ERCIM News 113
April 2018
Special theme Smart Farming
Guest editors Mirco Boschetti (IREA-CNR) and Erwin Schoitsch (AIT)
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Luis S. Barbosa, Alexandre Madeira (QuantaLab, and HASLab INESC TEC, Universidade do Minho)
Quantum algorithmics is emerging as a hot area of research, with the potential to have groundbreaking impacts on many different fields. The benefits come at a high price, however: quantum programming is hard and finding new quantum algorithms is far from straightforward. This area of research may greatly benefit from mathematical foundations and calculi, capable of supporting algorithm development and analysis. The Quantum Algorithmics Agenda at QuantaLab is contributing by seeking a suitable semantics-calculus-logic trilogy for quantum computation.
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Carmelo Lodato and Patrizia Ribino (ICAR-CNR)
Vitreoretinal diseases are widespread and on the rise. These pathologies can cause the degeneration of parts of the retina, and in particular of the macula. The visual perception, compromised by these ocular pathologies, can be improved with our non-therapeutic corrective technology, incorporated into a display device, which is viewed by the user in binocular vision.
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Haridimos Kondylakis, Georgia Troullinou, Kostas Stefanidis and Dimitris Plexousakis (ICS-FORTH)
The recent explosion of the web of data and the associated Linked Open Data (LOD) initiative have led to an enormous number of widely available RDF datasets. These datasets often have extremely complex schemas, which are difficult to comprehend, limiting the exploitation potential of the information they contain. As a result, there is now, more than ever, an increasing need to develop methods and tools that facilitate the quick understanding and exploration of these data sources.
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Roman Pletka, Nikolas Ioannou, Nikolaos Papandreou, Thomas Parnell and Saša Tomić (IBM Research Zurich)
The sustained increase in storage density and simultaneous cost reductions of NAND flash memories have ensured their continued popularity. But these positive attributes are linked to less desirable trends such as a reduction in the reliability of memory cells, requiring an increasingly overwhelming amount of sophisticated mitigation techniques, which become most apparent when applied to enterprise-level storage systems.
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Daniele Spoladore, Enrico G. Caldarola, Atieh Mahroo and Gianfranco E. Modoni (ITIA-CNR)
The CasAware research project combines context awareness with ambient assisted living by using a semantic-based framework that enables the smart home paradigm for everybody.
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Michael Sonntag (Johannes Kepler Universität Linz) and Michael Hofstätter (AIT)
Terrorism represents a serious threat to human life and infrastructure, and it is vital that police officers are equipped to investigate suspicious luggage, rubbish bins that might have been tampered with, etc., for improvised or unconventional explosive devices. Common investigation techniques currently include video cameras and transmission x-rays on mobile robots. Modern and advanced sensors are being incorporated into a prototype to allow more detailed investigations, while simultaneously ensuring the data is usable as evidence.
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Stephan Krenn, Thomas Lorünser and Christoph Striecks (AIT)
A large body of research in cryptography was established over recent decades but little of it has been commercialised. This is to the detriment of cloud computing, where the new methods would help to establish end-to-end security, which is not yet common practice.
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by Maria Pateraki and George Papagiannakis (ICS-FORTH)
Methods and technologies for creating photorealistic 3D models have undergone an impressive evolution with a positive impact in the cultural heritage sector. Using widely available standard tools we describe a modelling and simulation pipeline, which generally provides for most visualisation projects with an acceptable trade-off between visual consistency, accuracy and automatism.
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- Category: Research and Innovation
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by Nikoleta Tsabanaki, Theodore Patkos and Dimitris Plexousakis (ICS-FORTH)
Le Sommelier is a recommendation system that helps users choose one or more different bottles of wine that pair nicely with their joined orders. This is a frequent issue met by restaurant customers who have no specialised knowledge on the subject, and requires the satisfaction of a combination of complex rules. Our system represents, to a large extent, the expert’s knowledge of the field in the form of both strict and weak prioritised rules. In addition to the formalisation of general empirical knowledge, an important feature of the system is the utilisation of users’ preferences. Our system’s research contribution is the modelling of a complicated combinatorial problem in an accessible way and the execution of reasoning that can be fine-tuned with user-friendly defined adjustments based on the customers’ or restaurateur’s preferences and needs.