ERCIM News 123
October 2020
Special theme Blue Growth
Guest editors Alberto Gotta (ISTI-CNR) and John Mardikis (EPLO - Circular Clima Institute)
Blue Growth - Introduction to the Special Theme
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by the guest editors Alberto Gotta (ISTI-CNR) and John Mardikis (EPLO - Circular Clima Institute)
Ocean-based industrial development and growth are important to the economic and social development of many countries, and both the EU and the US agree on the urgency of implementing an integrated maritime strategy with the aim of coordinating policies for the different sectors of the sea. The growth of the maritime economy (blue growth) is an opportunity that Europe cannot wait to seize [1] to create new job opportunities, support systemic competitiveness, and strengthen social cohesion. This approach is also fully aligned with the objectives of the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, in particular, Objective 14 (SDG 14): “Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development”. International strategic documents [1] define the areas of blue growth as: coastal and maritime tourism, blue energy (renewable energy from offshore wind farms, onshore/offshore wave energy, salinity gradient, marine current, ocean thermal energy, biomass), marine environment and coastal strip preservation, abiotic and biotic marine resources, fisheries and blue biotechnologies, shipbuilding and marine robotics, smart ports, sustainable maritime transportation, maritime surveillance and safety, sustainability and economic uses of the sea.
An Open Innovation Model: Six Projects in the Maritime Field
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by Emilio Fortunato Campana (DIITET-CNR) and Erina Ferro (ISTI-CNR)
One of the largest shipbuilders in the world, Fincantieri (FC), together with Italy’s largest research institution, the National Research Council (CNR), successfully applied an open innovation model (OIM) to six projects in the maritime sector. The external knowledge of the CNR provided fuel to Fincantieri‘s business model, enabling research and development to be converted into commercial value.
Understanding and Managing Ocean Sustainability: The Blue-Cloud Project
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by Leonardo Candela and Pasquale Pagano (ISTI-CNR)
The Blue-Cloud flagship project of the Directorate-General (DG) for Research and Innovation Unit of the European Commission is establishing a thematic marine cloud serving the blue economy, marine environment and marine knowledge agendas and the European Open Science Cloud. The project links the horizontal e-infrastructures supported by DG CONNECT and DG GROW, long-term marine data initiatives supported by DG MARE, research infrastructures supported by DG for Research and Innovation and other recently funded thematic clouds.
Reinforcing Fisheries Management through Semantic Data Integration
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by Yannis Tzitzikas and Yannis Marketakis (FORTH-ICS)
The European project BlueCloud is developing pilot demonstrator applications with the goal of establishing a marine-themed European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) for the blue economy and marine environment. “Fish, a matter of scales” is one of these demonstrators that aims to improve data management and analytical capabilities of fisheries.
A New Data Infrastructure to Pilot Ocean Data Solutions
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by Linwood Pendleton (Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution - Ocean)
The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution – Ocean, an affiliate of the World Economic Forum, is partnering with the Ocean Data Platform to pilot Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) solutions to ocean problems. The Ocean Data Platform (ODP) is a new data infrastructure to pilot and scale data-oriented solutions to help chart a sustainable blue economy.
The World Coral Conservatory: Offering New Hope for Corals
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by Víctor Planas-Bielsa (Centre Scientifique de Monaco and Université Côte d’Azur), Rachid Benchaouir (Coraliotech, Monaco), Denis Allemand (Centre Scientifique de Monaco and Université Côte d’Azur) and Didier Zoccola (Centre Scientifique de Monaco and Université Côte d’Azur)
Climate change affects coral reefs worldwide. To counter the anticipated disappearance of coral reefs by 2100, the World Coral Conservatory was created as a “Noah's Ark” for corals. In addition to providing a living coral repository to protect and restore degraded reefs, the project will offer a global big data structure to supply resources for fundamental research into corals and to assist biotechnology companies in developing promising molecules for human health applications.
The Internet of Ships
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by Michele Martelli (Università degli Studi di Genova), Pietro Cassarà (ISTI-CNR), Antonio Virdis and Nicola Tonellotto (UNIPI)
A distributed computing platform can provide automatic control for maritime services, with likely economic and social benefits. In this context, the nodes involved in the computing tasks are autonomous complex cyber-physical systems, i.e., ships. The platform allows node computing cooperation through a high-level abstraction of the underlying sensor system. The computing tasks are related to the predictive analysis, employing artificial intelligence (AI) techniques based on the federated-learning paradigm.
Intelligent Journey Planning with Multi-hop Scheduling Optimisation for the Yachting Sector
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by Andreas Komninos (Computer Technology Institute & Press “Diophantos”), Charalampos Kostopoulos (OptionsNet IT Services & Consulting) and John Garofalakis (Computer Technology Institute & Press “Diophantos”)
Yachting tourism has the potential to drive strong blue growth in hosting countries due to its multiplicative effects in other related service and goods economy sectors. The project “Intelligent ICT Applications for the Management of Marinas and Yachts” is using intelligent approaches to address the unique challenge of providing journey-planning tools to yachters.
A Geolocation and Smart Alert System for Nearby First Responders on Roll-on/Roll-off Vessels
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by Paschalis Mpeis (University of Cyprus), Jaime Bleye Vicario (Centro Jovellanos, Spain), and Demetrios Zeinalipour-Yazti (University of Cyprus)
A4IoT is an innovative localisation architecture that supports a smart alert system to provide monitoring, navigation and guidance to first responders during fire outbreaks on roll-on/roll-off (Ro/Ro) vessels.
Understanding Complex Attacks on a Maritime Port
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by Sandra König (AIT Austrian Institute of Technology)
Attacks on maritime ports have become more sophisticated since modern ports turned into cyber-physical systems. Simulation models can help with the vital task of detecting such attacks and understanding their impacts.
A New Approach to Underwater Technologies for Innovative, Low-cost Ocean Observation: NAUTILOS
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by Gabriele Pieri (ISTI-CNR)
The NAUTILOS project aims to fill some of the existing gaps in marine observation and modelling by improving the measurement of chemical, biological and deep ocean physics variables. A new generation of cost-effective sensors and samplers is being developed, integrated into observation platforms and deployed in large-scale demonstrations off the coastline of Europe. These will complement and expand existing observation tools and services, allowing researchers to obtain data at a much higher spatial resolution, temporal regularity and length than is currently available at a European scale. It will also facilitate and democratise the monitoring of the marine environment for both traditional and non-traditional data users.
Computational Approaches for Uncertainty Quantification of Naval Engineering Problems
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by Riccardo Broglia, Matteo Diez (CNR-INM) and Lorenzo Tamellini (CNR-IMATI)
The design of efficient seagoing vessels is key to a sustainable blue growth. Computer simulations are routinely used to explore different designs, but a reliable analysis must take into account the unavoidable uncertainties that are intrinsic to the maritime environment. We investigated two ways of performing this analysis in an effective, CPU-time parsimonious way.
Sea Monitoring Made Simple and Efficient
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by Serena Berretta (University of Genova), Daniela Cabiddu (CNR-Imati), Michela Mortara (CNR-Imati) and Michela Spagnuolo (CNR-Imati)
Remote sensing provides almost global spatial coverage, but with limits in resolution and accuracy. Ground stations, conversely, provide very accurate coverage with high temporal resolution, but sparse and pointwise. What’s missing from this picture is accurate local knowledge with a high spatial resolution, making it possible to understand and analyse local phenomena to their full spatial extent. To fill the gap, we propose a paradigm shift in field sampling; environmental surveys that are dramatically cheaper, quicker and easier to perform, and the ability to perform visualisation and analysis tasks as the survey progresses. This is made possible by a real-time adaptive sampling method, embedded within a mobile observation platform. The method continuously guides and refines samples acquisition while in the field, elaborating the variable distribution and its related uncertainty along with the sampling process.
Offshore Oil & Gas Blow-out Containment
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by Fivos Andritsos
The demand for hydrocarbons and other mineral resources worldwide is increasingly met by tapping the vast seabed resources in ever more difficult and risky environments, like the abyssal oceanic depths or the arctic regions. The development of suitable means for safe underwater operations is a fundamental requisite for their sustainable exploitation, in particular on the delicate polar environments or the environmentally and socially stressed east Mediterranean region.
ERCIM Workshop on Quality in AI
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by Björn Levin (RISE) and Peter Kunz (ERCIM Office)
ERCIM invited experts in the field of artificial intelligence to a workshop held on 26 May 2020, with the aim of collecting ideas and suggestions about approaches to ensure high quality artificial intelligence (AI) in practical applications.
25th International Conference on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems
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by Maurice ter Beek
The yearly conference of the ERCIM Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems, FMICS, reached its 25th edition this year. A panel “Genesis, Success Stories, and the Next 25 Years” was organized to celebrate this remarkable milestone. The conference took place virtually on 2-3 September, hosted by TU Wien.
Evaluation of Synthetic Data for Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning
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by Markus Hittmeir, Andreas Ekelhart and Rudolf Mayer (SBA Research)
The generation of synthetic data is widely considered to be an effective way of ensuring privacy and reducing the risk of disclosing sensitive information in micro-data. We analysed these risks and the utility of synthetic data for machine learning tasks. Our results demonstrate the suitability of this approach for privacy-preserving data publishing.
Dronesurance: Using AI Models to Predict Drone Damage for Insurance Policies
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by Andrea Fontanari and Kees Oosterlee (CWI)
The increasing use of drones is likely to result in growing demand for insurance policies to hedge against damage to the drones themselves or to third parties. The current lack of accident data, however, makes it difficult for insurance companies to develop models. We provide a simple yet flexible model using an archetype of Bayesian neural networks, known as Bayesian generalised linear models, to predict the risk of drone accidents and the claim size.
DECEPT: Detecting Cyber-Physical Attacks using Machine Learning on Log Data
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by Florian Skopik, Markus Wurzenberger, and Max Landauer (AIT Austrian Institute of Technology)
Most current security solutions are tailored to protect against a narrow set of security threats and can only be applied to a specific application domain. However, even very different domains share commonalities, indicating that a generally applicable solution, to achieve advanced protection, should be possible. In fact, enterprise IT, facility management, smart manufacturing, energy grids, industrial IoT, fintech, and other domains, operate interconnected systems, which follow predefined processes and are employed according to specific usage policies. The events generated by the systems governed by these processes are usually recorded for maintenance, accountability, or auditing purposes. Such records contain valuable information that can be leveraged to detect any inconsistencies or deviations in the processes, and indicate anomalies potentially caused by attacks, misconfigurations or component failures. However, syntax, semantics, frequency, information entropy and level of detail of these data records vary dramatically and there is no uniform solution yet that understands all the different dialects and is able to perform reliable anomaly detection on top of these data records.
Photographic Heritage Restoration Through Deep Neural Networks
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by Michaël Tits, Mohamed Boukhebouze and Christophe Ponsard (CETIC)
Recent advances in deep neural networks have enabled great improvements in image restoration, a long-standing problem in image processing. Our research centre has experimented with cutting edge algorithms to address denoising, moire removal, colourisation and super resolution, to restore key images representing the photographic heritage of some of Belgium’s top athletes.
Penetration Testing Artificial Intelligence
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by Simon Tjoa (St. Pölten UAS, Austria), Christina Buttinger (Austrian Armed Forces), Katharina Holzinger (Austrian Armed Forces) and Peter Kieseberg (St. Pölten UAS, Austria)
Securing complex systems is an important challenge, especially in critical systems. Artificial intelligence (AI), which is increasingly used in critical domains such as medical diagnosis, requires special treatment owing to the difficulties associated with explaining AI decisions. Currently, to perform an intensive security evaluation of systems that rely on AI, testers need to resort to black-box (penetration) testing.
Future Cyber-security Demands in Modern Agriculture
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by Erwin Kristen, Reinhard Kloibhofer (AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna) and Vicente Hernández Díaz (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
The European agricultural sector is transforming from traditional, human labour-intensive work to data-oriented digital agriculture that has great potential for semi- or fully autonomous operation. This digital transformation offers many advantages, such as more precise fact-based decision making, optimised use of resources and big changes in organisation – but it also requires improved cyber-security and privacy data protection.
FLEXPROD - Flexible Optimizations of Production with Secure Auctions
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by Thomas Lorünser (AIT), Niki Dürk (X-Net), Stephan Puxkandl (Ebner)
The FlexProd research project aims to develop a platform to improve the efficiency and speed of cross-company order allocation and processing in the manufacturing industry. The platform will help make production more flexible, facilitating cooperation between manufacturers and customers to enable a more agile and efficient manufacturing industry.
HEALPS 2: Tourism Based on Natural Health Resources for the Development of Alpine Regions
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by Daniele Spoladore, Elena Pessot and Marco Sacco (STIIMA-CNR)
The HEALPS 2 project is using digital solutions and stakeholder engagement to unlock the potential of health tourism in the alpine regions.
Ton de Kok Appointed New Director of CWI
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Announcement
Prof. Ton de Kok has been appointed as director of CWI, by the board of CWI’s mother organization NWO-I, the institutes organization of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. On 1 October 2020, De Kok succeeds current director Prof. Jos Baeten, who has led the institute since 2011 and who will retire.
TRAPEZE - Transparency, Privacy and Security for European Citizens
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ERCIM is participating in the EU-funded Innovation Action “TRAPEZE” . The ambitious goal of the project is to drive a cultural shift in the protection of the European data economy by weaving trust into its very foundation and reconstructing the concepts of control, transparency, and compliance through technical and methodological, citizen-first, innovations.