EU Day at CCGrid 2022
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EU Day at CCGrid 2022
May 19, 2022
The CCGrid symposium series serves as a major international forum for presenting and sharing recent research accomplishments and technological developments in the field of Cluster, Cloud and Internet computing.
CCGrid 2022 is the 22nd edition of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Cluster, Cloud and Internet computing, taking place from 16-19 May 2022. The first CCGrid Conference started in Brisbane, Australia, in 2001. Since then, the conference has successfully been hosted around the world. Returning back to its originating country, the 22nd International conference is going to be held in Taormina (Messina), Italy.
We invite the European Cloud Community to participate in the EU Day at CCGrid 2022 on May 19th 2022.
EU Day, organised by HUB4CLOUD, explores the major developments in the European cloud computing ecosystem, in particular open source approaches.
CONFERENCE WEBSITE: https://fcrlab.unime.it/ccgrid22/
REGISTRATION OPEN (choose EU Day Early if you are joining only for this event and not the full conference): https://fcrlab.unime.it/ccgrid22/registrations/
EU day AGENDA
09:00 – 09:25 Opening and keynote
- Luis Busquets, Programme Officer Cloud and Software unit, DG CONNECT, European Commission
09:25 – 11:00 Project presentation I
DataCloud: An Ecosystem for Managing Big Data Pipelines on the Computing Continuum
by Dumitru Roman, SINTEF AS
With so much data being both generated and processed on the Computing Continuum (covering Cloud, Fog, and Edge paradigms), novel ways to effectively and efficiently manage data on the Computing Continuum are needed. Data pipelines, covering a broad set of operations from data collection to delivering insights, are central to managing data in this context. Supporting the lifecycle of Big Data pipelines on the Computing Continuum – including discovery, definition, simulation, adaptation, provisioning, and deployment of pipelines – is a challenging task. This is further exacerbated by the need to empower domain experts with little infrastructure and software know-how to actively participate in the design and operation of data pipelines. This presentation will introduce an ecosystem for managing Big Data pipelines on the Computing Continuum, together with a toolbox, architecture, and use cases based on the work carried out in the H2020 DataCloud project.
EU URBANITE project
by Maria Fazio, University of Messina
Cities are facing a revolution in urban mobility. Emerging start-ups are offering innovative mobility solutions to satisfy the demand of the growing population, both living or moving into the cities every day. We are moving from the concept of owning to sharing a vehicle; from using public transport services to moving around with a hop on/off bike or electric scooter; disruptive start-ups (Uber, Cabify) are shaking up traditionally established business models… But this innovation is also bringing up unforeseen consequences that public administrations need to manage. Electric scooters driven in pedestrian areas are posing safety risks and even pedestrian kills; piles of broken bikes are laying around in streets; protests and strikes by taxi drivers; electric charge points need to coexist with the growing demand for public parking spaces. It is in this new context that public administrations need means to help them understand this new scenario, supporting them in making policy–related decisions and predicting eventualities. There is a need of a platform that can harvest, fuse and curate data from heterogeneous sources, that can extract knowledge to help in the decision-making processes and simulation of solutions to anticipate behaviours and delimit unforeseen consequences. Besides, such intelligent platform can foster cross-departmental collaboration by eradicating internal silos. URBANITE analyses the impact, trust and attitudes of civil servants, citizens and other stakeholders with respect to the integration of disruptive technologies such as AI, DSS, big data analytics and predictive algorithms in a data–driven decision-making process. To this end, URBANITE provides recommendations, pathways and toolkits (both ICT-based such as data management platform and DSS, and non-ICT such as co-creation activities and a repository of social-related assets) for city managers. Results are validated in 4 real use cases: Amsterdam, Bilbao, Helsinki and Messina.
Personal Data Access Control in SmartCity domain: exploitation and control, and new integration possibilities in data sharing architectures Industrial Data Space (IDS)
by Ana Isabel Torre Bastida, Tecnalia research & Innovation
Current data sharing architectures, like Industrial Data Space – IDS, still lack maturity and certain requirements or functionalities that prevent them from being complete solutions when it comes to implementing intelligent, exploitable, secure, and reliable data spaces on which to develop a healthy data economy. One of these main shortcomings is the treatment of personal data and it is that these reference models are highly oriented to guarantee the sovereignty of the data for industrial data, and therefore the access control and exploitation of personal data is out of their scope, forgetting the exceptional privacy and usage conditions that must be considered in this type of data. In this tutorial we present a personal data cataloging system and its possible associated access policies, to allow the discovery of this kind of data and at the same time, control that only those who have been specified by the owner user have access and under the terms that he has previously established. This solution opens the doors to new possibilities in the exploitation of personal data, and even proposes a starting point to establish usage control policies to personal data. For example, in IDS architecture, our proposal can be the basis to implement personal data management capabilities into the IDS connectors. Our approach allows the exchange of information not to be limited to industrial or business domains, where sharing is focused only on impersonal industrial data. The validation will be carried out in cases of use started in Smart Cities for the treatment of data and decision-making of citizens. The main goal of this presentation is for the participants to become more aware of where their data can be shared and exploited and how its use can be controlled through adequate access policies.
ARTICONF: A Cloud-agnostic Blockchain-as-a-Service for Social Continuum
by Radu Prodan, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
The last decade saw an exponential increase in people’s online engagement regardless of age, gender, or nationalities through popular social media platforms, eventually creating a “Social Continuum”. Unfortunately, popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WeChat, or TikTok are monolithic platforms hosted on centralised Cloud data centres and controlled by a single company. This central ownership model raises trust issues, accompanied by an increasing concern for data security, privacy, transparency, and false content propagation. Typical examples are fake identities engaging in controversial discussions or deliberately communicating low-quality manipulative information that spreads quicker and attracts more audiences than credible sources.
To mitigate such challenges, Decentralised Social Applications (Social DApps), based on blockchain technology and hosted on a federated Cloud, present good potential to create a secure and practically inviolable Social Continuum, connecting billions of people under no centralised control and allowing them to share information using democratic consensus protocols safely. The ARTICONF project researches and develops a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform for building trustworthy, scalable and democratic Social DApps on top of a decentralised, federated Cloud infrastructure through three Social DApp use cases.
Crowd Journalism
The news media gets increasingly polarised between different societal fractions generating conflicts of interest and biased debates that deviate from the authentic topic. Social networks spreading fake news worsen this fragmentation. Citizens lack trustworthy and objective sources of information to form an educated opinion, which is unbiased and does not raise any political or societal conflict of interest. The Crowd Journalism DApp allows regular citizens to capture live videos during an event and stream them in real-time to a decentralised, federated Cloud platform. The platform creates comprehensive joint event footage that accommodates diverse angles and perspectives, with integrated fake news identification and filtering.
Video-Opinion Discussion
Citizens miss trust in digital communities and social networks. Communities want to connect and engage in meaningful and safe thematic opinion discussions that avoid hate speech, cyberbullying and divisive or extreme narratives. Heavily centralised social networks generate echo chambers that increase reinforcement biases and accelerate the propagation of low-quality or even false information. The Video-Opinion Discussion DApp complements crowd Journalism by engaging citizens in continuous, timezone-proof democratic opinion discussion threads and generates tamperproof video lifecycle events on a decentralised, federated Cloud platform. This DApp aims to provide integrated fake identity filtering, reputation scores and financial incentivisation for their contributions.
Carsharing
Car owners and passengers are reluctant to share a vehicle with strangers that endanger their privacy and safety in the absence of a reputation or recommendation system. Similarly, passengers are wary of penalties and contract breaches by car owners. The Carsharing DApp creates a social network of personal (consumable) cars, rented and shared by passengers directly from their owners. The DApp proposes a trustworthy, reputation-based consumer-to-consumer business model and transparent pricing, eliminating intermediary Taxi companies operating centralised fleets.
11:00 – 11:30 Coffee break
11:30 – 13:00 Project presentations II
Threat modeling for Kubernetes
by Francesco Minna, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Kubernetes is the most used container orchestration tool nowadays, available off-the-shelf on many public cloud platforms, as well as the goto engine for providing Platform-as-a-Service and Serverless Computing services. However, due to its complexity, the security threats to Kubernetes (and deployed applications) are difficult to identify early on.
This workshop will illustrate how to apply, both in theory and with practical examples, the STRIDE methodology to identify threats in Kubernetes deployments. Within the threat modeling process (i.e. identifying, quantifying, and addressing security risks or lack of defense mechanisms), STRIDE is a proven methodology to identify vulnerabilities and threats in computer and network systems.
When using STRIDE, a system is mapped to a Data Flow Diagram (DFD), representing the relationship between the entities of the system itself; the DFD is then used to identify “what can go wrong”, and how to prevent and remediate from potential threats. The workshop will show how to apply the STRIDE methodology to Kubernetes deployments.
The workshop will consist of three phases:
– training phase,
– experimentation phase,
– evaluation and discussion phase.
A training phase, where we will explain both the STRIDE methodology and the Kubernetes engine with practical examples. An experimental phase, where participants will be asked to use the aforementioned methodology to identify real and fake threats. Finally, an evaluation and discussion phase, during which we will showcase some real threats on a Kubernetes testbed, demonstrating how the threats could be exploited, prevented, and remediated, concluding with a discussion on the overall workshop.
MORPHEMIC: multi-cloud autonomous proactive optimization and complex monitoring of Cloud applications.
by Marta Rozanska, Yiannis Verginadis , University of Oslo, Institute of Communications and Computer Systems/Athens University of Economics and Business
The dynamic development of cloud computing with the introduction of novel cloud computing models creates new challenges for multi-cloud deployment and the urgent need for application deployment optimization.
This workshop describes how to follow multi-cloud native strategies using an advanced open-source framework called MORPHEMIC. This framework allows for multi-cloud deployment and optimized management of a cloud application based on flexible monitoring, context-aware maximization of the application owner’s utility of the deployed application, and autonomic reconfiguration based on the predicted application’s execution context.
During the workshop, we provide a practical introduction to the cloud-agnostic application modelling, configuration, deployment, monitoring, and proactive adaptation of Cloud applications. We will focus on the flexible monitoring with self-healing capabilities along with forecasting capabilities that enable adaptation of Cloud resources in a proactive way i.e., before the undesired situation occurs. What is more, all stages of the cloud deployment planning and designing process will be shown as well as the key steps in the deployment and autonomic application management.
Building evidence-based policies leveraging on the use of Cloud European Infrastructures in Public Administrations: the DECIDO project experience
by Antonio Filograna, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A.
Demonstrate the groundbreaking impact of the adoption of innovative methodologies, tools and data enabling the effective development of better evidence-based policies by public authorities, creating a bridge between Public Authorities and European Open Science Cloud to widen the use of the European Cloud Infrastructure services and data to Public Administrations.
DECIDO experiments and validates its approach and tools in the domain of disaster risk management. In particular, the trial will take place in Turin area (Italy) for floods, Aragon region (Spain) for wildfires, Greek municipalities for power outage and Kajaani area (Finalnd) for forest fire.
DECIDO will serve as an intermediary between the public sector, the citizen science world and the European Cloud Infrastructure (ECI) through the direct collaboration with EOSC and will provide storage capacity and processing power through EGI infrastructure.
DigiPlace – Digital transition within Cities
by Giusi Di Pino, Expert – EU Projects, Municipality of Messina – European Affairs Dept.
DigiPlace aims to set up an acceleration mechanism to enable cities to catch up the digitalisation opportunities in hard & soft infrastructure and remove all the obstacles encountered by mid-sized cities in their digital journey: lack of strategic & global vision; lack of technical and engineering capacities; difficulties in incorporating the digital innovation. Municipalities need to guarantee the uptake of digital innovation by the local stakeholders: citizens and entrepreneurs.
Succeeding in digital transformation is an opportunity not to be missed.
All those cities express this ambition to solve structural challenges that they are facing:
The DigiPlace network will help cities to embrace digital revolution by building the capacity of their citizens to face the challenges of new digital technologies and by co-designing solutions, solving some of common structural challenges that these cities are facing: encourage local economic development, optimise the functioning of public space and urban networks, unlock innovation potential.
The Network will also increase knowledge and awareness of those digital challenges among its stakeholders, who are not still fully aware of the digital transformation potential. The use of ICT and related technologies (IoT, big data, etc.) will unlock a new age of connectivity and intelligence in which multiple products, services and platforms will be connected and embedded within the network.
The ultimate aim of the project is the creation of a community of cities at international level that can support other mid-sized cities to succeed in their digital transformation process and will empower mid-sized cities with appropriate assets and resources (technical, financial and governance) to be successful in their digital journey.
Combining Node-RED and Openwhisk for Pattern-based Development and Execution of Complex FaaS Workflows
by George Kousiouris, Harokopio University
Modern cloud computing advances have been pressing application modernization in the last 15 years, stressing the need for application redesign towards the use of more distributed and ephemeral resources. From the initial IaaS and PaaS approaches, to microservices and now to the serverless model (and especially the Function as a Service approach), new challenges arise constantly for application developers. This tutorial presents a design and development environment coming from the H2020 PHYSICS project, that aims to ease application evolution and migration to the new FaaS model, based on the widely used Node-RED open source tool. The goal of the environment is to enable a more user friendly and abstract function and workflow creation for complex FaaS applications. To this end, it bypasses workflow description and function reuse limitations of the current FaaS platforms, by providing an extendable, pattern-enriched palette of ready-made, reusable functionality that can be combined in arbitrary ways. The environment embeds seamless DevOps processes for generating the deployable artefacts (i.e. functions and images) of the FaaS platform (Openwhisk). Annotation mechanisms are also available for the developer to dictate diverse execution options or management guidelines towards the deployment and operation stacks. Indicative scenarios of usage will be demonstrated, including creating, registering and executing functions and flows based on the Node-RED runtime, parallelizing a workload, collecting data at the edge and creating function orchestrators to accompany the application. The target FaaS platform in this case is another popular open source solution, Openwhisk.
13:00 – 15:00 Lunch break
15:00 – 16:00 Keynote Plenary
16:00 – 16:30 Coffee break
16:30 – 17:00 Project presentation III
Making data-driven policy management a reality across Europe
by Panayiotis Michael, National Technical University of Athens
The PolicyCLOUD project will harness the potential of digitisation, big data and cloud technologies to improve the modelling, creation and implementation of public policy. Funded under the European Commission’s H2020 programme, by December 2022, PolicyCLOUD will deliver a unique, integrated environment of curated datasets, and data management, manipulation, and analysis tools. The project will address the full lifecycle of policy management using the data analysis capabilities of the European Cloud Initiative.
Our 14-partner consortium is led by ATOS Spain and represents a diverse range of large companies, cloud providers, SMEs, research centres, and policy makers. Together we offer the skills combination required for effective, data-driven policy co-creation and cross-sector optimisation.
During the course of the project, our expertise will be practically demonstrated in four thematically distinct Pilot use cases to be run in diverse European cities, positively impacting both economic growth and the lives of the citizens concerned.
The solutions and tools developed by PolicyCLOUD will eventually become available from the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), as public cloud services.
PolicyCLOUD has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 870675.
The Cloud as a foundation for AI-based Policy Making – The AI4PublicPolicy experience
by Andrea Cristofori, Data Solution Architect at EGI Foundation
AI4PublicPolicy is a joint effort of policy makers and Cloud/AI experts to unveil AI’s potential for automated, transparent and citizen-centric development of public policies. To this end, the project will deliver, validate, demonstrate and promote a novel Open Cloud platform (i.e. AI4PublicPolicy platform) for automated, scalable, transparent and citizen-centric policy management based on unique AI technologies. The AI4PublicPolicy platform will be an Open Virtualized Policy Management Environment (VPME) that will provide fully-fledged policy development/management functionalities based on AI technologies such as Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and chatbots, while leveraging citizens’ participation and feedback. It will support the entire policy development lifecycle, based on technologies for the extraction, simulation, evaluation and optimization of interoperable and reusable public policies, with emphasis on citizen-centric policies development and optimization through the realization of citizen-oriented feedback loops.
The AI4PublicPolicy VPME will be integrated with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) with the dual objective to facilitate access to the Cloud and HPC resources that are required to enable the project’s AI tools, and to boost the sustainability and wider use of the project’s developments. Employing cloud and HPC services that respond to the diverse requirements is necessary, given the diversity of the datasets in terms of generation rates, types (structured/unstructured), volumes, etc., and the different underlying analytic frameworks to be performed. To this end, the cloud and HPC resources offered by the European Cloud Initiative will be exploited and allocated based on the policy under-development, depending on the datasets and the AI models to be invoked. What is more, the resources will be dynamically updated during the runtime, based on emerging situations (e.g., a local event that triggers the generation of additional datasets). AI4PublicPolicy’s business plan is focused on sustaining, expanding and commercializing these AI tools and the VPME through the development of a community of interested and engaged stakeholders (i.e., public authorities and other policy makers) around the project’s outcomes.
17:00 – 18:00 Panel & Closing
Workshop Organisers
Amrita Prasad
Martel Innovate
Dumitru Roman
Sintef AS