The GÉANT Innovation Programme strikes again! The 2023 edition awarded funds to 10 new projects from the community. The projects cover a range of working areas, from e-Health to networks, cloud, trust & identity, security and – a new one this year – blockchain.
What do these projects plan to do? How will they benefit the community?
Let’s take a closer look!
eHealth
The University of Kragujevac in Serbia proposed to create a new generation of compact, contactless medical devices to transform the medical support that can be provided on a continual basis to elderly patients, supporting their dependence and social inclusion. Outputs of the project will also include open-source data paradigms for analysis, interpretation, and sharing.
IRCCS MultiMedica – MultiMedica SpA in Italy is working on a project called “Education Never Dies”. This project aims to provide an immersive learning experience for remote medical students in anatomy, surgical anatomy, and surgical techniques, by combining wearable technology for the surgeon with audio/visual broadcasting from the laboratory, to provide a distributed first-person learning experience for remote students.
Cloud
The project proposed by the University of Galway in Ireland – SecMC: Secure Data Management for Multi-Cloud Environments – aims to address the challenges faced by industries in managing and securing data in a multi-cloud environment, developing a solution that solves data fragmentation and silos caused by the use of multiple clouds by organisations.
Networking
The University of Sussex in the UK is working on overcome some limitations identified in the literature on reinforcement learning-based congestion control, namely fairness amongst competing network flows without sacrificing performance and network utilisation, and the scalability of existing policies.
Security
The Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy is set to develop and test advanced and innovative graph-based techniques for anomaly-based intrusion detection. Graph theory has been identified as a promising tool for improving the accuracy and performance of network intrusion detection systems. The end goal is to provide the GÉANT community and the wider scientific community with an innovative approach to intrusion detection that will result in improved security monitoring and better protection of cyber assets against malicious actors.
Also in Italy, the University of Trieste is studying and implementing viable techniques for applying differential privacy to network data, such as passive network measurements, network device log files, or flow records. This is expected to ease the tension between data and users’ privacy due to the high among of personal data generated by ICT systems and stored in the cloud. Differential privacy is a promising approach to anonymise data releases and queries to private datasets.
SUNET, the Swedish NREN, is embarking in a joint activity with NORDUnet, that aims to design and implement and Open Source network controller for the management of core network devices including programmable automatic network services. This open platform is expected to be applicable to the wider community and to be beneficial not only because it is free but also because it supports innovative activities thanks to its open source code.
The University of Cambridge is looking at Internet of Things (IoT) devices. As they are on the rise, security has become a priority. These devices would benefit from being managed on a network level but first they need to be identified. This project proposes to create a system improve device identification and any change to its communication, which could be an indication of the device being hacked or misconfigured.
T&I
TSD (Services for Sensitive Data) and Educloud are two on-premise cloud services used by the University of Oslo. This project aims to digitising the process to register foreign Primary Investigators (PI) – one not having the Norwegian electronic ID – to avoid any hassle, help-desk service or physical paperwork and, instead, by using services as eIDAS, Life Science IAM, and eduGAIN.
Blockchain
The project submitted by the University of Cagliari is called “CAMEL – Comparative Analysis of Metrics for an Enhanced Level of Blockchain KPI measurement”. Blockchain applications are on the rise and it is of paramount importance that the protocols they are based on are investigated and monitored to guarantee high performance. This project’s working group aims at measuring protocols’ KPIs with a more systematic and scientific approach with the aim of providing the research community more trust and control over them to increase their use.
This is just a snapshot of the new solutions and ideas that the community will be developing in the coming months. If you are interested in reading about the projects that were awarded funds in the first (2021) and second (2022) edition of the GÉANT Innovation Programme, visit https://community.geant.org/community-programme-portfolio/innovation-programme/funded-projects
