UBITECH participats at the kick-off meeting hosted by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica spa in Palermo, Italy (October 3-4, 2022) of the TALON Research and Innovation Action, officially started on October 1st, 2022. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon Europe Programme (Grant Agreement No. 101070181) and spans on the period October 2022 – September 2025. TALON aims at sculpturing the road towards the next industrial revolution by developing a fully-automated AI architecture capable of bringing intelligence near the edge in a flexible, adaptable, explainable, energy and data efficient manner.
TALON architecture consists of three fundamental pillars: a) an AI orchestrator that coordinates the network and service orchestrators in order to optimise the edge vs cloud relationship, while boosting reusability of datasets, algorithms and models by deciding where each one should be placed; b) a lightweight hierarchical blockchain schemes that introduce new service models and applications under a privacy and security umbrella; and c) new digital-twin empowered transfer learning and visualization approaches that enhance AI trustworthiness and transparency. It combines the benefits of AI, edge and cloud networking, as well as blockchain and DTs, optimized by means of a) new key performance indicators that translate the AI benefits into insightful metrics; b) novel theoretical framework for the characterisation of the AI; c) blockchain used to deliver personalised & perpetual protection based on security, privacy and trust mechanisms; d) AI approaches for automatically and co-optimising edge and cloud resources as well as the AI execution nodes; e) semantic AI to reduce the learning latency and enhance reusability; and f) digital twins that visualize the AI outputs and together with human-in-the-loop approaches.
UBITECH undertakes the technical, scientific and innovation management of the TALON action, and drives the activities towards the design and development of TALON’s novel theoretical framework that employs information, probability and game theory approaches to explain and asses the operation of AI algorithms. Last but not least, UBITECH will define and design the NG-SDN and distributed intelligence functionalities of TALON framework. The NG-SDN toolkit offers top-down programmability and embraces white-box devices, enabling the operator to interact with the network in a manner previously impossible by defining custom solutions and protocols, manipulating packets in a new fashion. Through technologies like P4 and XDP, the operator can program the desired behaviour in multi-vendor devices with little effort, achieving end-to-end control of the network.
