A scientific paper entitled “Converging HPC, Big Data and Cloud technologies for precision agriculture data analytics on supercomputers” has been co-authored by Ryax Technologies, HLRS High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, CINECA, National Technical University of Athens, LeanXcale and UBITECH, and is presented at the 15th Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing (VHPC 20) held in conjunction with the International Supercomputing Conference – High Performance, between June 21-25, 2020 in Frankfurt, Germany. In this paper, Dr Sophia Karagiorgou and her co-authors discuss the orchestration of precision agriculture and livestock farming analytics workflows across hybrid IoT, Big Data, HPC and Cloud infrastructures. As a matter of fact, the convergence of HPC and Big Data along with the influence of Cloud are playing an important role in the democratization of HPC. The increasing needs of Data Analytics in computational power has added new fields of interest for the HPC facilities but also new problematics such as interoperability with Cloud and ease of use. Besides the typical HPC applications, these infrastructures are now asked to handle more complex workflows combining Machine Learning, Big Data and HPC. This brings challenges on the resource management, scheduling and environment deployment layers. Hence, enhancements are needed to allow multiple frameworks to be deployed under common system management while providing the right abstraction to facilitate adoption.
UBITECH Group kicks off the frESCO Innovation Action on new business models for innovative energy services for residential consumers
UBITECH and UBITECH ENERGY participates in the virtual kick-off meeting, hosted by CIRCE (June 10, 2020), of the frESCO Innovation Action, officially started on June 1st, 2020. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 893857) and spans on the period June 2020 – November 2023. The vision of the frESCO project to engage with ESCOs and aggregators and enable the deployment of innovative business models, on the basis of novel energy and integrated energy service bundles that properly combine and remunerate local flexibility for optimizing local energy performance both in the form of energy efficiency (energy savings) and demand side management (demand response). Such new service and business models will bring under common Pay for Performance Contracts (extended form of current EPCs) two currently differentiated service offerings to enable the realization of next-generation smart energy service packages.
UBITECH presents the Technical Challenges and the Real-world Testbeds of the CYBELE H2020 Innovation Action at the BDVA HPC, Big Data, IoT and AI Future Industry-driven Collaborative Strategic Topics Workshop
The BDVA organized workshop on HPC, Big Data, IoT and AI future industry-driven collaborative strategic topics took place virtually on May 5th, 2020, aiming to analyse in depth the challenges, limitations and longer term perspectives of the Large Scale Pilot actions, that are currently being developed in the context of the ICT-11-2018-2019 calls to demonstrate the potential of these technologies in the implementation of industrial pilot test-beds, as well as other existing relevant ongoing projects and activities in other programmes. These pilots ad test-beds deal with data coming from different industrial and business domains, such as manufacturing, health and healthcare, agri-food, finance, and other business or public sector domains. Although the particular sectors covered by the pilots provide a diversity of challenges, there are many common difficulties that have to be overcome. The aim of the workshop is to outline future research and innovation needs in terms of convergence and alignment of the basic technologies and their utilization in industry and specially SMEs.
In this context, UBITECH represented the CYBELE H2020 Innovation Action that aspires at demonstrating how the convergence of HPC, Big Data, Cloud Computing (services) and the IoT can revolutionise farming, reduce scarcity and increase our nation’s food supply in a dramatic fashion, bringing enormous social, economic, and environmental benefits. In particular, CYBELE Project Coordinator Dr. Steven Davy from WIT and CYBELE Technical Coordinator Dr. Sophia Karagiorgou from UBITECH presented the technical challenges, the research activities and the convergence of Big Data, HPC and AI technologies in the CYBELE Testbeds applicable to the Precision Agriculture and the Precision Livestock Farming contexts. Within CYBELE, UBITECH undertakes the technical coordination, leads the realization of large scale HPC-enabled test beds and delivers a distributed big data management architecture and a data management strategy providing 1) integrated, unmediated access to large scale datasets of diverse types from a multitude of distributed data sources, 2) a data and service driven virtual HPC-enabled environment supporting the execution of multi-parametric agri-food related impact model experiments, optimizing the features of processing large scale datasets and 3) a bouquet of domain specific and generic services on top of the virtual research environment facilitating the elicitation of knowledge from big agri-food related data, addressing the issue of increasing responsiveness and empowering automation-assisted decision making, empowering the stakeholders to use resources in a more environmentally responsible manner, improve sourcing decisions, and implement circular-economy solutions in the food chain.
UBITECH co-organizes a scientific workshop on Dependability and Safety Emerging Cloud and Fog Systems
With research and academic partners from the FutureTPM, ASTRID, CUREX and SECONDO H2020 European co-funded research projects, UBITECH co-organizes the 1st Workshop on Dependability and Safety Emerging Cloud and Fog Systems(DeSECSys) that will take place in September 17-18, 2020, in Guildford, United Kingdom, co-located with the 25th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2020).
Given that information security and privacy have already been established as some of the most crucial aspects of technology especially in a world that is migrating to digital applications by the day, this has inevitably led to the emergence of technologies that support the safety and dependability of the ever-increasing sensitive data handled by these applications. Additionally, besides these technologies which target security by their design, there are other technologies, such as machine learning, which could potentially be applied to security in innovative schemes. The goal of the DeSECSys workshop is to foster collaboration and discussion among cyber-security researchers and practitioners to discuss the various applications, opportunities and possible shortcomings of these technologies and their integration. Effectively the DeSECSys workshop aims to produce a collection of state-of-the-art research about emerging security technologies, their applications, their shortcomings and their verification with a focus on their uncompromised, in terms of security, safety and dependability, integration.
UBITECH team submits CovIDpass, the Citizen’s COVID-19 Immunity Certificate, at the Global Hack
Twelve members of UBITECH team, including Software Engineers, Web Developers, UI/UX Experts, Data Scientists, Mobile Developers and Blockchain Engineers, have submitted the CovIDpass idea and proof-of-concept at the online hackathon of Global Hack, entitled “Fight for our Future” (https://theglobalhack.devpost.com/), that takes place on April 9-12, 2020 and attracted more than 6,000 individuals submitting more than 1,000 ideas. CovIDpass proposes a privacy-preserving and secure infrastructure for the issuance and validation of the COVID-19 Immunity Certificate of citizens, enabling their mobility across different countries.
As COVID-19 is rapidly spreading across the globe, more restrictions on cross-country travelling are being imposed, significantly disrupting the air transportations. Worldwide public health safety restrictions have grounded more than 80% of flights, leading the industry and populations’ movement in unprecedented turbulence. It is inevitable that these strict policies are going to gradually transform into a system that incoming passengers will be obliged to prove their health status. Therefore, a global standardized COVID-19 immunity certification will be asked before boarding, as the humanity needs to ensure that in the post-COVID crisis era, people may move between countries in an objectively riskless fashion, both for themselves as well as for the public safety.
UBITECH undertakes the technical coordination of the TheFSM Innovation Action on Food Safety industrial data markets
UBITECH is participating at the kick-off e-meeting (March 27, 2020) of the TheFSM Innovation Action , officially started on February 1st, 2020. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 871703) and spans on the period February 2020 – January 2023. The vision of the TheFSM project is to deliver an industrial data platform that will significantly boost the way that food certification takes place in Europe. The platform will facilitate the exchange and connection of data between different food safety actors, who are interested in sharing information critical to certification. The project is going to accelerate the pace by which this type of certification bodies (in Europe and beyond) adopt digital innovation and offer data-driven services. Eventually, TheFSM aspires to catalyse the digital evolution of the quite traditional but very data-intensive business ecosystem of global food certification.
UBITECH participates at the experts panel in the first live webinar of the UPTIME H2020 project
UBITECH participated in the experts panel in the first live webinar of the UPTIME H2020 project on 19 March 2020, as the technical coordinator and the UPTIME platform integrator. The UPTIME 1st Live Webinar highlighted the differences between classic preventive maintenance and predictive maintenance using historical data and real time dataas well as illustrated benefits of predictive maintenance by a concrete implementation in the White Goods Industry.
UBITECH co-authors a scientific publication on HPC Enabled Virtual Industrial Experimentation Environments for Precision Agriculture and Livestock Farming
Following a peer-review process, the Computer Networks international journal published by Elsevier has accepted to publish the scientific manuscript entitled “CYBELE – Fostering Precision Agriculture & Livestock Farming Through Secure Access to Large-Scale HPC Enabled Virtual Industrial Experimentation Environments Fostering Scalable Big Data Analytics”, that has been co-authored by UBITECH. In this paper, Konstantinos Perakis and his co-authors introduce CYBELE, a platform aspiring to safeguard that the stakeholders involved in the agri-food value chain (research community, SMEs, entrepreneurs, etc.) have integrated, unmediated access to a vast amount of very large scale datasets of diverse types and coming from a variety of sources, and that they are capable of actually generating value and extracting insights out of these data, by providing secure and unmediated access to large-scale High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures supporting advanced data discovery, processing, combination and visualization services, solving computationally-intensive challenges modelled as mathematical algorithms requiring very high computing power and capability.
Successful final review for the ANASTACIA H2020 Research and Innovation Action in Brussels
The final contractual review meeting for the ANASTACIA H2020 co-funded research project (http://www.anastacia-h2020.eu) with external reviewers and project officer from the EC side took place in Brussels on February 19, 2020. The ANASTACIA consortium successfully presented the results of the work of the project at the final 18 months of project. ANASTACIA consortium developed a trustworthy-by-design security framework which address security in all the phases of the ICT Systems Development Lifecycle (SDL) that is able to take autonomous decisions through the use of new networking technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), continuous security monitoring, and intelligent and dynamic security enforcement. During the review meeting, the ANASTACIA consortium demonstrated how the ANASTACIA framework had protected a Smart Building from various adversaries and attacks using compromised devices, and how it had provided a holistic framework for security by-design suitable for Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) based on IoT and Cloud architectures. UBITECH was leading the integration and testing activities of the ANASTACIA project, and developed a highly scalable data filtering mechanism for collecting and aggregating all security logs.
Successful midterm review for the InteropEHRate H2020 Research and Innovation Action in Luxembourg
The first contractual review meeting for the InteropEHRate H2020 co-funded research project (https://www.interopehrate.eu/) took place in Luxembourg on February 13, 2020. InteropEHRate aims to support peoples’ health by opening them up new ways to make health data available where needed. To make this possible, key health data is managed in “patients’ hands”, i.e. through Smart EHRs (S-EHR) on mobile devices. Data is always transferred via highly secure channels including a direct device-to-device. The InteropEHRate consortium successfully presented the results of the work of the project during the first 12 months of project. UBITECH, as the leader of health record security and privacy protocols of the project, presented the security and privacy mechanisms adopted in InteropEHRate for both the remote and device-to-device protocols. These mechanisms include two variants for identity management (one of them utilizes qualified digital signatures for eIDAS regulation compliance), double-signed consent management and pluggable authentication based on Keycloak Identity and Access Management.
