by Paolo Azzoni
Research and Innovation Action (RIA) projects focus on activities primarily at TRL 3-6, involving consortiums that may comprise SMEs, large enterprises, universities and public organisations. They emphasise the development and application of innovative technologies to address industrial and societal challenges, showcasing their value and potential in a realistic lab environment or use case.
In the previous magazine, INSIDE Industry Association, in partnership with the European initiative EUCEI, awarded the four winners of their 2024 RIAs Challenge. EUCEI aims to build a European continuum among industries involved in edge, IoT and cloud technologies and their applications. As a member of the OpenContinuum CSA, INSIDE participates to the EUCEI initiative facilitating networking and collaboration opportunities that expand and safeguard Europe’s position in Intelligent Digital Systems and in the Edge-to-Cloud Computing Continuum. In the previous magazine, we presented projects that have reached significant milestones in this domain and that hold promising avenues for further exploitation and industrial impact.
As evidence of these accomplishments, the winning projects were showcased and celebrated at the ECS Brokerage Event 2024, organised by the three industry associations (AENAS, EPoSS and INSIDE) in Brussels on 20 and 21 February. In the poster presentation hall of Hotel La Plaza, the event provided a platform for the winners to engage with industry stakeholders, policymakers and fellow innovators, and propose follow-ups and new project ideas. This presented the perfect opportunity to speak with the leaders of the projects on their successes so far, their future ambitions and their impressions of the Brokerage as a whole.
As a project leader and a professor, what makes the Brokerage event worth attending? I’m coming from a world that is probably a little bit orthogonal to most of the people here. People are coming here from the hardware side – chips, systems and so on – while I’m coming from the top, so cloud and then moving down to the edge. This kind of matching is really useful for me because in order to make cloud systems and edge systems that actually work, I need support and requirements from people in the lower technology levels and a strong connection to industry. So, this event is definitely a huge opportunity for me.
Your poster mentions follow-up and new project ideas. How can the Brokerage help to shape and give momentum to these ideas? We have to look forward to the next project opportunities because what we are doing right now in this project is to create a sort of first version of the continuum. For that, we need two main ingredients. First, more use-cases. We definitely need to make our computing infrastructure more efficient and more intelligent. But this has to be put together with more intelligence at the orchestration layer too. If I have a smartphone that is more intelligent, can it work alone or is it better if it talks and shares data and computing with other smartphones that are more intelligent? In the end, having this kind of orchestration on top of better, more efficient and more intelligent hardware will probably help us to better shape the future. Second, we need better integration with the physical world, which means sensor actuators, hardware accelerators and so on. This event is really useful in that respect because of the merging of different communities from ECS. We had a lot of chances to talk with other people just today and there is still tomorrow too.
What has been the highlight of the event so far for you? I was impressed by the number of people who came to our booth asking what we’re doing. This gives us a lot of use-cases and a lot of new ideas in terms of the usage of the technology that we provide, which is our duty as a university. For example, we were talking to somebody from automotive and they were saying that our project can be used to reduce the number of integrated circuits, CPUs and microcontrollers in a single car, which means saving costs and decreasing problems with the supply chain. This very important right now. In other words, better and more intelligent orchestration can mean more integrated and smarter components, but a reduced number of them. These sorts of discussions are what I feel is most valuable at this event.
What are your biggest technical and societal ambitions for MYRTUS?
Francesca: From the technical point of view, the idea is to create key enabling technologies for a real continuum. The ambition is to create an infrastructure capable of offering connection, monitoring and orchestration capabilities of all the resources from edge to cloud in a homogeneous manner – as in, with the same type of techniques. These resources will be orchestrated by the main result of MYRTUS: a cognitive engine to use artificial intelligence in a transparent manner for users. This project is not to create services for users but to orchestrate the continuum of resources with swarm intelligence and federated learning to learn from the execution in order to evolve and be able to offer better usage of resources. In terms of sustainability, the goal of this cognitive engine is to be able to better orchestrate the resources and distribute the computation, lowering the power consumption where needed. And if you want to have a societal impact with something this complex, you need instruments to facilitate the designer’s work, so we are preparing a design and programming environment to facilitate usage.
Katiuscia: Another ambition is to be part of the open-source community. In fact, all of the methodologies that we are developing will be released in an open-source version. Even the tools released by the company are open source and we will try to keep it that way. So, it’s a big investment in open source and open-source strategies.
Francesca: We also have two use-cases that have a lot of ambition and impact at the societal level. For example, one is about remote telerehabilitation in virtual environments. The idea here is if you have this continuum, you allow people to train at home for rehabilitation after accidents. In this collaborative environment, there will be real agents, cooperating on a task to do with rehabilitation, but we can be aided by other virtual agents that learn from our actions and mimic our actions to guide us to complete tasks. The other use-case is about cooperative, connected and automated mobility to have, for example, better orchestration of vehicles in the city. So, there are many technical aspects that will have societal value.
The MYRTUS project wants to establish synergies with other projects and initiatives. How does the Brokerage help with this?
Katiuscia: The first interaction on this synergy was actually at the previous Brokerage event because one of the key points of the call – not only of the project – is to establish synergies with the IPCEI initiative. When we were in Amsterdam last year, it was an opportunity to contact STMicroelectronics, which is part of the IPCEI initiative, and we were able to include some very preliminary information on what we can do together using the results of the MYRTUS project. This year has been even better because, of course, we are excited about the project that we are starting. We have had the opportunity to talk with people who are interested in the results and can maybe bring in new use-cases, or at least want to be informed of the results. On our website, we will have a special page where we will try to collect all the input that comes from different projects and initiatives at the European level, but also from South Korea and Japan. We will try to use all this information to have the right solution after three years.
What has been the highlight of the event for you?
Francesca: For sure, the fact that it’s a great opportunity to create synergies. There are so many people here, including many people from industry who are difficult to catch in their normal routines. On this kind of occasion, it’s easier to establish contact. I come from academia, so this is really the perfect event to meet the big players from industry. This is basically the first big event that MYRTUS is participating in as a group, so it’s really nice that, at the start, we have already collected many contacts for follow-ups on the activities.
Katiuscia: I’ve been involved in these kinds of projects for more than 15 years now, so the main highlight of my day is to meet all the old and new friends because it’s really a community here. That’s the difference between other brokerages and this event. We know each other. Sometimes, we work together on the same projects, sometimes we arrive with different projects, but we all try to provide the technology for our community.
What are some concrete examples of how your project has added value to industry so far? In the NEPHELE project, we work a lot on developing solutions that tackle the overall phase of the continuum. How can we manage deployment that considers computing and networking infrastructure in IoT devices? We have two main artifacts. One has to do with the virtualisation of your devices: we provide an open-source software stack that is aligned with the emerging specifications from working groups like the W3C Web of Things Working Group. So, we have close interaction to follow the standard specifications in order to be more ready for industry. We also have validation within the project with industrial use-cases using this software stack and we follow guidelines from the Open Mobile Alliance. We follow these two groups for the IoT part of our solution. Then, for the orchestration platform, we once again try to develop open-source solutions and validate them in various industrial use-cases, like energy management in smart buildings, logistical operations in ports, healthcare and disaster recovery. Finally, we run two open calls where we get applications from SMEs and mid-caps so that they can get access to our solutions, validate them, develop extensions and give feedback to us.
Your poster mentions follow-up and new project ideas. How can you use the Brokerage to shape and gain momentum for these ideas? This comes into play as an evolution of the software that we develop, this being open source and close to standard. We have ideas for the addition of extra functionalities related to IoT virtualisation, more advanced security features and more advanced scenarios with regards to ad-hoc networking mechanisms, for instance, as well as solving more interoperability challenges for the IoT part. For the meta-orchestration part, the main motivation is to introduce more autonomy to the system and more decentralised intelligence characteristics. The Brokerage is very helpful in all this because we are coming from a domain where we tackle a lot of software development and management aspects. This event is bringing us into closer interaction with people who work a lot with hardware solutions. Bridging these two worlds can lead to the development of more innovative and end-to-end solutions in a more holistic way. I have really enjoyed the nice and helpful discussions all around.
What are your biggest ambitions for follow-up projects in terms of the technical and societal challenges that you want to solve? Energy efficiency is one of the main societal challenges. It would be great if we can manage to provide solutions that have a direct impact on energy. You can reduce energy consumption by using information communication technologies, but you can also reduce the energy consumption of this same ICT infrastructure. That’s really important. On top of this, we do a lot with data fusion and management, so I think that we can also provide advanced solutions related to disaster management in areas that feel the most effects of climate change. For me, these two are the most crucial.
Download ISSUE 7 of INSIDE Magazine via this link: https://www.inside-association.eu/publications
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