R&D and Technology Transfer

Accurate Reconstruction of Single Individual Haplotypes for Personalized Medicine

by Filippo Geraci and Marco Pellegrini

Advanced personalized medicine is one of the goals of current research, and in this area new genetic diagnostic methods are critical. Diagnostic technology that can be used in the field (closer to the patient, and far from the traditional high-tech labs) is needed. We are studying this problem with respect to technology for personalized chromosome haplotyping.

Sensor Network for Search and Rescue Operations in Collapsed Buildings

by Milt Statheropoulos

Earthquakes, technical failures and explosions are responsible for building collapses that result in victims becoming trapped. Second-Generation Locator for Urban Search and Rescue Operations (SGL for USaR, www.sgl-eu.org) is a mission-oriented project that aims at solving critical problems following massive destruction and large-scale structural collapses in urban locations. Urban search and rescue operations are carried out in a highly hazardous and unstable operating environment, with large numbers of injured, entrapped and vulnerable casualties needing help. In such situations, the first responders called to contribute to the search and rescue operations are usually outnumbered by the large number of collapses that they have to deal with in a short period of time.

IT Security: Risk-Based Prediction Tool and Method for Critical Infrastructures

by Jocelyn Aubert, Christophe Incoul and Djamel Khadraoui

In today’s world, where most critical infrastructures are based on distributed and interdependent systems, security failures have become very common, even within large corporations. The FP7 MICIE (Tool for systemic risk analysis and secure mediation of data exchanged across linked CI information infrastructures) project aims to design and implement an alerting system that identifies, in real time, the level of possible threats induced on a given critical infrastructure (CI) by ‘undesired’ events occurring in the CI and/or other interdependent CIs. Here, we briefly describe the approach of a real-time risk-based monitoring solution for interdependent services of CIs.

Formal Modelling and Analysis of Predictable Java

by Thomas Bøgholm, René R. Hansen, Anders P. Ravn, Hans Søndergaard, and Bent Thomsen

While embedded systems development is becoming increasingly complex due to demands for greater functionality and a shorter time to market, it is still using low-level, close to hardware, implementation languages. Modern languages like Java handle such complexities more elegantly, but issues with predictability hinder their adaptation in the embedded systems world. We have developed Predictable Java, a Java-based framework for safety-critical embedded systems, along with analysis tools based on formal modelling.

Hybrid Systems Design Methodology

by Michal Pluska and David Sinclair

Embedded systems that interact with the physical world should be designed with a high degree of safety. In most existing design approaches that deal with such systems, verification is done afterwards and may lead to redesign problems. Moreover verification is done by simulation which may not consider the whole spectrum of system operation. The Lero – Irish Software Engineering Research Centre work at the Dublin City University introduces a methodology that helps design systems that can be verified by formal methods and according to system requirements. Moreover it helps partition the system into the objects from which it is built.

Content-Sharing for Mobile Social Networks in the Haggle Platform

by Marco Conti, Franca Delmastro, Andrea Passarella

In mobile pervasive environments, mainly characterized by intermittent connectivity conditions, gathering social and context information about the users and their behaviour is fundamental to providing efficient communications and content exchange.

EXTRA Helps SMEs Assess their Knowledge Management Practices

by Sanae Saadaoui and Frederic F. Monfils

EXTRA has been designed to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) improve the way they develop and deliver software by making better use of each company’s previous experiences. In order to do this, SMEs must record these experiences. While knowledge management evaluation used to be inaccessible to SMEs, this is no longer the case. EXTRA has developed a self-assessment tool providing a set of good practices in software development for SMEs.

New Headway for the Semantic Web

by Stephanie Parker

"I have a dream for the Web in which computers become capable of analysing all the data on the Web", said Tim Berners-Lee in 1999. Therein lay the future. Linked Data is part of the vision of the semantic web to enrich the structure of the Web by embedding semantic annotations into data to improve the quality of search, collaboration, publishing and advertising and enable applications to become more integrated and intelligent.