Ubiquitous Internet RESEARCH UNIT
Ubiquitous Internet RESEARCH UNIT
Ubiquitous Internet RESEARCH UNIT
01/01/2021 – 31/12/2023
MARVEL aims to collect, analyze and data mine multi-modal audio-visual data streams of a Smart City and help decision makers to improve the quality of life and services to the citizens without violating ethical and privacy limits in an AI-responsible manner.
Principal investigator: Claudio Cicconetti
01/01/2021 – 31/12/2023
AI solutions are now ubiquitous and transforming our societies at an unprecedented rate. With numerous examples of unethical AI use, the need for a better understanding of the ethical use of AI technologies in our societies is more pressing than ever. The HCAIM (Human-Centred AI Master’s) consortium set out to create a master’s program offering an integrated ethical, technical, and practical curriculum for understanding the construction of AI models, their realization at an industrial scale, and the evaluation of their long-term impact on society. The HCAIM consortium creates one-of-a-kind educational materials that will be used consistently at partner institutes, facilitating the free flow of project ideas and students between participating countries. short-term Erasmus actions will also help students exchange ideas and knowledge and connect. Nonetheless, the programs will differ to some extent at the participating universities due to their respective traditions, resources, and legal and cultural environments. The diverse range of elective courses allows students to create their own personalized HCAIM portfolio based on their interests in various domains.
Principal investigator: Lorenzo Valerio
01/03/2021 – 29/02/2024
With SLICES-SC, we aspire to foster the community of researchers around this ecosystem, create and strengthen necessary links with relevant industrial stakeholders for the exploitation of the infrastructure, advance existing methods for research reproducibility and experiment repeatability, and design and deploy the necessary solutions for providing SLICES-RI with an easy to access scheme for users from different disciplines. A set of detailed research activities has been designed to materialize these efforts in tools for providing transnational (remote and physical) access to the facility, as well as virtual access to the data produced over the facilities. The respective networking activities of the project aspire in fostering the community around these infrastructures, as well as open up to new disciplines and industrial stakeholders.
Principal investigator: Andrea Passarella, Raffaele Bruno
01/06/2018 – 30/04/2024
Il progetto ha come obiettivo quello di rispondere alle esigenze di riorganizzazione della Mobilità, in un’ottica di Mobilità sostenibile globale permanente ed integrata, tale da rendere nuovamente la mobilità urbana una risorsa per la città e non un problema con conseguenti limitazioni e restrizioni. Il Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR). Responsabile dello sviluppo dell’Applicazione innovativa, della fase sperimentale del progetto, dell’analisi dei dati di mobilità per calibrare gli interventi previsti e futuri, tra i quali anche la formazione e diffusione.
Principal investigator: Franca Delmastro, Raffaele Bruno
01/02/2021 – 31/07/2024
SAI will develop the scientific foundations for novel ML-based AI systems where (i) each individual is associated with its own “local AI twin” (called Personal Data Ecosystem, PDE), which acts as the individual’s proxy in a complex ecosystem of interacting PDEs; (ii) PDEs elaborate local data via explainable AI models tailored to the specific characteristics of their human peers; (iii) PDEs interact with each other to build more complex global AI models and/or come with collective outcomes built on the local models; (iv) interaction between local PDEs is driven by (quantifiable) models of the individual and social behaviour of their human peers; (v) quantifiable human behavioural models coupled with complex network analysis makes the global AI models and outcomes explainable-by-design. The ultimate goal of SAI is thus to provide the foundational elements enabling a collective of distributed explainable AI PDEs to create, via a human-centric approach, global AI models whose processes and outcomes are explainable and tailored to the needs and constraints of individual users. The interactions between PDEs in SAI will be engineered to preserve the plurality of information inherent in the data, giving them all the elements to take informed decisions and avoid biases, or, at least, to transparently expose biases inherent in data and in the decision process.
Principal investigator: Andrea Passarella
01/10/2020 – 31/08/2024
The EU-funded HumanE-AI-Net project brings together leading European research centres, universities and industrial enterprises into a network of centres of excellence. Leading global artificial intelligence (AI) laboratories will collaborate with key players in areas, such as human-computer interaction, cognitive, social and complexity sciences. The project is looking forward to drive researchers out of their narrowly focused field and connect them with people exploring AI on a much wider scale. The challenge is to develop robust, trustworthy AI systems that can ‘understand’ humans, adapt to complex real-world environments and interact appropriately in complex social settings. HumanE-AI-Net will lay the foundations for designing the principles for a new science that will make AI based on European values and closer to Europeans.
Principal investigator: Andrea Passarella, Chiara Boldrini
01/03/2021 – 31/09/2024
QUANCOM propone un’azione coordinata per lo sviluppo e la sperimentazione sul campo di una rete incondizionatamente sicura costruita tramite tecnologia quantistica. Il progetto prevede lo studio di soluzioni per la trasmissione basate sia su fibra ottica che satellitari.
Principal investigator: Claudio Cicconetti
01/01/2020 – 31/12/2024
SoBigData++ strives to deliver a distributed, Pan-European, multi-disciplinary research infrastructure for big social data analytics, coupled with the consolidation of a cross-disciplinary European research community, aimed at using social mining and big data to understand the complexity of our contemporary, globally-interconnected society. SoBigData++ is set to advance on such ambitious tasks thanks to SoBigData, the predecessor project that started this construction in 2015.
Principal investigator: Andrea Passarella, Chiara Boldrini
01/01/2023 – 30/06/2025
Il progetto QUID (Quantum Italy Deployment) ha l’ambizioso obiettivo di avviare il processo di realizzazione dell’Infrastruttura per la Comunicazione Quantistica (QCI) in Italia. Il progetto prevede l’installazione di sistemi e di reti, sul territorio nazionale, per testare le tecnologie di comunicazione quantistica, in particolare la distribuzione quantistica di chiavi crittografiche (QKD), in modo da integrare questa tecnologia con l’attuale rete in fibra ottica, dedicata alle telecomunicazioni.
Principal investigator: Claudio Cicconetti
01/06/2022 – 31/05/2025
As part of the green, circular and digital transformation of the European manufacturing community, it is extremely important that data-driven digital manufacturing processes urgently incorporate innovative and active resiliency strategies at production and supply chain levels to maintain their sovereignty and competitiveness levels, respecting European digital values (excellence, privacy, trust) to improve individual and value chain flexibility. In order to achieve long-term resilience to reorganise supply chains or speed up decision making to dealt with any disruption, it is imperative to ensure the implementation of distributed data-intensive intelligent and dynamic industrial decision support, augmentation and automation processes, integrating Artificial Intelligence (smart anticipation) and Intelligent Automation (rapid response) capabilities in Human-Automation symbiosis. Hence, only businesses that can articulate their data, based on AI, digital thread and digital twin solutions, will be able to react rapidly to external shocks.
RE4DY mission is to demonstrate that the European industry can jointly build unique data-driven digital value networks 4.0 to sustain competitive advantages through digital continuity and sovereign data spaces across all phases of product and process lifecycle, proposing Data as a Product core concept to facilitate the implementation of digital continuity across digital threads, data spaces, digital twin workflows and AI/ML/Data pipelines. This concept leverages resiliency on top of advanced manufacturing digital processes and value ecosystems supporting the development and implementation of digital continuity, so distributed data management solutions implemented to deal with factory resiliency can be immediately and seamlessly reused to enhance connected factory and value network level processes.
Principal investigator: Andrea Passarella
01/10/2022 – 30/09/2025
SoBigData RI, with its tools and services, empowers researchers and innovators through a platform for the design and execution of large-scale data science and social mining experiments, open to users with diverse backgrounds, accessible on cloud (aligned with EOSC guidelines), and also exploiting supercomputing facilities. SoBigData RI will render social mining experiments more efficiently designed, adjusted, and repeatable by non-data scientists’ domain experts by pushing the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable) and FACT (Fair, Accountable, Confidential and Transparent) principles. SoBigData RI will orient resources from multiple perspectives: e-infrastructures and online services developers; big data analytics and AI; complex systems focussed on modelling social phenomena; ELSEC (Ethical, Legal, SocioEconomic and Cultural) aspects of data protection (as defined by the HLEG-AI); privacy-preserving techniques. SoBigData RI PPP will move our RI forward from the simple awareness of ethical and legal challenges in social mining to the development of concrete tools that operationalize ethics with value-sensitive design, incorporating values and norms for privacy protection, fairness, transparency, and pluralism.
Principal investigator: Andrea Passarella
01/12/2021 – 30/11/2025
L’obiettivo del progetto HPCQS è fornire oggi alla ricerca e all’industria in Europa gli strumenti per l’utilizzo di computer e simulatori quantistici adatti a risolvere le sfide computazionali di domani.
Principal investigator: Claudio Cicconetti
01/01/2023 – 31/12/2025
The 6Green project aims to conceive, design, and realise an innovative service-based and holistic ecosystem, able to extend “the communication infrastructure into a sustainable, interconnected, greener end-to-end intercompute system” and promote energy efficiency across the whole 5/6G value-chain. The ultimate objective is to enable and to foster 5/6G networks and vertical applications reducing their carbon footprint by a factor of 10 or more.
To achieve this objective, the project will exploit and extend state-of-the-art cloud-native technologies and the B5G Service-Based Architecture with new cross-domain enablers to 1) boost the global ecosystem flexibility, scalability and sustainability, and 2) enable all the 5/6G stakeholders (from the ones acting at the infrastructure and network platform to vertical industries) reducing their carbon footprint by becoming integral parts of a win-win green-economy business, and meeting a Decarbonization Service Agreement. The 6Green intent-based cross-domain interactions among stakeholders will allow achieving a tight proportionality between the time-varying and geographically distributed mobile workload produced by vertical applications and network slices, and the energy/carbon footprint induced to the 5/6G network and computing infrastructure continuum.
6Green will provide stakeholders with flexible and green Artificial Intelligence mechanisms that will allow propagating the environmental impact to any players acting on virtual domains, and triggering zero-touch operations according to customizable energy- and carbon-aware policies, allowing optimal use of renewable energy sources.
The project will also deliver three future-proof use-case applications that will provide a diverse awareness of the green capabilities of the 6Green platform, and that will demonstrate the potential 5/6G impact in enabling other vertical industry sectors to reach the carbon neutrality targeted by the European Green Deal.
Principal investigator: Raffaele Bruno
01/01/2023 – 31/12/2025
Il progetto EDGELESS mira a sfruttare il concetto serverless in tutti i livelli del continuum edge-cloud per beneficiare appieno di risorse computazionali diversificate e decentralizzate disponibili on-demand vicino al luogo in cui i dati vengono prodotti o consumati. In particolare, miriamo a realizzare un pooling orizzontale efficiente e trasparente delle risorse sui nodi edge con capacità limitate o hardware specializzato, perfettamente integrato con le risorse cloud, che rappresenta un enorme passo avanti rispetto alle soluzioni di offload verticale odierne.
Principal investigator: Claudio Cicconetti
01/09/2022 – 31/12/2025
The digital infrastructures research community continues to face numerous new challenges towards the design of the Next Generation Internet. This is an extremely complex ecosystem encompassing communication, networking, data-management and data-intelligence issues, supported by established and emerging technologies such as IoT, 5/6G, cloud-to-edge computing. Coupled with the enormous amount of data generated and exchanged over the network, this calls for incremental as well as radically new design paradigms. Experimentally-driven research is becoming worldwide a de-facto standard, which has to be supported by large-scale research infrastructures to make results trusted, repeatable and accessible to the research communities.
SLICES-RI (Research Infrastructure), which was recently included in the 2021 ESFRI roadmap, aims to answer these problems by building a large infrastructure needed for the experimental research on various aspects of distributed computing, networking, IoT and 5/6G networks. It will provide the resources needed to continuously design, experiment, operate and automate the full lifecycle management of digital infrastructures, data, applications, and services.
Based on the two preceding projects within SLICES-RI, SLICES-DS (Design Study) and SLICES-SC (Starting Community), the SLICES-PP (Preparatory Phase) project will validate the requirements to engage into the implementation phase of the RI lifecycle. It will set the policies and decision processes for the governance of SLICES-RI: i.e. the legal and financial frameworks, the business model, the required human resource capacities and training programme. It will also settle the final technical architecture design for implementation. It will engage member states and stakeholders to secure commitment and funding needed for the platform to operate. It will position SLICES as an impactful instrument to support European advanced research, industrial competitiveness and societal impact in the digital era.
Principal investigator: Andrea Passarella
01/01/ 2023 – 31/12/2025
5G mobile networks will be soon fully available, handling all types of applications and providing services to massive number of users. In this complex and dynamic network ecosystem, an optimized end-to-end satellite support is key to manage requirements imposed by multiple vertical industries requiring full global connectivity. The European space sector acknowledged this as a key opportunity to expand its business towards the massive deployment of broadband services, what resulted in standardization efforts to adapt 5G to satellite needs. In this context, the aim of TRANTOR is to perform a significant step forward by paving the path for the 5G NTN evolution towards 6G. To do so, TRANTOR targets the in-orbit validation of a complete satellite value chain involving an automated management of satellite resources across multiple bands, satellites, and orbits, and a converged radio access network. Specifically, at the ground segment, TRANTOR targets the development of novel satellite network management solutions, fully integrated in the 3GPP management framework, which allow the significant scaling up of heterogeneous satellite traffic demands and capacities in a cost-effective, highly dynamic, band and orbit agnostic manner. AI governance will be a main pillar here enabling real time radio resource management across multiple satellite systems for efficiently and trustworthy addressing satellite client needs. In parallel, in the user segment, TRANTOR aims to radically increase the flexibility of access architecture by enabling pre-6G non-terrestrial multi-connectivity. It will be supported by the design of a multi-orbit and multi-band antenna for satellite UEs as well as by the development of gNB and UE 5G NTN equipment able to attend the multi-connectivity needs. Finally, TRANTOR aims to introduce security mechanisms to provide resilience to all types of cyber-threads, specially those emerging from the integrated management and multi-connectivity framework proposed.
Principal investigator: Lorenzo Valerio
01/01/2024 – 31/12/2026
6G is expected to emerge as key enabler for the intelligent digital society of 2030 and beyond, providing superior performance via groundbreaking access technologies, such as joint communication and sensing, cell-free, Radio Intelligent Surfaces, and ubiquitous wireless intelligence . Most importantly, 6G is expected to trigger a total rethink of network architecture design, which builds on the key idea of new stakeholders entering into the value chain of future networks. The SUNRISE-6G approach is inspired by the “network of networks” concept of 6G Networks, aiming to integrate all private and public infrastructures under a massively scalable internetlike architecture. SUNRISE-6G similarly aspires to create a federation of 6G test infrastructures in a pan-european facility that will support converged Testing as a Service (TaaS) workflows and tools, a unified catalogue of 6G enablers publicly accessible by experimenters, and cross-domain vertical application onboarding. Experimentation and vertical application onboarding are offered via a Tenant Web Portal, that acts as a single-entry point to the facility, serving end users (e.g., experimenters) and tenants (e.g., vertical developers, infrastructure owners, 6G component manufacturers). The project execution is based on 4 pillars, delivering: (a) the Implementation of new 6G enablers, complementary to existing ones being developed in SNS Phase 1 projects, (b) A truly scalable and 3GPP compliant Federation solution that provides access to heterogeneous resources and devices from all Europe, (c) A Federated AI plane aligned with AIaaS and MLOPS paradigms, which promotes a collaborative approach to AI research which benefits immensely from scaling-up datasets and models and (d) a commonly adopted Experimentation Plane, which offers common workflows to experimenters.
Principal investigator: Raffaele Bruno
01/3/2024 – 28/02/2027
In order to keep Research Infrastructures at the highest level of excellence in science, new technologies and solutions must be developed to steer toward a reduced environmental footprint, as it is the case for all domains of our societies. Lowering the environmental impact of digital infrastructures should be a priority as they today contribute 3 to 4% of the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emission in the world and expected to triple from 2020 to 2050. GreenDIGIT brings together 4 major distributed Digital Infrastructures at different lifecycle stages, EGI, SLICES, SoBigData, EBRAINS, to tackle the challenge of environmental impact reduction with the ambition to provide solutions that are reusable across the whole spectrum of digital services on the ESFRI landscape, and play a role model. GreenDIGIT will capture good practices and existing solutions and will develop new technologies and solutions for all aspects of the digital continuum: from service provisioning to monitoring, job scheduling, resources allocation, architecture, workload and Open Science practices, task execution, storage, and use of green energy. GreenDIGIT will deliver these solutions as building blocks, with a reference architecture and guidelines for RIs to lower their environmental footprint. It will include the extension of a workload manager, Virtual Machine Manager, AI/ML training framework, and IoT/5G/network management solutions from 4 participating RIs with new brokering logic to optimize task execution toward low-energy use. User-side tools and Virtual Research Environments will also be expanded with energy usage reporting and reproducibility capabilities to motivate users to apply low-energy practices. The new solutions will be validated through reference scientific use cases from diverse disciplines and will be promoted to providers and users through an active dissemination and training programme, in order to prepare the next generation of Digital RIs with a low environmental footprint.
Principal investigator: Andrea Passarella
ARTES 4.0 – Advanced Robotics and enabling digital TEchnologies & Systems 4.0
16/04/2019 – 31/10/2022
L’obiettivo del Macronodo CNR-IIT è quello di promozione delle attività di ARTES 4.0 e raccolta delle richieste di servizi di orientamento, formazione e innovazione ricerca industriale e sviluppo sperimentale, dei committenti che si rivolgeranno ad ARTES 4.0.
Principal investigator: Andrea Passarella
