Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications

5GTANGO: 5G Platform for Industry-specific Network Services and Applications

Panagiotis Karkazis — 2020-05-22

5G will not simply be an evolution of mobile broadband networks as its predecessors, but will open the door to unique service capabilities, calling for new business models. In this context, Software Dened Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are technologies that will shape the evolution of the telecom sector with new network capabilities and business opportunities. The ultimate goal is to increase the level of programmability, control and exibility of net- works, while reducing network operation costs and provide platforms for the validation and verication of network services. Towards addressing these challenges, this paper provides insights of the 5GTANGO Manage- ment and Orchestration (MANO) framework, along with insight from its building blocks and project achievements.

A Big Data Software Paradigm for Heterogeneous Cloud Deployments

Christos Kotselidis — 2020-05-22

E2Data is an EU-funded research project aiming to provide a new Big Data software paradigm for achieving maximum resource utilization for heterogeneous cloud deployments without requiring developers to change their code. It essentially addresses the fundamental question of how modern Big Data frameworks can dynamically and transparently exploit heterogeneous hardware accelerators. The E2Data solution takes a cross-layer approach by allowing vertical communication between the four key layers of Big Data deployments: application, Big Data software, scheduler/cloud provider, and execution run time. For this purpose, four dierent use-case scenarios have been selected to prove the applicability of the project's approach: health analytics, natural language processing, green buildings and biometric security. To achieve those goals, Apache Flink and the Tornado VM are used in the project as the building blocks for enabling heterogeneous execution for Big Data frameworks.

Barriers and Incentives for setting-up Industrial Ph.D. in Greece

Nikolaos Krikis — 2020-05-22

Higher education, and its links with research and innovation, plays a crucial role in individual and societal advancement. Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) provides the highly skilled human capital that contemporary Europe needs to create jobs, economic growth and prosperity. However, in meeting the in-creased demand for industrial workers and cross-cutting researchers, higher edu-cation training methodology must be better aligned with the needs of the knowledge-intensive labour market and in particular with the requirements of small and medium-sized enterprises. GIENAHS Alliance intends to contribute to the strengthening of the "knowledge triangle", linking education, research and innovation, improving at the same time, the quality of teaching and learning, the future mobility of students and staff and cross-border cooperation. Based on our experiences from the GIENAHS project we present the current key aspects emerged in Greece that can help Greek SMEs to develop their internal skills to face innovation in a more structured and systematic way and, on other side, the Greek HEIs to understand industrial practice for improving their interaction with SMEs.

Biz4Fun, a Virtual 3D World for teaching Entrepreneurship Skills

Konstantinos Kovas — 2020-05-22

Youth unemployment remains a serious concern in Europe. Poverty rates are higher for young people than for the overall population and involun-tary part-time work or protracted temporary positions expose this generation to a risk of long-term poverty. Even if the number of young people, who want to start their own business, increased, they perceive an actual beginning of their business as unrealistic due to shortage of financial and other sources. So, it is vital to inspire and motivate young people to start their own business, assist them in gaining strong entrepreneurship skills and competences, and ensure that the next generation of professionals have strong knowledge and entrepreneur-ship spirit. Biz4Fun is an Erasmus+ project, that utilizes a 3D Virtual World as the medium to attract and teach young people the necessary skills for establish-ing and running a successful start-up business. A relevant curriculum has been developed, along with learning material and scenarios, implemented in the 3D World based on Gamification approaches.

Developing autonomous cart equipment and associated services for supporting people with moving disabilities in Supermarkets: The EQUAL Approach

Christos Antonopoulos — 2020-05-22

The need for equal treatment of people with disabilities has led to the conception of the noble idea of “Equal” project. During its term, the main objective is to create an autonomous provision whereby disabled people have free and independent access to a supermarket. The combination of many subsystems that are related to various technology sectors, such as electrical, electronic, mechanical and informatics, make the final mechatronic system easy to use, reliable and advanced.

ECOSCALE : A Novel Framework for Utilising Multi-FPGAs in HPC Systems

I Mavroidis — 2020-05-22

ECOSCALE implements a scalable programming environment and architecture, aiming to substantially reduce energy consumption as well as data traffic and latency. ECOSCALE introduces a novel heterogeneous energy-efficient hierarchical architecture, as well as a hybrid programming environ-ment and runtime system. The ECOSCALE approach is hierarchical and it scales well by partitioning the physical system into multiple independent Work-ers (i.e. compute nodes). Workers are interconnected in a tree-like fashion and define a contiguous global address space that can be viewed either as a set of partitions in a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS), To further increase energy efficiency, as well as to provide resilience, the Workers employ recon-figurable accelerators mapped into the virtual address space utilizing a dual stage System Memory Management Unit with coherent memory access. The implemented UNILOGIC architecture supports shared partitioned reconfigura-ble resources accessed by any Worker in a PGAS partition, as well as automat-ed hardware synthesis of these resources from an OpenCL-based programming model.

Enhancing Youth Entrepreneurship Skills and Competences in Agriculture with a Virtual Reality Platform

Foteini Grivokostopoulou — 2020-05-22

Entrepreneurship skills and spirit of youth can result in jobs creation, can produce wealth for society can also produce vital social capital. In our days, with the current high levels of youth unemployment in Europe, entrepreneur-ship is increasingly seen as a vital way for young people to be active in the la-bor market, get income and realize their potential. The Agrient project aims at producing an innovative educational platform and providing a systematic ap-proach to train and support young people to run successfully their own agri-businesses. Several innovative open courses and training procedures will be de-signed to efficiently teach Entrepreneurship, focused on the Agriculture do-main. The educational platform will utilize and use advanced ICT-based educa-tional methods like 3D virtual reality. This will contribute in ICT-based innova-tive teaching and training as well as assessment. Teachers will be offered new and more attractive ways of teaching, through the 3D Virtual reality educational environment that will be developed. Learners will have the opportunity to learn more efficiently and improve their skills on agriculture and entrepreneurship by using advanced ICT technologies (like virtual reality), thus improving the over-all quality of learning.

GAIA: Saving Energy and Teaching Sustainability

Georgios Mylonas — 2020-05-22

A considerable part of recent research in smart cities and IoT has focused on achieving energy savings in buildings and supporting aspects related to sustainability. In this context, the educational community is one of the most important ones to consider, since school buildings constitute a large part of non-residential buildings, while also educat- ing students on sustainability matters is an investment for the future. The Green Awareness In Action (GAIA) project has focused on educating students on energy-related matters and achieving energy savings by using IoT data generated inside school buildings.

Internet of things applications on monitoring hydroponics through wireless sensor networks

Andreas Komninos — 2020-05-22

This paper presents the development of a scalable hydro- ponics monitoring system and data processing through wireless sensor networks. We implement novel hardware and virtual sensors through ab- straction in an IoT management platform. We introduce the concept of collaborative machine learning from multiple sites to improve prediction and discuss related project challenges.

iRead: Infrastructure and Integrated Tools for Personalized Learning of Reading Skill

Dionysis Panagiotopoylos — 2020-05-22

iRead is the acronym for the “Infrastructure and integrated tools for personalized learning of reading skills" European Union Horizon-2020 funded project This report briefly presents the iRead project (consortium composition, aims and objectives, current status and achievements, future work).

Lean Innovative Connected Vessels “LINCOLN” Project

Chrysostomos Stylios — 2020-05-22

LINCOLN is a 36 months innovation action project funded by European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 under Blue Growth programme: “High value-added special-ized vessel concepts enabling more efficient servicing of emerging coastal and offshore activities”. Lincoln objective is to develop three new added value ves-sels with innovative on board equipment, using lean design methodology and IoT solutions, able to be used in diverse maritime coastal activities and sectors in an efficient and sustainable way. Computer and Technology Institute & Press "Dio-phantus" has developed the PortWeather application, an IoT application, gather-ing information and providing useful information on weather monitoring and forecasting for safe sea transportation especially rescue operations.

LOCARD: Lawful evidence cOllecting and Continuity plAtfoRm Development

Pablo López-Aguilar Beltrán — 2020-05-22

Digital evidence is currently an integral part of criminal investiga-tions, and not confined to pure cybercrime cases. Criminal behaviours like fi-nancial frauds, intellectual property theft, industrial espionage, and terrorist networks leverage the Internet and cyberspace. The very ubiquity of digital de-vices in modern society makes digital evidence extremely relevant for investi-gations about all kinds of criminal behaviour like murder, contraband activities, and people smuggling, to name a few. Due to its nature, the use of digital evidence in a court of law has always been challenging. It is critical that it should be accompanied by a proper chain of cus-tody, guaranteeing its source and integrity.
LOCARD aims to provide a holistic platform for chain of custody assurance along the forensic workflow, a trusted distributed platform allowing the storage of digital evidence metadata in a blockchain. Each node of LOCARD will be able to independently set its own permission policies and to selectively share access to digital evidence with other nodes when deemed necessary and upon proper authorization through fine-grained policies. LOCARD's modularity will also allow diverse actors to tailor the platform to their specific needs and role in the digital forensic workflow, from preparation and readiness, to collection, to analysis and reporting.

Proactive Building Energy Management based on Fuzzy Logic and Expert Intelligence

Vassiliki Mpelogianni — 2020-05-22

The main goal of this project is to develop expert intelligence tools to be incorporated in commercial energy management platforms for proactive energy management in buildings to further optimize energy savings. To this end, three (3) fuzzy logic powered tools will be deployed to be incorporated in well-known SaaS platforms used for energy management to further improve decision making related to smart fault detection and diagnostics as well as intelligent predictive maintenance of basic building equipment. The first tool, the so-called expert FDD analyser, will be a core fault detection and diagnostics tool related to common building equipment, such as HVACs, PV plants, pumps, etc., enhancing ongoing monitoring-based performance management of building systems to save energy and extend equipment life. The second tool, the so-called HVAC system optimizer, will be based on a fuzzy inference engine for optimizing HVAC system operation in order to increase comfort, reduce energy costs and shift peak demand. Finally, the third tool, the so-called maintenance expert, will be a cost-effective maintenance tool to predict future maintenance needs on basic building equipment with the view of further optimizing its operation across time.

RoadEye: Road Condition Monitoring using Computer Vision and Deep Learning Techniques

Christos Theoharatos — 2020-05-22

The RoadEye project proposes the development and demonstration of an integrated application (or system) for real-time road condition monitoring, using a camera and an embedded system, which can be integrated in complete ADAS systems that provide a full range of functions. This application will be able to track and detect the condition of the road surface in real-time, within a distance of 5-to-25 meters from the vehicle, based on computer vision and ma-chine/deep learning techniques. The techniques that are being developed within the project will be able to classify the state of the road into some preselected categories such as normal road and slippery road (e.g. wet, snow etc.), and even detect surface anomalies within the road such as potholes and speed bumps / humps.

SafeACL: Ligament reconstruction based on subject-specific musculoskeletal and finite element models

Dimitar Stanev — 2020-05-22

This technical report presents the SafeACL project, which focus on the development of a decision support system based on the integration of musculo-skeletal computer models with imaging (MRI, X-ray, ultrasound) and motion analysis data (kinematics, kinetics) to simulate the surgery and to improve cus-tomization, objectivity, and effectiveness of treatments for ACL reconstruction. The SafeACL system will allow the physician to operate in a virtual environment using an individualized musculoskeletal model that will be able to predict the effect of the surgery. SafeACL is a project co‐financed by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union and Greek national funds through the Operational Program Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, under the call RESEARCH – CREATE – INNOVATE, started in July of 2018 (M1) and has a duration of 36 months. The 1st section of this report provides an over-view of SafeACL, by describing objectives, the work plan and the implementa-tion phases, the expected results and impact of the project. The current status of the project is described in section 2, while conclusions and future work are in-cluded in the last section.

Spectral Evidence of Ice on Aircrafts – The SEI Project

Alessandro Falcone — 2020-05-22

The general objective of the SEI project (reference call: MANUNET III 2018) is to experiment spectral sensor fusion techniques of data acquired by UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) during aircraft preflight inspection. In Gen-eral Aviation, an important safety issue regards the presence of ice on the air-craft's fuselage and wings. Ice on the wings can cause loss of lift and stalling, which in most cases would result, during take-off phase, in airplane’s fatal crash. Another important aspect to consider is the high amount of de-icing liquid usually involved in the process incurring in high costs and considerable damage to the environment. This is not a typical industrial scenario, but the project addresses important aspects related to the manufacturing sector: it has to accomplish spe-cific tasks following a design process; it involves human operators (labour) col-laborating with machines and tools; it includes the usage of semi-raw materials (glycol fluids) to accomplish a service; it sees serialization of the process that could be invoked at any needed time. Moreover, it targets safety issues both for operators and machines regarding reliability of results at the end of the process, it is order-based and comparable to a discrete manufacturing process.

Take-A-Breath: Smart Platform for Self-management and Support of Patients with Chronic Respiratory Diseases

Antonios Lalas — 2020-05-22

This paper presents the Take-A-Breath project, which focus on the development of an advanced system for supporting personalized approaches to self-management of chronic patients with respiratory diseases to significantly increase the effectiveness of the medical care. Take-A-Breath is a project co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union and Greek national funds through the Operational Program Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, under the call RESEARCH – CREATE – INNOVATE. The project has started on July of 2018 (M1) and will have a duration of 36 months. The first section of this report provides an overview of Take-A-Breath, by presenting objectives and innovation aspects as well as by describing the work plan, the implementation phases, the expected results and the impact of the project. The current status of the project is described in section 2, while conclusions and future work are included in the last section.

The Future Time Traveller Project: Career Guidance on Future Skills, Jobs and Career Prospects of Generation Z through a Game-Based Virtual World Environment

Michalis Xenos — 2020-05-22

Future Time Traveller is a European project that aims at transforming career guidance of generation Z through an innovative, games-based scenario approach and to prepare the next generation for the jobs of the future. The pro-ject objective is to foster innovative thinking and future-oriented mindset of young people, through an innovative game-based virtual world environment. This environment helps them explore the future world, understand the trends that shape the future world of work, the emerging jobs, and the skills they will require. The Future Time Traveller project is implemented by a team of experts in 7 European countries (Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and United Kingdom). The project target groups include young people (genera-tion Z), career guidance practitioners and experts, and policymakers. This paper presents, in brief, the Future Time Traveller project and introduces the reader to the main features and functionalities of the 3-dimensional virtual world and the games developed in this environment.

The HealthSign project, current state and future activities

D Kosmopoulos — 2020-05-22

This paper presents the HealthSign project, which deals with the problem of sign language recognition with focus on medical interac- tion scenarios. The deaf user will be able to communicate in his native sign language with a physician. The continuous signs will be translated to text and presented to the physician. Similarly, the speech will be recognized and presented as text to the deaf users. Two alternative versions of the system will be developed, one doing the recognition on a server, and another one doing the recognition on a mobile device.

The SEnDIng project Data Science and Internet of Things professionals’ training

Vasileios Gkamas — 2020-05-22

Data Science (DS) and Internet of Things (IoT) are currently among the key drivers of skills and competences required by the IT market. As a skills’ gap is projected in the DS and IoT domains, substantial effort is required by training providers for the upskilling of IT workforce. The SEnDIng project aims to address the skills’ gap of Data Scientists and IoT engineers by developing and delivering two learning outcomes-oriented, modular VET programmes. Trainings will be delivered into three phases: e-learning, face-to-face and work-based learning. During the self-paced online training, trainees will be upskilled on DS or IoT, face-to-face training will cultivate their transversal skills and work-based learning will allow trainees to apply the acquired skills on realistic case studies in their workplace with mentoring support. Upon successful completion of the training, participants will go through the certification which is designed and developed by SEnDIng and is aligned with the NQFs, EQF and ECVET.

The SOUP project: current state and future activities

Dimitris Kosmopoulos — 2020-05-22

Greenhouse cultivation represents one of the most significant production sectors of Greece, however it remains a labour-intensive activity and requires large amounts of pesticides. The SOUP project (SOilless culture UPgrade) aims to automate the monitoring of plant growth through sensor networks, and to introduce robotic technology for the labour-intensive tasks such as pest management and harvesting. The project investigates the cultivation of tomatoes, which is of high financial importance for Greece due to its size.

Training Universities in Palestine about Virtual 3D Worlds

Konstantinos Kovas — 2020-05-22

This paper presents TESLA, a Capacity Building, Erasmus+ project that aims to involve Palestinian Universities in the technologies and the re-search movement of Virtual Reality and Virtual Worlds. We present a first in-sight about the activities of the project and describe the initial surveys conduct-ed and the content of the training workshops organized and carried out during the first year of the project. Instructional and technical Terms of References were created, and the partners designed a series of courses in a 3D Virtual World. The Virtual Reality courses have been implemented and the Palestinian Universities are currently conducting Piloting activities.