by Tanja E. J. Vos

The Future Internet will be a complex interconnection of services, applications, content and media, on which our society will become increasingly dependent for critical activities such as social services, learning, finance, business, as well as entertainment. This presents challenging problems during testing; challenges that simply cannot be avoided since testing is a vital part of the quality assurance process. The European funded project FITTEST (Future Internet Testing) aims to attack the problems of testing the Future Internet with Evolutionary Search Based Testing.

by Jan Kalina

Gene expression data are typically analysed by standard automated procedures that tend to be vulnerable to outlying values. In a project carried out by the Centre of Biomedical Informatics of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, we use alternative approaches, based on robust statistical methods, to measure differential gene expression in cardiovascular patients. Our results are applicable to personalized medicine.

by Christophe De Vleeschouwer

Video production cost reduction is an ongoing challenge. The FP7 ‘APIDIS’ project (Autonomous Production of Images based on Distributed and Intelligent Sensing) uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to propose a solution to this problem. Distributed analysis and interpretation of a sporting event are used to determine what to show or not to show from a multi-camera stream. This process involves automatic scene analysis, camera viewpoint selection, and generation of summaries through automatic organization of stories. APIDIS provides practical solutions to a wide range of applications, such as personalized access to local sport events on the web or automatic log in of annotations.

by Angelos Bilas

Data storage technology today faces many challenges, including performance inefficiencies, inadequate dependability and integrity guarantees, limited scalability, loss of confidentiality, poor resource sharing, and increased ownership and management costs. Given the importance of both direct-attached and networked storage systems for modern applications, it becomes imperative to address these issues. Multicore CPUs offer the promise of dealing with many of the underlying limitations of today’s I/O architectures. However, this requires careful consideration of architectural and systems issues and complex interactions in the I/O stack, all the way from the application to the disk. “IOLanes” (Advancing the Scalability and Performance of I/O Subsystems in Multicore Platforms) is new a EC-funded project led by FORTH-ICS that addresses these issues.

by Thanh Thoa Pham Thi, Juan Yao, Fakir Hossain
and Markus Helfert

High quality data helps the data owner to save costs, to make better decisions and to improve customer service and thus, information quality impacts directly on businesses. Many tools for data parsing and standardization, data cleansing, or data auditing have been developed and commercialized. However identifying and eliminating root causes of poor IQ along the information life cycle and within information systems is still challenging. Addressing this problem we developed an innovative approach and tool which helps identifying root causes of poor information quality.

by Carl Binding, Olle Sundström,Dieter Gantenbein and Bernhard Jansen

The sudden peak of oil prices in 2008 together with the depletion of oil reserves, and the ecological impact of today’s combustion engines have sparked renewed interest in fully electrical vehicles (EV) and plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEV). Based on typical driving patterns, it is believed that EVs could substantially alter the energy mix used for individual transportation, current limitations of battery technology not withstanding. In addition, in electrical power grids with a high percentage of fluctuating, renewable, energy sources (wind, solar) a larger fleet of EVs can absorb peaks of power production, and attenuate power troughs by acting as a distributed energy resource (DER), feeding power from its accumulator into the grid. In the context of the Danish EDISON project, we are investigating the potential impact of an EV fleet on electrical distribution grids and how to optimally integrate these resources into the power grid.

by Peter Dolog

Graph transformation approach for consolidation of creativity sessions results is part of the FP7 EU/IST project idSpace: Tooling of and training for collaborative, distributed product innovation. The goal of graph transformation approach is to provide a tool for merging results of various sessions (such as brainstorming sessions), which are represented as graphs, when the session participants- are physically distributed.

by Andrea Esuli, Diego Marcheggiani and Fabrizio Sebastiani

Researchers from ISTI-CNR, Pisa, aim to effectively and efficiently extract information from free-text mammography reports, as a step towards the automatic transformation of unstructured medical documentation into structured data.

by Gabriele Costa, Francesco la Torre, Fabio Martinelli and Paolo Mori

As a result of the rapid increase in mobile device capabilities, we believe that many users will soon migrate most of their tasks from the computer to the smart phone. We thus feel that new, more effective security mechanisms are needed to protect users, especially minors. For this reason, we are currently engineering a software suite designed to monitor all security-relevant activities and, where necessary, block unsuitable material.

by Stina Nylander

Having children in preschool can be a logistic challenge. Parents need to keep track of dates for events, what to bring, changes in the opening hours of the preschool, and many other things. PreschoolOnline is an attempt to support the information exchange between parents and preschool teachers and provide an opportunity to study how ICT can be used in preschool.