RESEARCH AGENCIES

The Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia): http://www.fct.mctes.pt/

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ORGANISATIONS

Instituto de Telecomunicações
The Instituto de Telecomunicações has a set of activities associated with Future Internet, specially in its Aveiro site (www.av.it.pt). The Instituto benefits from its dual linkage with industry and academia to drive several projects on Future Internet, being active in many of the most well-known european research projects.

Universidade de Aveiro
The Aveiro University (www.ua.pt) is a multidisciplinary university, being quite active in many applications areas. The University hosts green campus and smart house initiatives, bringing together multiple technical disciplines (Environment, chemistry, material sciences) with Future Internet approaches to provide added value to society.

Portugal Telecom Inovação

Universities: Madeira, Porto (Engineering & Psychology)

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PROJECTS & INITIATIVES

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Cloud Counselling for Youths

Taking advantage of Portugal’s mobile phone penetration rate of 117% this project provides a service of cloud counseling support to young members of communities facing social issues via sms communication. This initiative relies on a network of qualified volunteers that log in to a robust Web-based interface in order to manage conversations. The information collected from each interaction is automatically forwarded on a daily basis to the appropriate social institutions according to the type and urgency level assigned to each interaction. The use of mobile technology for these situations presents an innovative platform with which youths are deeply comfortable with, and compared to traditional help lines this system offers a higher level of anonymity and discretion, which are crucial requirements to be met when dealing with youths in socially susceptible situations.

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Panorama Networks

The proliferation of the Internet and wireless access technologies introduced the constant mobile paradigm, where users want to be always connected making use of the best available networks and technologies. In order to provide seamless connectivity among the new wireless access technologies, such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX and 3GPP (UMTS, HSPA and/or LTE), the IEEE 802.21 standard has defined the media independent handover framework. However, although there is a recognized importance of the IEEE 802.21 framework in the vertical handover optimization procedures, it is still necessary to improve this framework to the radio access technologies individual features. The networking part of this project aims to integrate the process of the IEEE 802.21 framework with the aforementioned wireless access technologies, enabling the complete support of all the envisioned IEEE 802.21 handover phases in the support of handovers with Quality of Service between all technologies: Ethernet, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, 3G, LTE.

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APOLLO

Field: Internet-of-Things – in cooperation with “Portugal Telecom Inovação”
The main objective of the project is the development of a platform to support new services in the area of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. It is the purpose of the project to develop a transversal technological platform that support management, control and monitoring of an heterogeneous network of sensors and actuators. And that exports a service layer to third parties willing to develop next generation M2M applications in various areas including Utilities, Transports, Health, Agriculture, Distribution and Consumer Electronics.
The project platform will support from it’s start a vast set of M2M Smart Services & Applications such as Smart Metering, Smart Grids, m-Health (remote monitoring of patients), Smart Cities, Smart Home and Smart Buildings according to a Portuguese Government set policy for the deployment of next generation networks.
The Project has the duration of 24 months
The project includes several activities associated with the definition of the technical architecture, specification and development of: (i) modules and software components for the platform; (ii) interfacing the platform with systems and devices from the M2M ecosystem, (iii) applications supported on open API’s provided by the platform. Within the scope of this project, is also the specification and development of creation tool for M2M services that allows end-users to design, parameterize and build, in a dynamic way and from elementary building blocks, the Smart Services supported by the platform. Another objective of the project consists of implementing specific components for M2M Smart Services in two distinct activity areas or sectors, in order to demonstrate the solution at the prototype phase.
http://atnog.av.it.pt/projects/apollo

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AMazING

Field: experimental infrastructure
The AMazING (Advanced Mobile wIreless Network playGround) consists of a free access wireless tested, composed by 24 fixed nodes located at IT Aveiro rooftop. At the core of the testbed, there are the support servers and redundant storage. OMF and OML are used as the basis for management and experiment execution. As an outcome, the project aims at providing a free and easily usable testbed for wireless experimentation, and to improve existing experimentation tools

http://atnog.av.it.pt/projects/amazing and http://amazing.atnog.av.it.pt/

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S(o)OS

Service-oriented Operating Systems
Field: Distributed systems
Processor and network architectures are making rapid progress with more and more cores being integrated into single processors and more and more machines getting connected with increasing bandwidth. Processors become heterogeneous and reconfigurable, thus allowing for dynamic adaptation to specialised needs. In future, thousands of billions of devices may be connected to form a single computing unit.
No current programming model is able to cope with this development, as they are too tightly coupled with the underlying device structure. Furthermore, complex, non-aligned middlewares and operating systems render the programming model unnecessarily inefficient. In order to realise efficient programmability of terascale devices by experts and average developers equally, a complete new approach to handling these types of devices across all layers is required:
Service-oriented Operating Systems (S(o)OS) address the needs of future distributed systems by drawing from service-oriented architectures (SOA) and the strengths of Grids. S(o) operating systems are modular and minimal, optimised to fit into the cache of distributed compute units and enable process-centric management of resources and distributed execution, thus maximising the resource usage whilst minimising overhead.

http://atnog.av.it.pt/projects/soos and http://www.soos-project.eu/

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PROBE-IT

PROBE-IT aims at supporting exploitation of European research advances in IoT deployments. It is indeed needed to ensure interoperability and acceptance of validated IoT solutions in a global context to avoid unnecessary competitions and overlaps. For that, PROBE-IT focuses on analyzing existing and ongoing worldwide deployments in different perspectives filling the needs of policy makers, deployments drivers, technology providers and users.

Portuguese partner: UNINOVA – The UNINOVA Institute is a multidisciplinary, independent, and non-profit research institute employing around 180 persons (mainly researchers), located in the metropolitan area of Lisbon. The aim of UNINOVA is to pursue excellence in scientific research, technical development and advanced training & education. The UNINOVA research team taking part of this project has participated in relevant national and European projects in the IoT research domain, and it has also taken part in coordination activities and initiatives worldwide.
http://www.probe-it.eu/

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MASSIF

On the base of proper multi-level event correlation MASSIF will provide innovation techniques in order to enable the detection of upcoming security threats and trigger remediation actions even before the occurrence of possible security incidences. Thus, MASSIF will develop a new generation SIEM framework for service infrastructures supporting intelligent, scalable, and multi-level/multi-domain security event processing and predictive security monitoring. Such service-level SIEM involves the modelling and formal validation of security, including trusted computing concepts, architecture for dependable and resilient collection of service events, supported by an extremely scalable and high performance event collection and processing framework, in the context of service-level attack models.

Portuguese partner: Fundação da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa (FFCUL) – FFCUL is a private non-profit organization, created in 1993, as an initiative of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisboa (FCUL), in order to manage its R&D projects, with FCUL acting as a third party based on a scientific agreement in force. FFCUL is the front institution for a scientific collaboration of multiple research groups, with more than 200 ongoing projects. Many of these R&D activities are developed together with international teams and are funded both at national and European levels.
http://www.massif-project.eu/

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FUTURE CITIES

The Future Cities Project is a FP7 European project which aims at unlocking the full potential of interdisciplinary research in urban technologies, as well as strengthening knowledge transfer activities in close cooperation with local and global industrial partners. A key goal is to turn the city of Porto into an urban-scale living lab, where researchers, companies and startups can develop and test technologies, products and services, exploring subjects such as: sustainable mobility, urban-scale sensing, safety and privacy, as well as quality of life for citizens and families. The project aims to work in a very inter-disciplinary way, engaging not only engineers and computer scientists, but also psychologists, urban studies specialists, and social scientists.

Portuguese partners:

Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto
Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto
Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação da Universidade do Porto

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