UBITECH participated at the ICT for Energy Efficiency Contractors meeting that was organized by the Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME) at 23-24 of May 2016. The main objective of the meeting was the exchange of information and identification of synergies among the ICT for Energy Efficiency funded Horizon 2020 projects of the 2014 and 2015 calls, as well as the collection of views regarding challenges that have to be faced in the future. UBITECH participated on the meeting on behalf of the ENTROPY H2020 project.
Upon the presentation of the work envisaged or work in progress of the related projects, open discussion among the participants was realized leading to a set of potential synergies, plans for joined activities and sharing of best practices (tools, consumer engagement methodologies, etc.). Such synergies include the definition of common evaluation methodologies and incentives for behavioural change and the interconnection of the proposed information models (e.g. semantic models, ontologies) for representing the collected information in the set of deployments. Furthermore, a workshop is going to be organized by ENTROPY targeting at collecting contributions from all the relevant projects, included any common activities realized.
A new paper of UBITECH, with the title “PaaSword: A Holistic Data Privacy and Security by Design Framework for Cloud Services”, has been accepted to be presented at the SecureCloud 2016 conference (held on May 24-25, at the Aviva Stadium, Dublin) that is organized by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and had (this year) a 26,6% of acceptance rate. The presentation of Dr. Panagiotis Gouvas and his co-authors focus on the PaaSword framework (supported by the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme of the European Commission), which intends to maximize and fortify the trust of individual, professional and corporate users to Cloud services and applications, by providing storage protection mechanisms, which improves confidentiality and integrity protection of users’ data in the Cloud while it does not affect the data access functionality. Specifically, PaaSword introduces a holistic data privacy and security by design framework with main aim to protect users’ sensitive data stored in the Cloud, based on a searchable encryption scheme enhanced with sophisticated context-aware access control mechanisms, as well as on an innovative approach for key management that maximizes customers’ control over their data. PaaSword intends not only to adopt the CSA Cloud security principles, but also to extend them by capitalizing on recent innovations on distributed encryption and virtual database middleware technologies that introduce a scalable secure Cloud database abstraction layer combined with sophisticated distribution and encryption methods into the processing and querying of data stored in the Cloud.
Dr. Panagiotis Gouvas, the R&D Director of UBITECH, gives a speech at the Nordic Game Conference, transferring his professional experience from the development of security solutions, his significant background in JEE and telecom, and his research work related to the development of secure, interoperable and portable applications across different cloud providers. His speech entitled “Evolution of the PaaS Ecosystem and the Impact on Games” incorporates the experience and technological know-how gained by the UBITECH’s R&D team in the PaaSword H2020 and PaaSport FP7 projects, which aim to address many challenges related to security and portability in PaaS ecosystem – wherein the game industry provides a continuous source of challenges and requirements. The Nordic Game conference, constituting the most relevant games industry conference in Europe and including a program filled with the best speakers from the global industry, access to international exhibitors and 2000+ professionals, world-class hospitality and a host of networking events, is held annually in Malmö, Sweden. The 2016 edition will take place on 18-20 May at Slagthuset, a beautiful venue near the Malmö city center.
UBITECH has actively participated in the pre-conference meetings as well as the main conference activities at Net Futures 2016: Driving Growth in the #DigitalSingleMarket. UBITECH participated at the pre-conference meetings of the of the Clusters of European Projects on Cloud, providing contributions and ideas based on the work realized on relevant Horizon2020 projects. Specifically, UBITECH participated at the “Software Engineering for Services and Applications” clustering meeting on behalf of the ARCADIA project, the “Novel approaches and technologies for Cloud resource and service management (NATRES)” clustering meeting on behalf of the ARCADIA and INPUT projects and the “Data Protection, Security and Privacy in Cloud” clustering meeting on behalf of the PaaSword project.
A white paper entitled “NATRES’ White-paper” has been co-authored by UBITECH and published at the webpage of the EU Cluster “Novel approaches and technologies for Cloud resource and service management (NATRES)”. This open-access document aims to support the activities of the cluster of projects and actions on Cloud partially funded by the European Commission through the FP7-Collaboration-ICT and H2020-LEIT-ICT programmes. It identifies the current research approaches and newest technologies in the field of resource and service management in Cloud environments, as well as the gaps that are not yet fulfilled by them. This information is considered essential to identify future research and development directions, as well as to help the initiation of new actions and projects in the field of resource and service management. UBITECH has contributed on the white paper on behalf of the ARCADIA and INPUT H2020 projects, providing information regarding the proposed approaches and the adopted technologies for novel resource and service management aspects, as well as the expected impact on the service market of the proposed actions results. The white paper is available 
UBITECH is actively involved in the organization of the First International Workshop on Programmability for Cloud Networks and Applications to be held in conjunction with the ITC 28 in Würzburg, technically co-sponsored by IEEE and VDE ITG, and in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM, since the workshop is supported and initiated by the two EC H2020 projects INPUT and ARCADIA, wherein UBITECH participates.
UBITECH participated and provided a presentation at the MARSOL Workshop “Investigation and Monitoring of MAR Sites” that was organized by ICCS and held in Lavrio at 16-18 March 2016. The workshop covered aspects of environmental monitoring technologies, focusing on the monitoring of hydrologic and water quality parameters that are crucial for Managed Aquifer Recharge facilities. These aspects have been examined through an integrated approach, including: New monitoring technologies (not commercially available); Commercial monitoring technologies that are cost and energy effective; Data gathering, transmission, management & storage; Critical environmental parameters in groundwater engineering (with respect to MAR facilities).
The Germany Institute of Standardization (Deutsches Institut für Normung – DIN) has initiated the process to develop a DIN SPEC (with the planned document number DIN SPEC 91337) in accordance with the PAS procedure dealing with “Unified Application Management Interface for Cloud Application Platforms”. This DIN SPEC will specify requirements for application programming interfaces (API) for applications on cloud platforms with the aim of optimizing the interoperability between platform-as-a-service solutions, tools and value-added services offered by third party providers. After publishing the respective business plan for four weeks on the DIN Website for comments and objections, the overall editing process has been officially launched with a kick off meeting that took place in DIN premises in Berlin, at March 17th, 2016. UBITECH has actively participated in the kick off meeting of DIN SPEC 91337, wherein the workshop members selected UBITECH’s R&D Director Dr. Panagiotis Gouvas for the role of the Workshop Leader.
UBITECH officially initiates its involvement and contribution in the CONFIG (COntrol Networks in FIve G) initiative, by participating in the Heidelberg meeting (held at February 10-11, 2016, in the offices of Eurescom) and positioning itself in the consortium for brining expertise related to security, context-aware authorization and resource access policy models, components certification. The CONFIG 5G project is running without public EU funding, based on the ideas and consortium built during the preparation of the first phase of the research and innovation projects of the European 5G Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) within the Horizon2020 framework, at Deutsche Telekom’s initiative.
The results of the second year of implementation of the LinDA* FP7-610565 project have been successfully demonstrated during the final project review on January 21st, 2016 at the European Commission in Luxembourg. These results include the final release of the LinDA workbench along with the performance evaluation of the LinDA tools, as well as the results from the operation of the LinDA pilots (fostering Business Intelligence Analytics, Environmental Analytics, Media Analytics) along with a set of suggestions for LinDA adopters.
