ERCIM News 101
April 2015
Special theme The Internet of Things and the Web of Things
Guest editors Dave Raggett (W3C) and Emmanuel Baccelli (Inria)
An Integration Gateway for Sensing Devices in Smart Environments
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by Michele Girolami, Francesco Furfari and Stefano Chessa
Smart Environments, and in particular Smart Homes, have recently attracted the attention of many researchers and industrial vendors. The proliferation of low-power sensing devices requires integration gateways hiding the complexity of heterogeneous technologies. We propose a ZigBee integration gateway to access and integrate low-power ZigBee devices.
Fighting Networking Heterogeneity in the Internet of Things
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by Elias Z. Tragos, Vangelis Angelakis and Stefanos Papadakis
The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to interconnect large numbers of heterogeneous devices to provide advanced applications that can improve our quality of life. The efficient interconnectivity of IoT devices can be achieved with a hybrid Cloud Radio Access Network (Cloud-RAN) and Software Defined Radio (SDR) framework that can overcome the heterogeneity of devices by seamlessly adapting to their communication technology.
Tectons: Towards a Generalised Approach to Programming Systems of Systems
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by Geoff Coulson, Andreas Mauthe and Markus Tauber
The world’s computing infrastructure is becoming increasingly differentiated into autonomous sub-systems (e.g., IoT installations, clouds, VANETs), and these are often composed to generate value-added functionality (systems of systems). But today, system composition is carried out in an ad-hoc, system-specific, manner, with many associated disadvantages. We need a generalized system-of-systems-oriented programming model that allows systems to be composed by application-domain ex-perts, not just systems programmers. Furthermore, composition should occur in a principled way that generates well-understood compositional semantics and behaviour.
BETaaS: Building the Future Platform for Development and Execution of Machine-to-Machine Applications
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by Carlo Vallati, Enzo Mingozzi and Giacomo Tanganelli
Recently proposed IoT platforms are typically based on centralized and cloud-centric infrastructures. The BETaaS project aims at designing a platform for the execution of M2M applications in a distributed runtime environment running close to the physical environment where sensors and actuators are deployed. The main goal is to move the intelligence to the edge in order to allow localized, content-centric, and timely processing of smart objects data. The platform facilitates the integration of existing IoT systems, while providing software developers with a high-level, content-centric abstraction to access smart objects’ resources.
Pro-IoT: Improving the Productivity of Companies by Using the IoT
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by Heikki Ailisto, Nadine Pesonen, Pertti Raatikainen and Jonathan Ouoba
Internet of things (IoT) and the related Industrial Internet are recognized as one of the most significant technology-driven disruptions of the coming ten years. VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has chosen IoT as a strategic area for research, development and innovation projects.
MusicBricks: Connecting Digital Creators to the Internet of Music Things
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by Thomas Lidy, Alexander Schindler and Michela Magas
A new Horizon 2020 Innovation Action project fosters the uptake of music technology research and acts as an accelerator for bringing creative music tech ideas to market, while providing a mesh of technological ‘bricks’ to create an ‘Internet of Music Things’.
Deploying an NFC-based Inventory System: A Case Study
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by Patrick Poullie, Thomas Bocek and Burkhard Stiller
NFC tags and transceivers are ubiquitous and well supported. Like many academic research groups, the Communication Systems Group CSG of the University of Zürich owns many physical devices, which are required for research and teaching. Traditionally, a printed, human-readable inventory and attached labels have been used to keep track of these devices. A new inventory approach was developed with the aim of simplifying the data acquisition using an NFC tag-based system supported by an Android application. This approach was implemented, tested, and used productively. However, due to technical difficulties - namely, a poor response of NFC tags on metallic material - the NFC-based inventory system did not simplify data acquisition and consequently, the NFC-based inventory system was changed back to the label-based system.
TrakChain Estimates Costs for Track and Trace in the Internet of (many) Things
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TrakChain Estimates Costs for Track and Trace in the Internet of (many) Things
by Miguel L. Pardal and José Alves Marques
The TrakChain assessment tools take a description of a physical supply chain – relevant locations, how many goods are received, how often, etc. – and estimate the performance of track and trace queries in a modelled traceability system, providing predictions of how much processing and storage will be required for the working system. The tools were developed at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal and were evaluated using a Pharmaceuticals supply chain case study.
W3C Europe@20 Anniversary Event
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W3C Europe will celebrate its twentieth anniversary with a symposium on Tuesday, 5 May in the Paris town hall.
The Web was born in Europe and W3C is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the European branch of W3C in Paris. Europe has played a fundamental role for the success of the Web. First of all, the founding of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994 became possible with the support by CERN, DARPA and the European Commission. Since 1995, when Inria hosted the European branch of W3C, the European Commission funded W3C activities in Europe, as for example the development of Web accessibility rules, enabling people with disabilities to participate equally on the Web. Since 2003, W3C Europe is hosted by ERCIM EEIG.
W3C will celebrate 20 years of work accomplished by European stakeholders for the benefit of the Web with a symposium on 5 May. Speakers will include, among others, representatives from Paris city council, the European Commission and the French government. The closing talk will be given by Tim Berners-Lee, Web Inventor and W3C Director. About 250 invited guests - global strategists, business leaders and developers - are expected to attend.
More information:
http://www.w3.org/20/Europe/
The Role of ERCIM EEIG
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by Antoine Petit
Over the last 25 years, ERCIM has earned a reputation as one of Europe’s leading expert groups in the areas of ICT and Applied Mathematics. In 2012, the ERCIM community was restructured and is now supported by two organizations, the ERCIM Association (AISBL) and the ERCIM European Economic Interest Group (EEIG). While the Association is carrying out and supervising all of ERCIM’s scientific activities, the EEIG, composed of a subset of the Association's members, is responsible for managing the ERCIM Office and the European branch of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Mesh Joinery: A Method for Building Fabricable Structures
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Paolo Cignoni, Nico Pietroni, Luigi Malomo and Roberto Scopigno
Mesh joinery is an innovative method to produce illustrative shape approximations suitable for fabrication. Mesh joinery is capable of producing complex fabricable structures in an efficient and visually pleasing manner. We represent an input geometry as a set of planar pieces arranged to compose a rigid structure by exploiting an efficient slit mechanism. Since slices are planar, a standard 2D cutting system is sufficient to fabricate them.
Icing Detection and Protection for Small Unmanned Aircrafts
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by Andrea Cristofaro and Tor Arne Johansen
In unmanned aerial vehicles, it is vital to be able to detect and accommodate ice adhesion on wings, control surfaces and airspeed sensors, since ice accretion modifies the shape of the aircraft and alters its measurements, thus changing the aerodynamic forces and reducing manoeuvring capability.
LEARNMINER – Advanced Analytics for eLearning
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by Christian Bauckhage, Markus Ketterl and Ulrich Nütten
LEARNMINER is an interactive social eLearning platform that integrates advanced analytics and linked data processing to assist users in structuring course material. Tools for analyzing crowd behaviour allow instructors to identify overly simple or difficult material and provide means for planning deadlines or tests. LEARNMINER allows for mobile access and provides interactive visualization of learning material and progress.
Online Semantic Analysis over Big Network Data
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by Chengchen Hu and Yuming Jiang
Mobile applications, web services and social media generate huge data traffic from many sources. This is described as ‘big network data’ with the ‘4V-characteristics’ - that is, variety, velocity, volume and veracity. Analysis on such big network data can discover problems, reveal opportunities and provide advice for the service and network providers for fine-grained traffic engineering with close to real-time adjustment or application acceleration [1].
From Cooling Integrated Circuits to Efficient Electrical Power Generation
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by Stephan Paredes, Brian Burg, Patrick Ruch, Ingmar Meijer and Bruno Michel
An earlier article in ERCIM News described a system for cooling integrated circuits with re-usable hot water. The result is a sharp increase in energy efficiency and a sharp reduction in the carbon footprint of data centers. The same technique is being applied to photovoltaic electrical energy production, again with a huge gain in system efficiency due to the parallel recovery of waste heat. In hot climates heat from datacenters as well as solar systems is converted into cooling by means of adsorption heat pumps.
VAVID– Handling Big Data
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by Jochen Garcke, Fraunhofer SCAI
The German VAVID project develops improved techniques for data compression as well as new methods of data analysis, data management and interactive data visualization.25 Years of Python at CWI
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Announcement
In February an interview with Guido van Rossum was published on the ACM website, celebrating 25 years of Python. This popular programming language originates from CWI in Amsterdam, where Van Rossum designed Python in December 1989 and finished the first working version in the first months of 1990. He named the language after his favourite British comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Guido van Rossum
Java Bug Fixed with Formal Methods
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Announcement
Researchers from the Formal Methods group at CWI fixed a bug in programming language Java in February 2015. They found an error in a broadly applied sorting algorithm, TimSort, which could crash programs and threaten security. The bug had already been known from 2013 but was never correctly resolved. When researcher Stijn de Gouw attempted to prove the correctness of TimSort, he encountered the bug. His bug report with an improved version has now been accepted. This version of TimSort is used by Android.
MOOC on “Binaural Hearing for Robots”
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Announcement
A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Binaural Hearing for Robots” will be available on the platform France Université Numérique from 11 May to 12 June 2015. It will be taught by Radu Horaud, research director at Inria Grenoble Rhône-Alpes.