"Living in the Edge, Sailing Through the Cloud”: Orchestrating Applications in the Edge to Cloud Computing ContinuumOrchestrating Applications in the Edge to Cloud Computing Continuum
Tamas Kiss, University of Westminster, United Kingdom
On Location Privacy and Security of Positioning in Modern Systems
Srdjan Capkun, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Slices: European Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies
Serge Fdida, Sorbonne Université, France
Integrating Machine Learning and Multi-Agent Systems for Fully Enabling Device-Edge-Cloud Continuum in Complex IoT Worlds
Giancarlo Fortino, University Calabria, Italy
"Living in the Edge, Sailing Through the Cloud”: Orchestrating Applications in the Edge to Cloud Computing ContinuumOrchestrating Applications in the Edge to Cloud Computing Continuum
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Brief Bio
Tamas Kiss is a Professor of Distributed Computing at the School of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the Research Centre for Parallel Computing at the University of Westminster, London, UK. He also servrs as Co-Editor in Chief at the Journal of Grid Computing, published by Springer Nature. He holds a PhD in Distributed Computing, and MSc Degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering. He has attracted over £60 Million research funding and have been leading national and European research projects related to enterprise and scientific applications of cloud computing technologies. He has been involved in more than 20 European research projects as principal investigator or co-investigator. He has coordinated three EU: CloudSME (Cloud-based Simulation Platform for Manufacturing and Engineering) that developed a Cloud-based simulation solution for manufacturing and engineering SMEs; COLA (Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application) that investigated how a generic and pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of cloud applications can be created; and ASCLEPIOS (Advanced Secure Cloud Encrypted Platform for Internationally Orchestrated Solutions in Healthcare) that focused on secure cloud-enabled applications in healthcare. Currently he is involved in five EU projects, including DIGITbrain - Digital twins bringing agility and innovation to manufacturing SMEs, by empowering a network of DIHs with an integrated digital platform that enables Manufacturing as a Service, PITHIA-NRF - Plasmasphere Ionosphere Thermosphere Integrated Research Environment and Access services: a Network of Research Facilities, HARPOCRATES - Federated Data Sharing and Analysis for Social Utility, CO-VERSATILE - Adaptive and resilient production and supply chain methods and solutions for urgent need of vital medical supplies and equipment, and ARCAFF - Active Region Classification and Flare Forecasting. The leading recent research outputs of his team, in collaboration with several other groups, have been the MiCADO cloud orchestrator solution that enables the automated deployment and run-time management of microservices-based applications in heterogeneous cloud infrastructures, and the CloudSME and CloudiFacturing platforms that support manufacturing and engineering companies to utilise cloud-based high-performance computing services to run simulation and optimisation applications. These solutions have already been utilised by close to 100 companies and generated significant economic impact.
Abstract
With the intensively increasing utilisation of IoT devices, large amounts of data are collected and needs to be processed close to its sources or transferred to larger and centralised cloud computing resources. Such application scenarios are common, for example, in manufacturing where smart sensors attached to manufacturing machines are collecting valuable information, in smart cities where such IoT devices are present in the streets or attached to vehicles, or in healthcare where wearable devices by patients can collect important information related to their behaviour and bio-signals. The collected large amount of data then needs to be processed, typically by big data analytics or artificial intelligence algorithms. A key question in such cases is where to process such information. Local processing using edge or fog computing nodes closer to the data sources can significantly reduce latency. On the other hand, such computational resources are more volatile and have limitations in storage and computational capacity. In comparison, clouds offer practically unlimited storage and computational capacity, but they also increase latency. A key question is how to distribute such loads between the various layers of the computing infrastructure, and how to deploy and manage such complex, typically microservices-based applications, spanning the edge to cloud computing continuum. In this keynote an edge to cloud application-level orchestrator, called MiCADO, will be presented that was developed within several EU funded projects and that is utilised in multiple sectors, including manufacturing, healthcare, public services and research. Besides outlining the evolution and architecture of the solution, it will also be widely illustrated how the orchestrator serves a wide range of use cases from the above-mentioned domains. Additionally, a vision of a generic architecture towards a holistic approach for edge to cloud application-level orchestration will also be presented.
On Location Privacy and Security of Positioning in Modern Systems
Srdjan Capkun
ETH Zurich
Switzerland
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Brief Bio
Srdjan Capkun (Srdan Capkun) is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich and Chair of the Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center (ZISC). Originally from Split, Croatia, he received his Dipl. Ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering / Computer Science from the University of Split in 1998, and his Ph.D. degree in Communication Systems from EPFL in 2004. His research interests are in system and network security. His focus areas are wireless security (in particular secure positioning), and system security where he focuses on trusted computing and blockchain technologies. He is a co-founder of 3db Access, which focuses on secure distance measurement and proximity-based access control, and of Futurae, a company focusing on usable on-line authentication. In 2016 he received an ERC Consolidator Grant for a project dedicated to securing positioning in wireless networks (www.securepositioning.com). He is a fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE
Slices: European Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies
Serge Fdida
Sorbonne Université
France
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Brief Bio
Serge Fdida is a Professor with Sorbonne Université since 1995. His research interests are related to the future internet technology and architecture. He has been leading many research projects in Europe, notably pioneering the activity on federated Internet testbeds. He established PlanetLab Europe in 2007 and the OneLab and FIT facilities. He was one of the founders of the ACM Conext conference, general chair of ACM Mobicom 2015 and IEEE Infocom 2019. Serge Fdida has also developed a strong experience related to innovation and industry transfer, - he was the co-founder of the Qosmos and Hopcast companies, - one of the active contributor to the creation of the Cap Digital cluster in Paris and President of EIT Health France. He is currently coordinating SLICES, the first large-scale scientific instrument in Digital Sciences, supported by the EU ESFRI framework Serge Fdida received his PhD from Université Pierre & Marie Curie (UPMC), Paris in 1984. He received his Habilitation in 1989. Assistant professor UPMC (1983-1987). Associate professor UPMC (1988-1991). Professor Université Paris Descartes (1991-1995). Sabbatical at IBM Raleigh in 1995. Professor Sorbonne Université. Adviser ITC Department CNRS (2000-2005). Vice-President European affairs of UPMC (2014-2018). VP International Development of Sorbonne Université (2018-2021).
Abstract
Various countries and regions have already announced formal plans of government support for their research and development efforts that will define 6G.
In order to research and master digital infrastructures, the scientific community needs to address significant challenges regarding their efficiency, trust, availability, reliability, range, end-to-end latency, security and privacy. Building and deploying test platforms is complex as digital infrastructures develop rapidly, are powered by technology and driven by applications. It is therefore critical to anticipate the demand and challenging to build the next generation of test platforms.
A generation of test facilities has emerged lately in all continents with initiatives such as NSF/PAWR and FABRIC, Colosseum, CENI and ICT-17 projects. Similarly, the software-driven approach to design and deploy digital infrastructures has triggered significant open-source initiatives such as ONAP, OAI, OMEC and O-RAN that can also inspire the framework of test platforms.
The enabling technologies such as separation between the network and the compute, virtualization, distribution and Cloud SaaS offer us the opportunity to define physical and digital platforms for at-scale research and experimentation. This trend is going to impact the telecommunication and computer-based sectors, from design to products to operation and this is where the testbeds meet the network as a fully controllable, programmable virtualized test platform. The science of Digital Infrastructures raises multiple complex challenges to the research community that already started to explore them in the context of the forthcoming 6G. Experimentation is becoming an even more important methodology to assess and qualify the diverse design assumptions and choices in realistic conditions. It is now timely not only to strengthen existing facilities ready for 5G testing but also most importantly to start developing early 6G platforms as most components are software-based. This is the motivation for proposing a holistic approach where all resources (compute, storage, network) are mobilized to address the end-to-end scenario, integrating all technologies and components. This approach will allow to continuously design, operate and automate the full life cycle management of applications and services. Such platform will be based on a technology roadmap that will be consolidated on the basis of the analysis of several inputs provided by the community regarding the wireless technology advances, that are pertinent to the evolution of new radio (NR) and core network (CN) unti-2030.
On the methodology side, our community still lacks a rigorous approach to the results produced and exposed as encyclopedic knowledge. Reproducibility is addressed regularly with almost zero progress. A scientific article is considered as reproducible if the authors provide all the data and computer codes necessary to repeat the same analysis and to obtain the “same” results (depending on the deterministic characteristics of the environment under test). Reproducibility should be provided on the same but also on different platforms. As a consequence, test platforms can also play a critical role in supporting the full research life-cycle, open data and reproducibility.
The presentation will introduce the SLICES initiative and the main methodology and solutions just started being deployed and will discuss the various challenges and concerns regarding the design and usage of these platforms.
Integrating Machine Learning and Multi-Agent Systems for Fully Enabling Device-Edge-Cloud Continuum in Complex IoT Worlds
Giancarlo Fortino
University Calabria
Italy
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Brief Bio
Giancarlo Fortino (IEEE Fellow 2022) is Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the Dept of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics, and Systems of the University of Calabria (Unical), Italy. He received a PhD in Computer Engineering from Unical in 2000. He is also distinguished professor at Wuhan University of Technology and Huazhong Agricultural University (China), high-end expert at HUST (China), senior research fellow at the Italian ICAR-CNR Institute, CAS PIFI visiting scientist at SIAT – Shenzhen, and Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE Sensors Council. At Unical, he is the Rector’s delegate to Int’l relations, the chair of the PhD School in ICT, the director of the Postgraduate Master course in INTER-IoT, and the director of the SPEME lab as well as co-chair of Joint labs on IoT established between Unical and WUT, SMU and HZAU Chinese universities, respectively. Fortino is currently the scientific responsible of the Digital Health group of the Italian CINI National Laboratory at Unical. He is Highly Cited Researcher 2020-2022 in Computer Science by Clarivate. Currently he has 20 highly cited papers in WoS, and h-index=72 with 19000+ citations in Google Scholar. His research interests include wearable computing systems, e-Health, Internet of Things, and agent-based computing. He is author of »600 papers in int’l journals, conferences and books. He is (founding) series editor of IEEE Press Book Series on Human-Machine Systems and EiC of Springer Internet of Things series and AE of premier int'l journals such as IEEE TASE (senior editor), IEEE TAFFC-CS, IEEE THMS, IEEE T-AI, IEEE IoTJ, IEEE SJ, IEEE JBHI, IEEE SMCM, IEEE OJEMB, IEEE OJCS, Information Fusion, EAAI, etc. He chaired many int’l workshops and conferences (120+), was involved in a huge number of int’l conferences/workshops (500+) as IPC member, is/was guest-editor of many special issues (75+). He is cofounder and CEO of SenSysCal S.r.l., a Unical spinoff focused on innovative IoT systems, and recently cofounder and vice-CEO of the spin-off Bigtech S.r.l, focused on big data, AI and IoT technologies. Fortino is currently member of the IEEE SMCS BoG and of the IEEE Press BoG, and former chair of the IEEE SMCS Italian Chapter.
Abstract
Recently the device-edge-cloud paradigm is gaining momentum due to the benefits it could provide for the development of highly effective, efficient, and complex IoT ecosystems of diversified scale. However, there are many issues related to unsupervised control aspects that need to be addressed in order to fully realize the approach and make it fully operative in real complex environments. In order to address such issues, in this talk, we propose an holistic integration of machine learning and multi-agent systems to create a data-driven control architecture capable to autonomically monitor and control the device-edge-cloud continuum. This objective is being developed in the context of the Horizon Europe project named MLSysOps (https://mlsysops.eu/). Some use cases will be proposed to elucidate our current findings.