Projects

Hospital Acquired Infection and Outbreak Prevention System (HAI-OPS)

haiops_logo

The HAI-OPS project aims to decrease overall mortality and morbidity associated with hospital infections by targeting their most common sources and transmission pathways. This will be achieved using a comprehensive and configurable cyber-physical system. HAI-OPS differs from existing solutions by providing a comprehensive & pragmatic solution for combating hospital infection at many levels using an integrated cyber-physical system, that employs a two-pronged approach. First  of all, a basic line of defense that uses real-time monitoring of clinical workflows that are most prone to infection transmission, implemented both horizontally (pathogen-agnostic) and vertically (pathogen-specific). Second, an advanced line of defense that will employ the creation of hospital risk maps and contact networks between clinical healthcare workers.

International project funded via EUREKA’s Eurostars Project E9831, contract no. 47E/2015 / 09.12.2015.

A Pervasive Home Monitoring System Based on Intelligent Luminaires

ilight_logoThe aim of the i-Light project is to develop a novel energy efficient luminaire equipped with an embedded sensing, indoor localisation and communications electronic system that enables a pervasive, seamless, and inexpensive home monitoring scheme. This product is defined as a next-generation intelligent LED bulb that includes an additional electronic core for environment interfacing, data acquisition and transmission. This novel solution will enable a set of services to prospective users: tele-health applications, ambient assisted living, home rehabilitation applications, educational or training scenarios, or any other framework where long term pervasive monitoring is required.

International project funded via EUREKA’s Eurostars Project E9770, contract no. 46E/2015 / 09.12.2015.

Sound of Vision – Natural Sense of Vision through Acoustics and Haptics

soundofvision_logoThe Sound of Vision (Natural sense of vision through acoustics and haptics) project will design, implement and validate an original non-invasive, wearable hardware and software system to assist visually impaired people by creating and conveying an auditory representation of the surrounding environment. This representation will be created, updated and delivered to the blind users continuously and in real time. In addition to the auditory representation, haptics will be used moderately as an additional channel to convey some of the most relevant information. The system will help visually impaired people to both perceive and navigate in any kind of environment (indoor/outdoor), without the need for predefined tags/sensors located in the surroundings and regardless of the lighting conditions. The process of assisting visually impaired people that will be carried out by the device created by Sound of Vision consists of a series of repetitive steps, performed  continuously, in real-time:

  • 3D scanning of the environment: the portable hardware and software components scan the surrounding environment and create a 3D mesh-like representation of it;
  • 3D model processing: objects are identified within the 3D mesh model of the surroundings based on several characteristics, such as pixel/surface color and depth; most relevant objects are selected to be presented to the user through the next steps;
  • Encoding of visual information in the audio: every object of interest (extracted from the 3D model) is converted into 3D sound sources with characteristics corresponding the important characteristics of the object: position relative to the user, (estimated) size, distance to the user and in some cases movement, color, shape;
  • Actual audio rendering: the sounds produced by all the 3D sound sources are combined and played to the user, using specialized algorithms and wearable hardware.

International project funded via the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program.

Compositional Risk Assessment and Security Testing of Networked Systems (RASEN)

rasen_logoThe ICT systems on which the European society depends are becoming increasingly heterogeneous and complex. This is certainly the case with respect to technology and infrastructure, but also in terms of the social, economic and legal context of the systems. Heterogeneous networked service and computing environments cross organisational as well as geographical borders, and pose security challenges that need to be addressed from a broad perspective encompassing all these aspects, rather than viewed as a purely technical issue. This is also directly motivated by the Digital Agenda and its focus on trust, security and reliability. Our dependence on heterogeneous networked service and computing environments means that it is essential for organisations (including their non-technical personnel) to understand what their security properties mean in terms of risks. However, the nature of such systems makes security assessment very challenging for two reasons:

  1. Performing security assessments of large network systems in their entirety is infeasible, hence most organisations perform smaller assessments on parts of their systems. However, they are then left with a number of isolated assessments with no way of combining these into a global assessment picture.
  2. Security assessment are usually performed either at a high-level (e.g. by risk assessment), or at the technical low-level (e.g. by security testing). However, there are few methods and techniques that support bridging the gap between the two levels of abstraction.

Many software systems, also those of RASEN partners, such as the online banking system developed by EVRY and the health care systems developed by Info World are considered to be an important part of the European infrastructure, and therefore their security is governed by laws and regulations intended to ensure that they function as expected. However, it can be challenging for organisations to show that they are in compliance with these laws, e.g. because the laws are vague or interpreted differently. It is therefore our aim to strengthen organisations’ ability to assure compliance with legal norms and to assess the risks related to non-compliance by developing methods for risk assessment which specifically takes into account legal aspects of relevance to security. Lastly, in order to support rapid security assessments and to reduce time spent on security assessment of large scale system, our approach will have a particular emphasis on continuous security assessment in which (1) the security assessment is performed iteratively in such a way that results from previous assessments can be reused, and (2) the security risk assessment picture can be rapidly updated based on passive testing .

The overall objective of the RASEN project was to strengthen European organisations’ ability to conduct security assessments of large scale networked systems through the combination of security risk assessment and security testing, taking into account the context in which the system is used, such as liability, legal and organisational issues as well as technical issues. By organisations, we mean (1) organisations that develop software that needs to be security assessed and (2) organisations that operate or acquire software that needs to be security assessed. Networked large scale systems will be specifically targeted by our approach by the notions of compositionality and continuous assessment.

The extent to which the project objective was fulfilled was evaluated through its three case studies. The use case providers already performed security testing as part of their software development process, and were in a position to make comparisons and evaluate the difference between their current approach and the RASEN approach. The project had two separate evaluation phases where  the fulfillment of project objectives was evaluated. The results of these evaluations are detailed within the publicly-available project deliverables.

International project funded via the European Union’s FP7 program.