EXUS is an enterprise software company specializing in credit risk management, digital transformation services and innovation management. EXUS was founded with the vision to simplify enterprise software, make it simple, accessible and exciting. EXUS supports organizations worldwide to improve their results by introducing simplicity & intelligence in their business processes through state-of-the-art technology.

EXUS AI Labs manages a portfolio of initiatives that aim to pave the way for the introduction and take up of emerging technologies. Leveraging the results of strategic research activities allows the company to harness untapped niches in market sectors of interest. EXUS excels in driving innovation in software engineering and data management to foster advances in key sectors such as: security, transport, health, creativity and lifelong learning.

 

EXUS is the coordinator of ELEGANT and also main contributor in the development of the AI mechanisms for the system orchestration. In addition, EXUS contributes to all technical and evaluation tasks to validate, test, and provide feedback to the intermediate technical deliverables following agile principles. Finally, EXUS leads the Exploitation, Dissemination and Communication activities of the project.

The University of Manchester is one of the top research-led universities and can lay claim to 25 Nobel Prize winners amongst its current and former staff and students, including 4 current Nobel laureates. The School of Computer Science plays important roles in the two EU FET flagship projects (Graphene and Human Brain Project) and collaborates with the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) experiment headquartered in the University’s Jodrell Bank Observatory. The school also has a long and distinguished research record, including the development of the first stored program computer the late ‘40s, and the development of virtual memory among a range of innovations in the Atlas computer in the early ‘60s (the UK first supercomputer).

 

The University of Manchester is the technical coordinator of the project. The main technical role of the University of Manchester is to extend current state-of-the-art JVMs in order to enable low-power heterogeneous elastic JVMs. To achieve this goal, UNIMAN will integrate their in-house Tornado VM and Maxine VM with the ELEGANT architecture and deploy instances on IoT devices and Big Data platforms. In addition, UNIMAN also works on the verification of Java code embedded into IoT devices. In particular, UNIMAN will advance the state-of-the-art in software model checking and Java verification in three main directions: investigate, develop, and evaluate efficient decision procedures for solving constraints over String operations.

The Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS) is a non-profit Academic Research Body established in 1989 by the Ministry of Education in order to carry research and development activities in the fields of all the diverse aspects of telecommunications and computer systems. ICCS is associated with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (SECE) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). The personnel of ICCS consists of a number of Research scientists and more than 500 Associate scientists (including PhD students). The research carried out in ICCS is substantially supported by the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens. ICCS is very active in European co-funded research activities and has been the project coordinator of many EU projects in various programs. ICCS will participate in this project through the Computing Systems Laboratory (CSLab) of the SECE of NTUA.

CSLab is one of the largest research laboratories of the Computer Science Department of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens. CSLab possesses strong expertise in computer architecture and large scale parallel (HPC) and distributed systems (Big Data, Cloud and P2P infrastructures). Its members have performed research and development both at the higher level of algorithmic design and applications’ optimization as well as in the assembly and operation of such systems with a tradition spanning more than three decades in the implementation, optimization and operation of systems at all scales. 

 

ICCS contributes to the project its expertise on Big Data analytics application modeling, elastic resource management and provisioning, execution optimization over multiple Big Data engines and datastores. The main role of ICCS in the project is the design and implementation of the ELEGANT orchestrator. This entails the ML/AI models for dynamic code scheduling and code motion between BigData and IoT. Additionally, ICCS collaborates with UNIMAN and TUB to interface with both the IoT devices and the Big Data framework of the ELEGANT platform.

The internationally renowned Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) is located in Germany’s capital at the heart of Europe. Its broad academic activities are focused on exceptional performance in research and teaching for approx. 34000 students, providing the graduates with excellent qualifications. The TU Berlin strives to promote the dissemination of knowledge and to facilitate technological progress through adherence to the core principles of excellence and quality. Strong regional, national and international networking with partners in science and industry is an important aspect in these endeavors.

The Machine Learning (ML) / IDA group of Klaus-Robert Müller has a 25 year-long history and currently 32 fulltime researchers and 34 students. The group has contributed to numerous theoretical and practical developments of Neural Networks/Deep Learning (e.g. explaining methods) and a number of groundbreaking developments (e.g. kernel PCA) in the field of Support-Vector-Machines (SVM) – both are considered today’s standard methods of machine learning. In particular Klaus-Robert Müller has broadly applied ML methods in the Sciences (Neuroscience, Physics, Chemistry, Brain Computer Interfacing). The Database Systems and Information Management Research Group (DIMA) under the direction of Prof. Volker Markl conducts research in the areas of information modeling, business intelligence, query processing, query optimization, impact of new hardware architectures on information management, and applications. While having a strong focus on system building and validating research in practical scenarios and use-cases, the group aims at exploring and providing fundamental and theoretically sound solutions to current major research challenges.

 

TUB brings its expertise on Big Data analytics through Prof. Volker Markl who leads the Berlin Big Data Center project. TUB’s team regularly contributes to Apache Flink. In the process of including Apache Flink in the Apache foundation, TUB has gained a lot of experience in community engagement and gaining traction for open source projects. The team publishes scientific papers in top-tier conferences on the management of data, producing high quality scientific results. In ELEGANT, TUB develops the extensions to core parts of Flink that will enable the Big Data/IoT interoperability along with the design of the unified ELEGANT API. Furthermore, TUB implements a communication API between the Big Data platforms and IoT device and will leads the Big Data/IoT management tools.

CNIT (National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications) is a non-profit Consortium, bringing together 37 Italian Universities to foster research activity in the field of telecommunications, and provide facilities and clustering support to the Italian academic ICT research community. CNIT participated in hundreds of research projects, including EU coordinated projects, ERC grants and Italian nation-wide initiatives. It operates a satellite network, three national laboratories (Photonic Networks and Radar; Surveillance Systems, in Pisa, Multimedia Communications, in Naples) and 37 Research Units, one for each participating university.

CNIT’s contribution to this project will come from two research units: University of Roma Sapienza (DIET and DIAG departments) and University of Palermo. These units bring to the proposal specific skills and interests in the fields of programmable MAC protocols, emerging IoT wireless technologies, security and big data analytics. Such units have a large expertise in EU projects, having coordinated (at general or technical level) several EU proposals in both networking and security domains. Moreover, the involved CNIT units have a significant track of research accomplishments and top tier publications in conferences such as IEEE INFOCOM, ACM CONEXT, ACM CCS, etc, and in journals such as IEEE/ACM trans. Networking, etc. In addition to scientific expertise, CNIT’s team has the capability to build demonstrators and to organize workshops and conferences, and is active in the editorial and technical boards of several major journals and conferences.

 

CNIT contributes to the project with its expertise on IoT network design, programmable networks and algorithms for supporting automatic reconfiguration of network parameters for different application-specific optimizations. In particular, CNIT contributes to the design and implementation of the ELEGANT use case related to the large-scale secure smart metering based on LoRaWAN technology. To this purpose, CNIT will adapt current LoRaWAN network nodes and software modules in order to support the ELEGANT framework, the virtualization of different network functionalities (such as network analytics, anomaly detections, resource allocations) to be implemented on both the centralized network server/controller as well as the distributed gateways regardless of their specific HW/SW architecture, as well as innovative application servers. CNIT collaborates with UND to interface with both the IoT devices and the Big Data framework of the ELEGANT platform with a real LoRaWAN network.

Endless Innovation is not only a tagline, Unidata is one of the most innovative telco company operating in Italy. Technology driven, Unidata is continuously innovating since its foundation in 1985. Initially focused on hardware and microelectronics production, proposed in Italy the first personal computers and the first network making intensive use of microprocessors. In the early 1990s its core business changed, and it became one of the first Italian Internet Service Providers. In 2004 it also became a telephone operator bringing fiber to the home for quality telecommunications services.

Unidata has always been a company with a long-term vision, able to early adopt the best technologies and develop new customer-oriented solutions. Historically aimed mainly at business customers, Unidata has always made of flexibility, satisfying specific needs, listening to the customer and proximity its principal strengths, growing continuously its customer base and loyalty year after year. In the last few years Unidata has also worked to meet the demand from residential users, offering in areas poorly served or not served at all sources of high-speed broadband connections, offering up to 1000 Mbps of connectivity. This has been possible thanks to the invaluable fiber-optic infrastructure – more than 2,000 km of Unidata fiber – and the FTTH (Fiber To The Home) infrastructure architecture, meaning that from the server to the end user, the line is entirely made up of optical fibers, without copper sections, in order to achieve maximum performance.

 

The role of Unidata in the project is to bring the point of view and know-how of an IoT network operator, both in the context of definition and development of the ELEGANT platform (requirements, interoperability, ecosystems) and above all in the integration testing and validation phases, with a use case dedicated to the implementation of the project results in the GW of its LoraWan network.

Spark Works Ltd (SWORKS) is a nascent technology company delivering advanced hardware and software products in the areas of smart devices, e-health, building automation, telecommunication data analytics, ambient intelligence and car analytics with emphasis on the driver's behaviour. SPARKS team comprises well-trained industrial and academic researchers, combining skills and expertise in the fields of Internet of Things, eHealth, Smart Cities, Big Data, Advanced Analytics, novel telecommunication architectures such as Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Fog, V2X communication paradigms, paired with complimentary 5G Networking verticals. SWORKS’ engineers are proficient in offering high quality full stack development and service integration, already demonstrated through a diverse portfolio of successful research projects, PoCs, Hackathons, IEEE/ACM conference participation and demos, along with several SME events. The company has brought forward new ICT solutions that employ state of the art technologies developed in numerous private and EU funded projects under FP7 and H2020, while currently cooperating with partners across the EU having successfully deployed its hardware and software solutions in large public/private buildings such as schools and hospitals, maritime facilities and more recently cars and large vehicle fleets.

Founded with a result-driven mentality, SparkWorks is challenged by the opportunity of constantly evolving its platform and performing real-world experiments, it is therefore interested to identify new research challenges and architectural swifts that will probably lead into future product features to cover the constantly increased customer demand in the most efficient manner. Especially in the era of 5G and Tactile Internet that is rapidly approaching, SparkWorks intends to offer a solution as concrete as possible, able to penetrate into the now-shaping and extremely demanding market of Smart Cities (mostly through the Ecofriendly/Green Smart Building vertical).

 

SparkWorks Ltd under the auspices of the ELEGANT will enhance a use case scenario related to smart wearables in healthcare that efficiently track essential vital signs. SWORKS heavily invests in the extended functionality of next generation wearable devices, which include methods for monitoring and feedback, rehabilitation process assistance and therapeutic purposes or disease management, to provide a simple, unified healthcare infrastructure. Moreover, SWORKS intends to utilize the results of ELEGANT in the fields of the Unified API, the integrated application virtualization layer based on JVMs and the Intelligent Orchestrator to enhance the capabilities of its overall product line. This will greatly benefit ELEGANT as a whole, since preliminary results based on real-world deployment requirements will become available thus boosting the effect of all parallel development activities of each architectural element of the ELEGANT framework.

Unisystems founded in 1964 and is a member of the Quest Group. It is one of the most reliable ICT solutions providers in South-East and Central Europe, with more than 500 specialized executives, an annual revenue of €100 million and subsidiaries in Belgium, Luxemburg and Romania. It has being a strategic partner of Financial Institutions, EU Agencies, Telecommunications Providers and Enterprises. The company is implementing and supporting large-scale, complex and mission critical ICT projects in European Organizations. Due to its true client oriented approach, commitment to excellence and its agile and efficient management style, UniSystems is positioned as a focused ICT provider to the European marketplace having already gained the respect of its partners and the trust of its Clients. The solutions and services portfolio includes: infrastructure modernization & redesign, Cloud services and supports, DevOps automation, IT security, telecom consultancy & design, case management, human capital management, application management, critical systems custom software development, financials systems, business support. With more than 500 specialized executives, an annual revenue of over €100 million and subsidiaries in Belgium, Luxemburg and Romania, Unisystems is also investing in its international perspective, demonstrating exceptional reliability and a wide portfolio of successful case studies and best practices.

 

Within the ELEGANT project, UniSystems leads the development of the IDE extensions and UI tools to be used by developers for easier deployment of the ELEGANT platform and assists in the integration and validation tasks. Furthermore, UniSystems provides consultancy services for the design and development of both the Cloud Computing and IoT modules of the ELEGANT framework.

UBITECH is a leading, highly innovative software house, systems integrator and technology provider, established to provide leading edge intelligent technical solutions and consulting services to businesses, organizations and government in order to allow the efficient and effective secure access and communication with various heterogeneous information resources and services, anytime and anywhere. UBITECH enables real-time valid information processing and decision-making, the realization of intelligent business environments, and B2B and B2C transactions by providing high added-value business –oriented and –based solutions. UBITECH has been established in Athens, Greece back in 2005, concentrated initially in the Greek and Balkan market and acquiring several EC and national grants for novel R&D initiatives. Currently, UBITECH has extended its operations with targeted international activities through its subsidiaries, representation offices, business partners and affiliated companies in Limassol (Cyprus), Madrid (Spain), Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Guayaquil (Ecuador), concentrating mainly in the Spanish-speaking countries of Central and Latin America. Technology innovation constitutes the lifeblood of UBITECH. We are continuously seeking and validating new, emerging technologies, developing new ideas, concepts and solutions, and improving existing software applications and products for vertical markets or for addressing specific end-users' needs. UBITECH R&D team is engaged in developing, integrating, deploying, piloting, demonstrating and evaluating innovative technologies, utilities, features and processes, transferring technological know-how to end-user organizations and adapting breakthrough solutions to end-users' demands. UBITECH R&D team participates in large, multidisciplinary consortiums in complex and highly-innovative projects, including experts from universities, research institutes and industry across the enlarged Europe, which partner to provide research, technology integration and skilled project management.

UBITECH performs applied research in the areas of Cloud Computing, Software and Services; Network Softwarization and 5G Technologies; Digital Security and Privacy, Big Data and Analytics; Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things; Energy Efficiency; Factories of the Future; Life Sciences and e/m-Health; Ambient Assisted and Independent Living; e-Government and Policy Modelling; Lifelong Education and Technology-enhanced Learning.

 

Within ELEGANT, UBITECH has a double role, providing one of the project’s use cases and also participating in the work performed in the technical work-packages. More specifically, UBITECH provides the needed requirements and SLAs that will be used in order to design the conceptual architecture of ELEGANT and then will evaluate the outcomes of the project by refactoring the surveillance solution, making test deployments and evaluate with dedicated tests. Regarding its role in the technical part of the project UBITECH leads WP2 that is responsible for the gathering of the essential use case requirements, SLAs, and extract and characterize the data operators of the applications. UBITECH R&D with strong experience and expertise on security and also cloud and edge computing, will contribute to related tasks, both at the design but also on the implementation part.

ITTI is an IT company (SME) providing software solutions for companies and institutions in Poland and in other countries. The company operates since 1996 and is located in Poznan, Poland. Currently, ITTI has a team consisting of ca. 90 persons. The main goal of ITTI is to develop and provide innovative applications and dedicated software solutions which are adjusted to customer needs, e.g. systems supporting management of warehouses and manufacturing processes, systems supporting preparation of space missions or space situational awareness activities, e-health systems, simulation tools. Since 2001 ITTI has been actively involved in the research and development projects performed in the programmes funded by European Commission (recently H2020, and formerly FP5, FP6 and FP7), European Defence Agency (e.g. Joint Investment Programme on Force Protection, Joint Investment Programme on CBRN) and national research programmes. In R&D activities the company cooperates closely with numerous universities and research institutes based in Poland as well as around Europe. Moreover, ITTI collaborates with such organisations as European Space Agency (ESA) and European Network Information Security Agency (ENISA).

 

Within ELEGANT, ITTI brings its expertise in the area of cyber security, information management and pattern recognition, critical infrastructure protection, software quality, as well as data privacy.

KTM Innovation GmbH, a subsidiary of Pierer Mobility A.G., is leading the digitization of the largest European manufacturer of powered two-wheeler vehicles. KTM is the leading manufacturer of motorbikes in Europe and fourth globally. With an average production of over 200000 vehicles per year, KTM faces grand challenges in terms of security and privacy for its connected fleet of powered two-wheelers. To this end, KTM Innovation is responsible for researching and developing end-to-end solutions for IoT and data delivery between the various components, vehicles, and in general any internet-enabled in-house manufactured equipment.

KTM Innovation GmbH was founded as the first point of contact for digital transformation and innovation of the Pierer Mobility group. KTM Innovation operates within various technology fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Blockchain and Business Modelling. With its own software competence and a unit for technology consulting, KTM Innovation GmbH tackles problems that span vertically the software and hardware stack.

 

KTM Innovation participates to the ELEGANT proposal as a use case provider. The proposed use case will assess both the end-to-end security of the IoT infrastructure of the vehicles and the proposed code optimizations. KTM Innovation also assists in the deployment of the ELEGANT solutions on its IoT infrastructure. Last but not least, KTM leads the Standardization activities of the project.