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.

Source: http://cf2015.holacloud.eu/programme

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 contact us or find the presentation here.

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.

Source: http://pci2015.teiath.gr/research-project-results-track

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.

The project objective was to develop a flexible architecture and modular software that allows the use of product information in a strategic way. In addition, the specific initiative has increased the productivity of the engineering activity through an integrated and holistic use of the data, people and the complete life-cycle processes of Products. Thus, the specific results have made it possible today, to talk of a new, integrated approach to optimize the entire value chain of the manufacturing industry.

Continue reading EL MUNDO praises LinkedDesign in its Innovators column: Industry 4.0 – A European consortium launches the most powerful platform for digitizing industry

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 here.

Source: http://www.semantics.cc/programme

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.

For this purpose, the adoption of the two-dimensional barcode (2D-barcode) techniques has been advised, enabling the storage of all crucial information of the digitally-signed civil-status certificates (including but not limited to the issuer name, the issuing data and place, and a subset of the personal data of the citizen appeared on the PDF document). In particular, each time a civil-status certificate is issued and digitally signed (in the RENAPER Secure Data Exchange Platform), a unique identification code will be generated based on the digital certificate used to sign a given civil-status certificate. This unique identification code along with the aforementioned subset of data appeared on the certificate will be encrypted, transformed into QR code and imprinted on the PDF file of the digitally-signed civil-status certificate. This 2D barcode will be decrypted by a cross-platform mobile application to be developed and distributed only to authorized public servants, allowing only authorized personnel to be able to check whether the data appeared on the document are modified by the citizen (data integrity control) and to examine the validity of the digital signature (originality and authenticity check).

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.

Towards this vision, UBITECH participates and contributes with three projects, namely ARCADIA, INPUT and PaaSword. ARCADIA constitutes the only EC funded project that addresses exclusively theme 2 of the ICT-09 topic (i.e. software architectures and tools for highly distributed applications) and aims at designing and validating a framework for development and management of reconfigurable, highly distributed applications and infrastructures. PaaSword has a strong focus on Cloud security and 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. Finally, INPUT 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. For more information, you can download the Software & Services, Cloud Computing H2020 Project Portfolio here.

Source: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/software-services-cloud-computing-h2020-project-portfolio

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 session explored the challenges on efficiently handling big data in various domains taking into account constraints imposed by the infrastructural operational environment as well as preferences of the involved stakeholders. UBITECH presented a novel programming approach –as it is under specification within the framework of the ARCADIA Horizon 2020 project- that aims at optimally placing applications over programmable infrastructure, taking into account –among others- big data aspects. Furthermore, UBITECH presented work in progress and challenges with regards to the production of big data analytics in various domains.

The need for design and implementation of innovative big data management solutions based on the peculiarities of each application domain was highlighted in the panel along with the need for investment on the human capital of enterprises in terms of data scientists that are aware of their daily business processes and can contribute towards the transition to analytically-drive enterprises.

Source: http://www.dataconference.org/IndustrialTrack.aspx

A scientific paper entitled “Exploiting Linked Data Towards the Production of Added-Value Business Analytics and Vice-versa” has been presented by UBITECH at the 4th International Conference on Data Management Technologies and Applications (DATA 2015), which was held in Colmar, Alsace, France, on July 20-22, 2015. At this paper, Eleni Fotopoulou, Panagiotis Hasapis and Anastasios Zafeiropoulos – along with other co-authors – propose an approach for the production of added-value business analytics through the consumption of interlinked versions of data and the exploitation of linked data principles. Such interlinked data constitute valuable input for the initiation of an analytics extraction process and can lead to the realization of analysis that was not envisaged in the past. In addition to the production of analytics based on the consumption of linked data, the proposed approach supports the interlinking of the produced results with the associated input data, increasing in this way the value of the produced data and making them discoverable for further use in the future.

Source: http://www.dataconference.org/Program/2015/DATA_paperList.htm