakes the technical lead of the project’s research activities, while UBITECH R&D team will heavily contribute and lead the technological choices towards the definition and design of the a holistic data privacy and security by design framework that will enable application developers to implement secure and transparent Cloud-based services, incorporating security and data protection features in the Cloud-based application itself at application design time. Moreover, UBITECH will significantly contribute in the definition of a context-aware policy access model and implement the XACML compliant context-aware security model for declaratively describing access control policies, which are easily interpretable into policy enforcement rules and will be used by the developer in order to annotate the Data Access Objects (DAOs) of his/her application. Finally, UBITECH will lead the development of all the appropriate mechanisms for forming the policies access, decision and enforcement middleware, which will encapsulate capabilities for maintaining the access policies model, for annotating and managing data access object annotations, for controlling their validity, for dynamically interpreting them into policy enforcement rules and for enforcing these policies at the application’s run time.

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 modules that will be integrated in the RENAPER Secure Data Exchange Platform, so as to interoperate with the existing RENAPER Red Federal infrastructure and to provide the citizens with the modality of the electronic request of civil status certificates from the civil registry office of the respective provinces of Argentina, as well as the modality of the electronic payment of the fees foreseen in the federal legislation and the provincial regulations for issuing the requested civil status certificates.

More specifically, the citizen will be able to access and complete (with his/her personal data) a web-based dynamically-generated application form (according to the type of the certificate requested and the province meant to receive the request) and submit his/her request electronically. Upon the electronic submission of the application form, on the one hand, the request is inserted in the Red Federal infrastructure and forwarded to the clerks of the civil registry office of the respective province, while, on the other hand, the citizen is prompted to proceed with the electronic payment of the respective fee required utilizing his/her credit card. The electronic payment module will interoperate with the Red Federal infrastructure, update the payment information and trigger the automated generation and issuing of the certificates requested that will be forwarded for receiving a valid digital signature and finally delivered to the citizen. Therefore, these modules specified in the contract constitute the most important enablers for improving the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of the provided services to the citizens and for leading to a significant increase of the utilization of these citizens-centric e-services.

UBITECH has been accepted as a member of the NetWorld2020, the European Technology Platform for communications networks and services that gathers players of the communications networks sector: industry leaders, innovative SMEs, and leading academic institutions. NetWorld2020 is closely related to the Association of the 5G-PPP, which was setup in order to have a legal entity that could sign the PPP contract with the EC. UBITECH is highly interested on actively participating at the NetWorld2020 activities and provide contributions with the potential to influence the research direction related to future communication systems in the area of mobile and wireless, within Horizon2020 and beyond, as well as to provide feedback to the NetWorld2020 Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) for the 5G domain.

Source: http://networld2020.eu/our-members/

The Linked2Safety project ended successfully in September 2014, and was graded excellent in its final review that took place in Brussels in November 2014. The Linked2Safety project concerned the development of a Next-Generation, Secure Linked Data Medical Information Space for Semantically-Interconnecting Electronic Health Records and Clinical Trials Systems Advancing Patients Safety In Clinical Research.

Within the context of the project, UBITECH was in charge of the development and validation of the so-called “EHR Revision, Annotation and Enrichment Mechanism”, which comprises of a set of utilities for extracting and generating standardized and fully anonymized data cubes out of homogenized Electronic Health Records, for reassuring the quality and clinical value of the generated data cubes, for ensuring the protection and anonymity of the personal data aggregated in the generated cubes, for enriching the data cubes with semantic information and ontological concepts, as well as, for RDFizing the semantically enriched data cubes and publishing them as Linked Data Cubes.

Additionally, UBITECH led the implementation of the integrated Linked2Safety Platform’s security and decision support mechanisms and the overall software quality assurance activities, and significantly contributed to the development of the common EHR schema and semantic model, to the development of the technical specification of the internal design of the “Interoperable EHR Space”, to the design, modeling and implementation of the “Linked Data Space” components, as well as to the dissemination of the project results and the communication of Linked2Safety results to other initiatives.