Ubiquitous Internet

RECOGNITION will develop a radically new approach for embedding self-awareness in ICT systems. This will be based on the cognitive processes that the human species exhibits for self-awareness, seeking to exploit the fact that humans are ultimately the fundamental basis for high performance autonomic processes. This is due to the cognitive ability of the brain to efficiently assert relevance (or irrelevance), extract knowledge and take appropriate decisions, when faced with partial information and disparate stimuli. Using the psychological and cognitive sciences as concrete inspiration, our approach is to develop functional models of the core cognitive processes that allow humans to assert relevance and achieve knowledge from information. This involves mechanisms such as inference, belief, similarity and trust. These will be translated to the ICT domain by development of flexible RECOGNITION algorithms that can be imbedded in ICT on a flexible basis for self-awareness. We will demonstrate this new paradigm for Internet content. The future Internet will see ever-increasing amounts of content that needs to be effectively managed and acquired, often from portable devices and in diverse spatial and social situations. The massive scale of content will swamp the user with information, impeding effective management and relevant acquisition by the user. By exploiting the self-awareness capability we will enable the users, content and network to cope effectively in a scalable manner, thus making unprecedented amounts of relevant content available and unleashing new classes of applications that extract maximum utility from content.

The future Internet will be characterised by a pervasive diffusion of devices with heterogeneous capabilities and resources. Users will carry personal mobile devices (smartphones, PDAs, cameras) bundling several wireless interfaces, supporting computationally intensive tasks, and powerful tools to produce multimedia content. Other types of devices with networking capabilities will be also available in the environment (sensors, fixed cameras, etc) featuring more specialised resources. The resulting networking environment, seen as a whole, will thus be characterised by a multitude of heterogeneous resources. The goal of SCAMPI is to enable each user to avail not only of the resources available on its own device, but also to opportunistically exploit the other resources of the environment, including those on the other users’ devices, in a trustable and secure way. SCAMPI will thus enable users to compose the functionality of the different resources available in the network, enjoying much richer functionality than what available on their own device. To realise this vision, SCAMPI develops the technical solutions for a service platform in mobile and pervasive opportunistic networks. Service is used as the main abstraction for using resources. We focus on opportunistic networking environments, where the network is formed by the devices spread in the environment, events such as long disconnections and partitions are the rule, and no simultaneous multi-hop paths can be guaranteed. Thus, SCAMPI generalises the pure opportunistic networking concept, and investigates the novel concept of opportunistic resource usage in challenged networks. The “human factor” (information about the social relationships among users) is a key dimension of the project. On the one hand, because SCAMPI leverages social awareness to optimise its technical solutions. On the other hand, because SCAMPI will enable novel services enhancing current mobile online social networking applications.

MOTIA project is aimed at developing a methodological framework for ICT network inter-dependencies analysis. Special efforts will be devoted to identify critical system inter-dependencies as potential amplifiers of negative impacts upon failures or deliberate attacks. A representative Italian case study will be deeply analyzed, whilst providing general purpose tools. Generally speaking, one expects increases of inter-dependency among the different systems to reduce resilience of the overall system. In this respect, one of the main objectives is to define and implement alert-indicators for crisis prevention and mitigation policy purposes. The analysis of indicators may also help CERT's (Computer Emergency Response Teams) to take prompt and effective actions in order to recover an acceptable operational state. Among related objectives the following are worth noting:

•  Developing analytical tools capable to identify the most critical inter-dependencies. Basic screenings will be in terms of potential impact on Quality of Service, security perception and economic status, according European Commission general indications,
•  Ensuring the analysis tools to account for emerging technologies, forthcoming operators and growth trends.

This COST Action will propose realistic energy-efficient alternate solutions to share IT distributed resources. As large scale distributed systems gather and share more and more computing nodes and Storage resources, their energy consumption is exponentially increasing. While much effort is nowadays put into hardware specific solutions to lower energy consumptions, the need for a complementary approach is necessary at the distributed system level, i.e. middleware, network and applications. The Action will characterize the energy consumption and energy efficiencies of distributed applications. Then based on the current hardware adaptation possibilities and innovative algorithms it will propose adaptive and alternative approaches taking into account the energy saving dimension of the problem. The Action will characterize the trade-off between energy savings and functional and non-functional parameters, including the economic dimension. A COST Action is the right scheme in order to unite a dispersed community and to promote the dissemination of the solutions and the energy concerns to the broader public. Deliverables will include workshop proceedings, books, good practice leaflets fostering consciousness rise at ICT researchers, scientists, managers and users levels. Finally, benefits will address scientific and societal needs.

This project involves researchers of Cardiff University (UK), IIT-CNR (Italy), University of Cambridge (UK), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), University of Oxford (UK), University of Aveiro (Portugal), and Institut Eurecom (France). In this project we are looking at how to exploit the structures defined by human social relationships to develop an entirely new paradigm for adaptability in technology-rich pervasive information and communication systems. Human social relationships have dynamic characteristics, massive scalability, inclusivity, self organisation and remarkable structural properties. These social links may be based on diverse issues emanating from trust and human-centric behavioural characteristics. Exploiting social networks for communication between electronic devices provides a unique way of translating qualitative human behaviour into adaptation for pervasive systems. This is because the behaviour of the human can be used to define and adapt a unique social structure between the electronic devices. Social anthropology results merged with models of social networks’ structure will be exploited to design trustable and adaptive networking protocols and data management systems for pervasive information and communication environments. Therefore, “Social Networking for Pervasive Adaptation” will i) investigate and understand dynamics of human social relationships; ii) model and analyze the social system dynamics and structures based on characterisation of human interactions; iii) Develop and validate the adaptive human behavioural-based paradigm for pervasive adaptation; iv) Develop the mechanisms and protocols for the electronic social networking paradigm and validate it from the technological standpoint, that is, its technical feasibility, effectiveness and scalability; v) Develop and validate the social mechanisms and protocols to assert & reinforce appropriate trust and security in dynamic situated environments; vi) Develop and validate the social mechanisms and protocols to acquire and provide user-relevant data & situated knowledge in pervasive technology rich environments using social networks. I contributed to write the project proposal, and together with Marco Conti I am leading the IIT-CNR scientific activities in the project.

EU-MESH's goal is to develop, evaluate, and trial a system of software modules for building dependable multi-radio multi-channel mesh networks with QoS support that provide ubiquitous and ultra-high speed broadband access. The system will be based on a converged infrastructure that uses a wireless mesh network to aggregate the capacity from both subscriber broadband access lines and provider fixed broadband links to form a virtual capacity pool, and provide access to this capacity pool for both stationary and mobile users. It will support low operation and management costs, through novel configuration and management procedures that achieve efficient usage of both the wireless spectrum and fixed broadband access lines. This will increase the competitiveness of existing providers, lower the barrier for small enterprises to enter the mobile broadband access market, and enable innovative services.

This project involves researchers of IIT-CNR (Italy), of SUPSI (CH), of the Libera Università “Vita Salute S.Raffaele” of Milan (Italy), and of Philipps-University Marburg (Germany). This project builds on recent psychophysical and neurophysiologic findings showing that as humans and animals move their eyes, their visual systems are subject to strong and robust (albeit transient) distortions of perceived space and time. It has been suggested, with strong supporting evidence, that these distortions may be relativistic-like consequences of the rapid remapping of neurones, necessary to compensate for the changes in retinal position produced by the eye movement. We plan to investigate and measure these phenomena with a multidisciplinary approach that combines the techniques of human psychophysics, functional magnetic imaging, animal neurophysiology and modelling within a Networked Control System (NCS). Together with Marco Conti I am leading the IIT-CNR scientific activities in the project.

Research (France), Institut Eurecom (France), Uppsala University (Sweden), EPFL (Switzerland), SUPSI (Switzerland), Martel Consulting (Switzerland). Haggle is a new autonomic networking architecture designed to enable communication in the presence of intermittent network connectivity, which exploits autonomic opportunistic communications (i.e. in particular in the absence of end-to-end communication infrastructure). We depart from the existing TCP/IP protocol suite, completely eliminating layering above the datalink, and exploiting an application-driven message forwarding, instead of delegating this responsibility to the network layer. To this end, we go beyond already innovative cross-layer approaches, defining a system that uses real best-effort, context aware message forwarding between ubiquitous mobile devices, in order to provide services when connectivity is local and intermittent. We use only functions that are absolutely necessary and common to all services, but that are sufficient to support a large range of current and future applications, more oriented to the human way of communicating (and more in general, the way communities of any type of entities communicate), rather than related to the technological aspect of the communication.

The motivation for BIONETS comes from emerging trends towards pervasive computing and communication environments, where myriads of networked devices with very different features will enhance our five senses, our communication and tool manipulation capabilities. The complexity of such environments will not be far from that of biological organisms, ecosystems, and socio-economic communities. Traditional communication approaches are ineffective in this context, since they fail to address several new features: a huge number of nodes including low-cost sensing/identifying devices, a wide heterogeneity in node capabilities, high node mobility, the management complexity, the possibility of exploiting spare node resources. BIONETS aims at a novel approach able to address these challenges. Nature and society exhibit many instances of systems in which large populations are able to reach efficient equilibrium states and to develop effective collaboration and survival strategies, able to work in the absence of central control and to exploit local interactions. We seek inspiration from these systems to provide a fully integrated network and service environment that scales to large amounts of heterogeneous devices, and that is able to adapt and evolve in an autonomic way. BIONETS overcomes device heterogeneity and achieves scalability via an autonomic and localized peer-to-peer communication paradigm. Services in BIONETS are also autonomic, and evolve to adapt to the surrounding environment, like living organisms evolve by natural selection. Biologically-inspired concepts permeate the network and its services, blending them together, so that the network moulds itself to the services it runs, and services, in turn, become a mirror image of the social networks of users they serve. This new paradigm breaks the barrier between service providers and users, and sets up the opportunity for "mushrooming" of spontaneous services, therefore paving the way to a service-centric ICT revolution.