Title: Emergent Connectors for Eternal Software Intensive Networked Systems
Agreement No: 231167
Project type: FP7 Fet
Project status: on going
People involved: Antinisca Di Marco
Website: http://connect-forever.eu/
Description:
The CONNECT Integrated Project aims at enabling continuous composition of networked
systems to respond to the evolution of functionalities provided to and required from the
networked environment. At present the efficacy of integrating and composing networked
systems depends on the level of interoperability of the systems’ underlying technologies.
However, interoperable middleware cannot cover the ever growing heterogeneity dimensions
of the networked environment. CONNECT aims at dropping the interoperability barrier by
adopting a revolutionary approach to the seamless networking of digital systems, that is,
synthesizing on the fly the connectors via which networked systems communicate. The
resulting emergent connectors are effectively synthesized according to the behavioral
semantics of application- down to middleware-layer protocols run by the interacting parties.
The synthesis process is based on a formal foundation for connectors, which allows learning,
reasoning about and adapting the interaction behavior of networked systems at run-time.
Synthesized connectors are concrete emergent system entities that are dependable,
unobtrusive, and evolvable, while not compromising the quality of software applications. To
reach these objectives the CONNECT PROJECT undertakes interdisciplinary research in the
areas of behavior learning, formal methods, semantic services, software engineering,
dependability, and middleware. Specifically, CONNECT will investigate the following issues
and related challenges: (i) Modeling and reasoning about peer system functionalities, (ii)
Modeling and reasoning about connector behaviors, (iii) Runtime synthesis of connectors, (iv)
Learning connector behaviors, (v) Dependability assurance, and (vi) System architecture. The
effectiveness of CONNECT research will be assessed by experimenting in the field of wide
area, highly heterogeneous systems where today’s solutions to interoperability already fall
short (e.g., systems of systems).
Title: ConstRaint and Application driven Framework for Tailoring Embedded
Agreement No: 295371
Project type: ARTEMIS
Project status: ongoing
People involved: Vittorio Cortellessa, Catia Trubiani, Luca Berardinelli
Website: http://www.crafters-project.org
Description:
ICT-based service and product innovation is curtailed by the growing vertical chain of dependence on poorly interoperable proprietary technologies in Europe. This issue was identified to have high impact on European innovation productivity by the Report of the Independent Expert Group on R&D and Innovation, commonly known as the Aho-report. The report demanded incentives for the convergence of shared technologies and markets as a
remedy. Actions creating standardized, commercially exploitable yet widely accessible ecosystems in European priority areas should be publicly supported. Real-time applications for heterogeneous, networked, embedded many-core systems suffer from the lack of trusted pathways to system realization and application deployment. Service and product development efforts are high with many uncertainties discouraging such ventures. This project brings to bear a holistically designed ecosystem from application to silicon. The ecosystem is realized as a tightly integrated multi-vendor solution and tool chain complementing existing standards. Feature-limited releases of reference tools and platforms are made available under favourable licensing conditions to support the evaluation and adoption of the results. Full-fledged versions are retained for commercial exploitation and standardization of the overall ecosystem is pursued. As direct effects of the project results 30% reduction of the total cost of ownership, 50% shorter time-to-market, and 30% decrease of the number of development assets are expected. Marketable lead applications driving ecosystem development and benchmarking on the fields of industrial & intelligent transport systems, video & image processing, and wireless communications are produced. Key challenges include guaranteeing secure, reliable, and timely operation, back-annotation based forward system governance, Tool-tool, tool-middleware, and middleware-hardware exchange interfaces, and energy management with minimal run-time overhead.
Title: MegaM@rt2
Agreement No: 737494
Project type: Ecsel
Project status: ongoing
People involved: Vittorio Cortellessa, Davide Di Ruscio, Luigi Pomante, Romina Eramo, Davide Arcelli, Daniele Di Pompeo, Michele Tucci, Vittoriano Muttillo, Giacomo Valente
Website: https://megamart2-ecsel.eu/
Description:
European industry faces stiff competition on the global arena. The electronic systems become more and more complex and call for modern engineering practices to tackle productivity and quality. The model-driven technologies promise significant productivity gains, which have been proven in several studies. However, these technologies need more development to scale for real-life industrial projects and provide advantages in runtime. MegaM@Rt brings the model-driven engineering to the next level in order to help European industry to reduce development and maintenance costs as well as to reinforce productivity and quality.
Title: Mirnas
Agreement No: HP10CV8XPV
Project type: ISCRA Class C Projects
Project status: proposal under review
People involved: Antinisca Di Marco
Website:
Description:
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a highly aggressive epithelial tumour originating both from mature hepatocytes and stem cells.
Epidemiological studies reported HCC as the fifth most common cancer and the third most common cause of cancer death worldwide.MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of small, non-coding RNAs that generated
a great impact in the molecular biology field. They can negatively regulate the expression of their target genes in a post-transcriptionalmanner, inducing mRNA degradation or inhibiting mRNA translation.
Given their involvement in various pathologies including cancers, miRNAs functions started to be investigated with the help of bioinformatics approaches that allows to predict interaction with potential target genes [mirbase.org, microrna.org, genemania.org].
In this project, we want to move forward in order to obtain a list of potential genes relating to a group of significantly altered miRNAs in HCC for different species. We want to start to predict target genes for a
selected miRNAs. One of the final objective of the project is to identify functional of clusters target genes could be related to. Finally, we built up networks to visualize the possible circuits and pathways in which
selected miRNAs could be involved, providing a potential resource for other researches focused on HCC. In the future, we plan to use the outcomes of this project to consider other types of cancer.
Title: Performability-Aware Computing: Logics, Models, and Languages
Agreement No: prin2007
Project type: MIUR PRIN
Project status: finished
People involved: Vittorio Cortellessa, Luca Berardinelli, Catia Trubiani
Website: http://www.sti.uniurb.it/paco/
Description:
The project PaCo intends to contribute to the development and the integration of logics, models, and languages for the description and the analysis of performability-aware systems.
On the one hand, we plan to study separately some of the performability-aware formalisms proposed in the literature, in order to establish new theoretical properties or to make them more expressive.
On the other hand, we plan to relate some of those formalisms by means of suitable direct transformation functions from source models to object models as well as inverse functions for the propagation of results from object models back to source models.
The project will focus on stochastic variants of temporal logics and model checking, stochastic variants of process calculi and behavioral equivalences, probabilistic timed automata and models, specification of performability measures, and model transformations assisted by type systems.
Title: Providing Lightweight and Adaptable Service Technology for pervasive Information and Communication
Agreement No: 026955
Project type: EU-FP6 STREP
Project status: finished
People involved: Vittorio Cortellessa, Antinisca Di Marco, Luca Berardinelli
Website: http://plastic.paris-rocquencourt.inria.fr/
Description:
Ubiquitous networking provides mobile users with unique features for seamlessly accessing
networked services. However, service provisioning for B3G distributed computing platforms faces
numerous challenges, among which are: developing services that can be easily deployed on a wide
range of evolving infrastructures, from networks of devices to standalone wireless resourceconstrained
handheld devices; making services resource-aware so that they can benefit from
networked resources and related services; and ensuring that users always experience the best
Quality of Service (QoS) possible according to their specific situation. In addition, services must be
provisioned in a way that guarantees their dependability. The PLASTIC project will develop a
comprehensive provisioning platform for software services deployed over B3G networks. The project
will build upon both Web services and more standard component-based technologies. The PLASTIC
platform will specifically integrate innovative methods and tools for service development, from design
to validation, and a supporting middleware for service provisioning in B3G networks. The platform will
enable dynamic adaptation of services to the environment with respect to resource availability and
delivered QoS, via a development paradigm based on Service Level Agreements and resource-aware
programming. The middleware will be service oriented, to enable integration and composition of
heterogeneous software services from both infrastructure-based and ad hoc networks. The
middleware will integrate key functions for supporting the management of adaptive services in the
open wireless environment, dealing with resource awareness and dependability. The project will
assess the PLASTIC platform through representative and challenging mobile e-services, specifically
eVoting, eLearning, eHealth and eBusiness. Key assessment factors will include cost, quality and
dependability, as well as the innovativeness of the services created.
Title: Improvements of Industrial Real Time Embedded Systems development process
Agreement No: 2010-1-269362
Project type: ARTEMIS
Project status: ongoing
People involved: Vittorio Cortellessa, Luca Berardinelli
Website:
Description:
The PRESTO project aims at improving test-based embedded systems development and validation, while considering the constraints of industrial development processes. This project is based on the integration of:
a) test traces exploitation (generated by test execution in the software integration phase induced by the industrial development process, to validate the requirements of the system) along with
b) platform models and
c) design space exploration techniques
The expected result of the project is to establish functional and performance analysis and platform optimisation at early stage of the design development. The approach of PRESTO is to model the software/hardware allocation, by the use of modelling frameworks, such as the UML profile for model-driven development of Real Time and Embedded Systems (MARTE). The analysis tools, among them timing analysis including Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) analysis, scheduling analysis and possibly more abstract system-level timing analysis techniques will receive as inputs on the one hand information from the performance modelling of the HW/SW-platform, and on the other hand behavioural information of the software design from tests results of the integration test execution.
Title: Video-oriented UWB-based Intelligent Ubiquitous Sensing
Agreement No: 240555
Project type: FP7 ideas ERC strating Grant
Project status: ongoing
People involved:
Website:
Description:
VISION aims to developing an innovative infrastructure providing
real-time sensing services, with particular emphasis on 3D video, with mobile
and context-aware operation: 60 GHz UWB radios to enable broadband transmissions
in the Wireless Sensor Network; a comprehensive channel model to optimize the
radio design; novel techniques to manage the huge number of nodes for ubiquitous
sensing; innovative tools to support the development process of intelligent
services; full cross-layer adaptability to external conditions to assure the
best achievable performance and support of Quality of Services.
VISION will study, design, implement and demonstrate an innovative system supporting intelligent services
for ubiquitous sensing, with particular emphasis on real-time 3D video sensing.
The objectives of the proposed research are numerous and call for a joint effort of groups working at
different levels, e.g. propagation, wireless sensor network design at all layers (physical, MAC, routing),
middleware, application and tools for context-aware QoS management.