The main goal of COG-LO is to create the framework and tools that will add cognition and collaboration features to future logistics processes by: 1) Introducing the Cognitive Logistics Object (CLO) by adding cognitive behavior to all involved Logistics actors and processes; 2) Developing the environment that will allow CLOs to exchange information through ad-hoc social secure networks. The main objectives of COG-LO are: (a) Definition of a Future Cognitive Logistics Objects reference implementation model that supports cognitive logistics behaviour; (b) Design and develop the necessary analytics and cognitive tools that enable complex event detection, context awareness and multi-criteria decision support. (c) To design and develop the collaboration platform based on hybrid ad-hoc social networks of CLOs. (d) To design and develop the COG-LO tools (Cognitive Advisor, which realizes the cognitive behavior of CLO based on the reference implementation model, and Tweeting CLOs, allowing CLOs to exchange information in ad-hoc Social IoT networks); (e) To evaluate the COG-LO results via intermodal, cross-country and urban logistics pilot operations. (f) To introduce new business models for ad-hoc collaborations affecting all logistics stakeholders and create a community of Logistics, ICT and urban environment stakeholders. The consortium is led by SingularLogic and consists of 14 partners from 8 countries.

The Web economy has been revolutionized by unprecedented possibility of collecting massive amounts of user personal data, which lead the web to become the largest data market and created the biggest companies in our history. Unfortunately, this change has deep consequences for users, who, deprived of any negotiation power, are compelled to blindly provide their data for free access to services. Data collection is opaque, fragmented and disharmonic, so that users have no control over their personal data, and, thus, on their privacy. Personal Information Management Systems (PIMS) aim to give users back control over their data, while creating transparency in the market. However, so far, they have failed to reach business maturity and sizeable user bases. PIMCity offers tools to change this scenario. First, we implement a PIMS development kit (PDK) to commoditize the complexity of creating PIMS. This lowers the barriers for companies and SME to enter the web data market. Second, we design and deploy novel mechanisms to increase users' awareness: (i) the Transparency Tags (TT) show users essential information about the services they access, in a simple and easy to understand manner; (ii) the Personal Data Avatar (PDA) is an intuitive means for users to control the information shared to third parties. Third, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the above tools by engineering EasyPIMS, our fully-fledged PIMS. We commit to build the largest-ever transparent data marketplace implementing and demonstrating EasyPIMS with hundreds of thousands of end-users, collaborating with advertisers and operators in the web market. We strongly believe that an open market for data will only flourish if we stop the arms race between users and services. For this, we involve advertisers and end-users in the whole process. PIMCity has all these players in our consortium, along with leading IT companies and data providers, renowned research centres and universities, and SMEs already in the market of PIMS.

Superfluidity is “a state in which matter behaves like a fluid with zero viscosity”. Our project aims at achieving superfluidity in the network: the ability to instantiate services on-the-fly, run them anywhere in the network (core, aggregation, edge) and shift them transparently to different locations. The SUPERFLUIDITY project tackles crucial shortcomings in today’s networks: long provisioning times, with wasteful over-provisioning used to meet variable demand; reliance on rigid and cost-ineffective hardware devices; daunting complexity emerging from three forms of heterogeneity: heterogeneous traffic and sources; heterogeneous services and needs; and heterogeneous access technologies, with multi-vendor network components. The SUPERFLUIDITY solution is based on: a decomposition of network components and services into elementary and reusable primitives; a native, converged cloud-based architecture; the virtualization of radio and network processing tasks; platform-independent abstractions, permitting reuse of network functions across heterogeneous hardware platforms, while catering to the vendors’ need for closed platforms/implementations; and high performance software optimizations along with leveraging of hardware accelerators. As a result, the 5G network will benefit from: i) location-independence: network services deployable in heterogeneous networks; ii) time-independence: near instantaneous deployment and migration of services; iii) scale-independence: transparent service scalability; and iv) hardware-independence: development and deployment of services with high performance irrespective of the underlying hardware. Through these properties, SUPERFLUIDITY will provide a converged cloud-based 5G concept that will enable innovative use cases in the mobile edge, empower new business models, and reduce investment and operational costs. The SUPERFLUIDITY consortium gathers an impressive and uncommon blend of Telco and IT players that can make its vision a reality.

The overall theme of our proposed doctoral programme is ECOLE: Experience-based COmputation: Learning to optimisE. It seeks novel synergies between nature inspired optimisation and machine learning to address new challenges that arise in industry due to the increasing complexity of products, product development and production processes. The unique aspect of ECOLE is to study and capture the notion of experience that is associated with expert engineers, who have worked on complex optimisation tasks for a certain time, in a computational framework composed of machine learning and optimisation strategies. We aim at developing cutting-edge optimisation algorithms that can continuously accumulate experience by learning from development projects both over time and across different problem categories. The more such algorithms are used for different optimisation problems, the better they become since their accumulated experience increases. The Consortium consists of two world-leading universities, the University of Birmingham (UK) and the University of Leiden (The Netherlands), both in the top 150 in the 2016-17 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and two innovative companies, Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH (Germany) in the automotive sector and NEC Europe Ltd (UK) in the ICT sector. All have world-leading research groups with complementary expertise that support ECOLE. ECOLE fills an urgent need in Europe for highly skilled optimisation and machine learning experts who have first-hand industrial experiences allowing sustainable know-how growth for solving future challenges. Its entire training programme is centred around a set of novel research projects proposed for early stage researchers (ESRs), complemented by domain knowledge training, hands-on engineering training and transferable skill training. ESRs will spend 50% of their time in the non-academic beneficiaries and be trained in different academic environments and industrial sectors.

Quickly developing, upgrading and deploying applications is the core function of the software and IT industry, often achieved through running software on shared hardware (e.g., on data centers) in order to reduce costs and improve profitability. At this point however, the software world appears stuck with inherently insecure and not-so-efficient lightweight virtualization (e.g., containers), because virtual machines are deemed too expensive to use in many scenarios. Unikernels, extremely lightweight VMs, seem like a step towards a solution, but their overwhelming development time and costs hinder their use in real-world settings. Unicore will challenge this status quo by enabling software developers to easily build and quickly deploy lightweight, secure and verifiable images (which we call unikernels) starting from existing applications. Unicore will create a common code base from which to build unikernels, and develop tools that will make the creation of such unikernels as easy as compiling an app for an existing OS, which will enable EU players to lead the next generation of cloud computing services and technology. Such tools will also allow for the creation of lean, efficient operating systems that would be perfectly suitable for resource-constrained devices settings such as IoT. Through its industry-led consortium and its top-notch academic partners, Unicore will ensure exploitation of its technical results through the implementation and operational deployment of multiple use cases. Unicore addresses the work programme’s goals by (1) providing a common code base and tools for code reusability, (2) by developing tools for verification and validation of the generated software, (3) through transparently handling of cross-platform dependencies and by (4) accelerating the full software lifecycle by fully automating several of its stages.