Projects

The vision of NEPHELE is to enable the efficient, reliable and secure end-to-end orchestration of hyper-distributed applications over programmable infrastructure that is spanning across the compute continuum from Cloud-to-Edge-to-IoT, removing existing openness and interoperability barriers in the convergence of IoT technologies against cloud and edge computing orchestration platforms, and introducing automation and decentralized intelligence mechanisms powered by 5G and distributed AI technologies. The NEPHELE project aims to introduce two core innovations, namely: (i) an IoT and edge computing software stack for leveraging virtualization of IoT devices at the edge part of the infrastructure and supporting openness and interoperability aspects in a device-independent way; (ii) a synergetic meta-orchestration framework for managing the coordination between cloud and edge computing orchestration platforms, through high-level scheduling supervision and definition, based on the adoption of a “system of systems” approach. The NEPHELE outcomes are going to be demonstrated, validated and evaluated in a set of use cases across various vertical industries, including areas such as disaster management, logistic operations in ports, energy management in smart buildings and remote healthcare services. 

Funding Agency: Horizon Europe (HORIZON) – WORLD LEADING DATA AND COMPUTING TECHNOLOGIES 2021
Duration: 01/09/2022-31/08/2025

As one of the first in a series of projects foreseen under GN5-FPA, GN5-1 aims to provide faster, more resilient and secure connectivity infrastructure and collaboration services to enable researchers and students’ access to applications that support evidence-based and effective collaboration across virtual research teams, worldwide. GN5-1 will continue the development of state-of-the art, cost-effective, secure and resilient connectivity to provide unconstrained capacity ahead of demand in the backbone network and NREN access in multiples of 100Gbps, delivering Terabit connectivity where needed. GN5-1 will prototype, pilot and, where appropriate, procure new online above-the-net services and deliver pervasive, innovative and distributed trust and identity infrastructure and services to achieve strategic positioning of T&I services as a key enabler of research and education collaboration within Europe.

Funding Agency: HORIZON – Research infrastructures
Duration: 01/01/2023-31/12/2024

The v-PalM project aims to develop a platform for offering virtual guidance and education services at the Museum of Paleontology and Geology that is hosted at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens. The development of the platform will be based on innovative information and communication technologies (ICT), including conversational agents, machine learning, personalized recommenders, development of mobile applications taking advantage of gamification techniques and content digitization using 3D scanning devices. The v-PalM solution will create a Virtual Museum offering to visitors user-friendly access to the available material, so that the interested people, depending on their interests, will be able to enjoy the virtual tour services, including educational and entertainment services for the museum, focusing on cases where physical access is not possible. The solution will be also applicable within the museum, contributing to the upgraded offering of traditional services based on a physical visit in the museum.

Funding Agency: General Secretary for Research and Innovation
Duration: 01/08/2022-31/12/2023

STREET-LINES project aims to develop a system that will collect information from open tourism-based platforms and online social networks used by the visitors, and it will generate in an automated manner recommendations for strategic planning of cultural events, designing proper support of the emerging tourist destinations, etc. Specifically, the STREET-LINES project will crawl publicly available sites containing tourism-relevant content, e.g., websites of Municipalities/Prefectures, and online social media aiming to collect as many as possible open data relevant with planned events, provided from the organizers and relevant to the interests of users that are considered potential visitors. The system will store the relevant information in an innovative way based on multi-layer complex networks, that will allow the proper scaling of the collection process of large amount of data and their analysis. Also, the system will analyze the users’ actions (sentiment analysis) in order to recognize cognitive information regarding their interests and subsequently, based on a groundbreaking network embedding technique in metric spaces, it will generate intelligent recommendations.

Funding Agency: General Secretary for Research and Innovation
Duration: 01/08/2022-31/12/2023

The project will build on top of the Horizon 2020 Up2U project that has piloted its methodology and its learning platform with selected teachers from hundreds of schools from several European countries. The Up2U finished in 2020, and reported a positive impact on teachers but also identified their further needs. This Up2DigiSchool project will adopt that methodology and the technical solutions, will update it to the current circumstances and to newly-recognised teachers’ needs, and will extend the previous target schools base to make a positive impact on more teachers of Europe. Starting from the already-recognised needs and existing solutions, the Up2DigiSchool project ensures it will efficiently address the real challenges of the target groups.

Funding Agency: ERASMUS+
Duration: 01/02/2022-28/02/2025

EduCardia aims to develop an assessment methodology focusing on assessing and improving socioemotional competencies of students in primary and secondary educational level. The project is based on an existing open-access Emotional Intelligence (EI) model, known as EmoSocio, that enables teachers to identify at-risk and neglected students in the classroom, potential victims of bullying as well as the existence of cliques. Appropriate Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) material for Teachers accompanied by a set of training activities for students will be developed within the EduCardia project. According to the assessment results provided by the EmoSocio tool, teachers choose some of the suggested training activities with the aim to ameliorate the inclusion of students, the class climate, and the educational equity. After some period of making educational activities, teachers should re-execute the EmoSocio model to figure out whether there is any improvement in the tool’s assessment results.

Funding Agency: ERASMUS+
Duration: 01/02/2022-28/02/2025

The project WE-COLLAB aims to implement innovative practices to improve student engagement during online teaching. It is essential to support teachers in designing several teaching methodologies. Innovative pedagogical skills are needed to provide solutions for inclusive and high-quality digital education. The project will directly address challenges that often characterise poorly designed online courses such as fatigue during long video conferences, sense of being isolated, higher levels of distractibility, providing specific guidelines on new approaches to be used, teaching styles and effective teaching materials to enhance online learning.

Funding Agency: ERASMUS+
Duration: 01/02/2022-28/02/2025

ARSINOE shapes the pathways to resilience by bringing together Systems Innovation Approach (SIA) and Climate Innovation Window (CIW), to build an ecosystem for climate change adaptation solutions. Within the ARSINOE ecosystem, pathways to solutions are co-created and co-designed by stakeholders, who can then select either existing CIW technologies, or technologies by new providers (or a combination) to form an innovation package. ARSINOE applies a three-tier, approach: (a) using SIA it integrates multi-faceted technological, digital, business, governance and environmental aspects with social innovation for the development of adaptation pathways to climate change for specific regions; (b) it links with CIW to form innovation packages by matching innovators with end-users/regions; (c) it fosters the ecosystem sustainability and growth with cross-fertilization and replication across regions and scales, at European level and beyond, using specific business models, exploitation and outreach actions. The ARSINOE approach is show-cased in nine widely varied demonstrators, as a proof-of-concept with regards to its applicability, replicability, potential and efficacy.

Funding Agency: HORIZON 2020, (H2020) – Building a low-carbon, climate resilient future: Research and innovation in support of the European Green Deal
Duration: 01/10/2021-30/09/2025

During the COVID-19 crisis across all countries, the situation of students with disabilities has been one of the most critical due to the need for rapid and radical changes in already complex circumstances. Project SUCCESS ‒ “Supporting success for all – Universal Design Principles in Digital Learning for students with disabilities” ‒ aims to support teachers and caregivers who work with students during lockdowns, when digital tools and distance learning are the only media available for attending classes and interacting with peers.

Funding Agency: ERASMUS+
Duration: 01/03/2021-31/12/2023

In DRUIDNET we first propose a formal dynamical model of the resources, workload and network, that incorporates phenomena met in dynamic systems, such as wireless communications, mobile edge computing datacentres, and network time varying topologies. We also propose a new set of estimators for the workload and resources time varying profiles, which together with the development of a formal hybrid model allow the description of the future behaviour. Moreover, we establish novel resource allocation mechanisms that take into account explicitly service differentiation, QoS/QoE metrics and context-awareness. Our research goes one step further by focusing on the development of control algorithms for cyber-physical systems (CPS),that incorporate resource allocation mechanisms to the decision strategy itself. This new generation of controllers, driven by a co-design philosophy both in the network resource utilization and computing resource utilization, has the potential to cause a quantum leap in many crucial fields in engineering, such as Industry 4.0, collaborative robotics, logistics, and general multi-agent systems. To achieve all these breakthroughs, we utilize and combine tools from Automata and graph theory, machine learning, modern control theory and network theory. 

Funding Agency: General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT)
Duration: 01/08/2020-31/12/2023