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Past Projects

InGeoClouds project (CIP-ICT-PSP-2011-5) Contract No 297300. The INspired GEOdata CLOUD Services (INGEOCLOUDS) (2012-2014) project aims at demonstrating the feasibility of employing a cloud-based infrastructure coupled with the necessary services to provide seamless access to geospatial public sector information, especially targeting the geological, geophysical and other geoscientific information. This kind of information possesses interesting characteristics like the size of the available data, the existing metadata descriptions (mostly according to the European Directive INSPIRE) and the current availability of related services that can be moved to the cloud. The service-based infrastructure created by the project will survive the pilot and demonstration phases since the partners plan to integrate it in their infrastructure and various charge-on-demand financial models can be employed to support it.

E-CLOUD Project. (CIP-ICT-PSP-2012-6). Contract No 325091. Europeana Cloud: Unlocking Europe’s Research via The Cloud. (2012-2015). Europeana Cloud is a Best Practice Network, submitted under Objective 2.1.a and coordinated by the Europeana Foundation, designed to establish a cloud-based system for Europeana and its aggregators. Europeana Cloud will provide new content, new metadata, a new linked storage system, new tools and services for researchers and a new platform – Europeana Research. Content providers and aggregators, across the European information landscape, urgently need a cheaper, more sustainable infrastructure that is capable of storing both metadata and content. Researchers require a digital space where they can undertake innovative exploration and analysis of Europe’s digitised content. Europeana needs to get closer to the target of 30 million items by 2015. Europeana Cloud meets these needs.

MIDAS. FP7-STREP. Contract 318786. The subject of MIDAS (Model and Inference Driven, Automated testing of Services architectures) is an integrated framework for SOA testing automation that will be available as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) on a cloud infrastructure (2012-2015). The framework spans all the testing activities: test generation, execution, evaluation, planning and scheduling, on the functional, interaction, fault tolerance, security and usage-based testing aspects. The focus is on SOA testing, i.e. on black box testing of single services and on grey-box testing of services architectures. The test execution environment will be based on a distributed TTCN-3 runtime environment. The testing methods and technologies that are investigated and prototyped in the project are beyond the state of the art, particularly on model-based testing, model checking of choreographies for sound interaction test scenarios, fuzzing for security testing, usage-based testing, probabilistic inference reasoning about test evaluation, planning and scheduling. An important project objective is the pilot application of the MIDAS framework to two real-world services architectures, in the domains of healthcare and supply chain management.

SEEK is a Marie Curie Project (project N. 295179) funded by EU in the PEOPLE program as an IRSES 2011 scheme. The project activity starts on March, 1 2012 and lasts 36 months. This project funds the exchange of research personnel between participant organizations from EU to international partners and vice-versa for a total funded budget of 352.800 euro. The consortium includes 8 partners from Europe, Brazil and Canada. The goal of the project is to investigate methods to extract meaningful knowledge from large amount of movement data by defining techniques for an advanced semantic-rich knowledge discovery process.

Contrail project (Collaborative project): Open Computing Inftrastructures for Elastic Services (2010-2013). Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7)Contract No 257438. The goal of the Contrail project is to design, implement, evaluate and promote an open source system in which resources that belong to different operators are integrated into a single homogeneous Federated Cloud that users can access seamlessly. Contrail will vertically integrate an open-source distributed operating system for autonomous resource management in Infrastructure-as-a-Service environments, and high level services and runtime environments as foundations for Platform-as-a-Service.

The Network of Excellence (Noe project) on Engineering Secure Future Internet Software Services and Systems (NESSoS) aims at constituting and integrating a long lasting research community on engineering secure software-based services and systems (2010-2013)Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7)Contract  No 256980. The NESSoS engineering of secure software services is based on the principle of addressing security concerns from the very beginning in system analysis and design, thus contributing to reduce the amount of system and service vulnerabilities and enabling the systematic treatment of security needs through the engineering process. In light of the unique security requirements the Future Internet will expose, new results will be achieved by means of an integrated research, as to improve the necessary assurance level and to address risk and cost during the software development cycle in order to prioritize and manage investments. NESSoS will integrate the research labs involved; NESSoS will re-address, integrate, harmonize and foster the research activities in the necessary areas, and will increase and spread the research excellence.

Sapir project (STREP): Search on Audio-visual content using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval (2007-2009). Sixth Research Framework Programme      (FP6). Contract No 45128. Funded by the Commission of European Communities Information Society and Media Directorate-General, the project aims at breaking this    technological barrier by developing a large-scale, distributed P2P architecture that will make it possible to search audio-visual content using the query-by-example    paradigm.

GridComp project (STREP): GRID programming with COMPonents: an advanced component platform for an effective invisible grid (2006-2009). Sixth Research Framework Programme (FP6). Contract No 034442 Funded by the Commission of European Communities Information Society and Media Directorate-General, the project main goal is the design and implementation of a component based framework suitable to support the development of efficient grid applications. The framework will implement a kind of “invisible grid” concept as it will properly abstract all those specific grid related implementation details that usually require high programming efforts to be dealt with.

Challengers project (SSA). Sixth Research Framework Programme (FP6) Contract No. 034128. Funded by the Commission of European Communities Information Society and Media Directorate-General, the project aims at providing the organizational and administrative framework that will support the gathering and consultation work of a group of experts from the research and business community with well established experience and deep knowledge in the area of Grid technologies.

CoreGRID project (NOE): European Research Network on Foundations, SoftwareInfrastructures and Applications for large scale distributed, GRID and Peer-to-Peer Technologies (2004-2008). Sixth Research framework Programme (FP6). Contract No. 004265. Funded by the Commission of European Communities Information Society and Media Directorate-General, the project aims at strengthening and advancing scientific and technological excellence in the area of Grid and Peer-to-Peer technologies. To achieve this objective, the Network brings together a critical mass of well-established researchers (119 permanent researchers and 165 PhD students) from forty-two institutions who have constructed an ambitious joint programme of activities. This joint programme of activity is structured around six complementary research areas that have been selected on the basis of their strategic importance, their research challenges and the recognised European expertise to develop next generation Grid middleware, namely: knowledge & data management; programming models; system architecture; Grid information and monitoring services; resource management and scheduling; problem solving environments; tools and GRID systems.

NextGrid project (IP): The Next Generation Grid (2004-2008). Sixth Research Framework Programme (FP6). Contract No. 511563. Funded by the Commission of European Communities Information Society and Media Directorate-General, the project addresses the Grid Based Systems for Complex Problem Solving activity within the IST Work programme. It specifically focuses on the second strategic objective of this activity and is designed to overcome present architectural and design limitations hampering the use and wider deployment of computing and knowledge Grids and to enrich its capabilities by including new functionalities required for complex problem solving.

Grid@Asia project (CA): Advanced Grid Research Workshops through European and Asian Co-operation (2005-2007)Sixth Research Framework Programme (FP6). Contract No 015994.The Grid@Asia project is designed to foster collaboration in Grid research and technologies between the European Union and Asian countries with a particular focus on China and South Korea, with the goal of will position the European Grid community as a leading centre of excellence, enrich European expertise in the field and support the adoption of common Grid standards worldwide

CODES project (CRAFT): Computing on Demand for Electromagnetic Software and applications (2005-2007). Codes is a co-operative research project (CRAFT) under the European Commission Sixth Research Framework Programme (FP6). Contract N° 018122. It is a research project having the objective to create a new software platform product able to boost the quality and performance of the existing electromagnetic design tools. Electromagnetic software plays a key role in the design and manufacturing of innovative electronic sub-systems (wireless components, micro sensors, smart antennas, high-frequency active and passive devices, MEMS) and in the next future the marketing success of the products of the organizations involved in the electromagnetic area will be strongly dependent from the computational speed of their software. Higher and higher performances will be, in fact, required to face increasing sub-system complexity and reduce design time. In the past, parallel mainframes were used to improve performance, but the high costs due to new hardware and software modifications limited its usage to very narrow applications. Today, GRID computational technology offers a robust and seamless environment to achieve high speed performance and, in this frame, the CODES project will provider a GRID solution, able to exploit at best the latest Information Technology developments applied to the electromagnetic design.

EchoGRID project (SSA). (2007-2008) Contract No.  045520Sixth Research Framework Programme (FP6) The project aims to foster collaboration with China in Grid research and technologies. In particular aims to establish a common research agenda, to exchange experiences and best practices by selecting Grid Open Standards for Grid middleware and applications interoperability, and to establish tangible partnerships in the field through support activities and tools, ranging from a mobility programme for researchers, to a dedicated partner search engine.

Escogitare project: Un’infrastruttura di E-SCience per gli Istituti di Ricerca del settOre aGro-alImenTARE (2004-2008). Funded by Italian Ministry of Agricultural and Forestry Policy (MIPAF). Aim of the “ESCOGITARE” Project is to provide a Grid-based infrastructure to the Italian Agricultural Research Council (CRA) Institutes in order to enable them to find and share their know-how, data and computational power in a collaborative work context. This target will be reached in this project by using both Grid and advanced videoconference technologies. In particular, the “ESCOGITARE” project which should provide an e-Science based, virtual laboratory structure for plant and animal genomics to help in the understanding of important traits such as yield, stress resistance and quality.

CNR RSTL Project: Resource Discovery in Large Collaborative Networks (2008-2009). Funded by the CNR. It regards the study of large distributed collaborative environments in highly dynamic contexts, and studies how emerging P2P models and protocols can be used and extended to support the realization of novel discovery tools, with different mechanisms for different levels of dynamicity. The main collaborative environment investigated is the Grid environment, where efficient discovery tools for dynamic and heterogeneous resources are needed to develop higher-level services aimed to find computational and network resources able to execute user applications.

Insyeme (FIRB/PNR) The project is aimed at investigating and experimenting novel tools and methodologies for the realization of systems for the prevention and management of emergencies in case of natural disasters, by exploiting a Mobile Grid Computing paradigm.

S-Cube project (NOE): Software Services and Systems Network (2008-2012). Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7)Contract No 215483.

Funded by the Commission of European Communities Information Society and Media Directorate-General, the project mission is to establish a unified, multidisciplinary, vibrant research community which will enable Europe to lead the software-services revolution and help shape the software service based Internet which will underpin the whole of our future society. S-Cube aims to push the frontiers of research in Service Oriented Computing by creating a vigorous research agenda where knowledge from diverse research communities is meaningfully synthesized, integrated and applied. Starting on March, 1 2008.

VISITO Tuscany – VIsual Support to Interactive TOurism in Tuscany (2010-2012). (POR FESR 2007-2013 project). Contract No 63748.

The project aims to create an infrastructure providing a user-centric fruition of the artistic and cultural heritage present in the art cities of Tuscany. The system that has to be realized will be able to manage in an integrated manner both historical-artistic information and other visitors’ interest requests. In particular, the project aims to develop advanced technologies to manage photographic materials which deal with the cultural heritage present in the Tuscan cities of art in order to realize a personalized electronic guide designed to provide better use and access to our artistic heritage. The goal is to offer novel immersive touristic services through both the new generation of mobile  devices and the Internet. Pilot tests are planned to be conducted in the cities of Florence, Pisa and San Gimignano  in order to test the developed system.

ASSETS  project (CIP PSP-BPN) Advanced Search Service and Enhanced Technological Solutions for the Europeana Digital Library (2010-2012)Contract No 250527.

ASSETS aims to improve the usability of the Europeana Digital Library platform by designing, implementing and deploying large-scale, scalable services for search and browsing. These services include: efficient storing and indexing, searching based on metadata and on content similarity; advanced ranking algorithms; browsing through semantic cross-links; semi-automatic ingestion of metadata requiring normalization, cleaning, knowledge extraction and mapping to a common structure.