Given the inability of Highly-Distributed-Application-Developers to foresee the changes as well as the heterogeneity on the underlying infrastructure, it is considerable crucial the design and development of novel software paradigms that facilitate application developers to take advantage of the emerging programmability of the underlying infrastructure and therefore develop Reconfigurable-by-Design applications. In parallel, it is crucial to design solutions that are scalable, support high performance, are resilient-to-failure and take into account the conditions of their runtime environment. Towards this direction, the ARCADIA project aims to design and validate a Novel Reconfigurable-By-Design Highly Distributed Applications Development Paradigm over Programmable Infrastructure. The proposed framework will rely on the development of an extensible Context Model which will be used by developers directly at the source-code level. Proper Context-Model will be assisted and validated by IDE-plugins (for many IDEs) in order to re-assure that the generated executable files contain meaningful semantics. According to ARCADIA’s vision, the generated executables should be on-boarded by a Smart Controller which will undertake the tasks of translating annotations to optimal infrastructural configuration. Such a controller will enforce an optimal configuration to the registered programmable resources and will pro-actively adjust the configuration plan based on the Infrastructural State and the Application State. The Context-Model and the aforementioned ARCADIA toolset will be complemented by a Development Methodology that will assure that developed Highly Distributed Applications are Reconfigurable-By-Design. The framework is planned to be validated and evaluated on three use cases that will be deployed over testbeds that host heterogeneous programmable infrastructure.

PrEstoCloud project will make substantial research contributions in the cloud computing and real-time data intensive applications domains, in order to provide a dynamic, distributed, self-adaptive and proactively configurable architecture for processing Big Data streams. In particular, PrEstoCloud aims to combine real-time Big Data, mobile processing and cloud computing research in a unique way that entails proactiveness of cloud resources use and extension of the fog computing paradigm to the extreme edge of the network. The envisioned PrEstoCloud solution is driven by the microservices paradigm and has been structured across five different conceptual layers: i) Meta-management; ii) Control; iii) Cloud infrastructure; iv) Cloud/Edge communication and v) Devices, layers. This innovative solution will address the challenge of cloud-based self-adaptive real-time Big Data processing, including mobile stream processing and will be demonstrated and assessed in several challenging, complementary and commercially-promising pilots. There will be three PrEstoCloud pilots from the logistics, mobile journalism and security surveillance, application domains. The objective is to validate the PrEstoCloud solution, prove that it is domain agnostic and demonstrate its added-value for attracting early adopters, thus initialising the exploitation process early on.

The CYBER-TRUST project aims to develop an innovative cyber-threat intelligence gathering, detection, and mitigation platform to tackle the grand challenges towards securing the ecosystem of IoT devices. The security problems arising from the flawed design of legacy hardware and embedded devices allows cyber-criminals to easily compromise them and launch large-scale attacks toward critical cyber-infrastructures. The proposed interdisciplinary approach will capture different phases of such emerging attacks, before and after known (even years old) or unknown (zero-day) vulnerabilities have been widely exploited by cyber-criminals to launch the attack. Emphasis is given on building a proactive cyber-threat intelligence gathering and sharing system to prevent the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities. This intelligence information will be used to maintain accurate vulnerability profiles of IoT devices, in accordance with data protection, privacy, or other regulations, and optimally alter their attack surface to minimise the damage from cyber-attacks. Novel technologies will be developed, based on distributed ledgers and blockchains, to monitor devices’ integrity state and network behaviour that will considerably increase the detection and response capabilities against targeted and interdisciplinary cyber-attacks. In the case of alleged malicious activity, tools for collecting and storing forensic evidence on a tamper-proof blockchain structure will be delivered, taking into account the specific needs of law enforcement agencies. Privacy-preserving network monitoring and advanced virtual reality-based visualisation techniques will be employed for quickly detecting botnets, DDoS attacks and other incidents. Relying on interdisciplinary research, an intelligent autonomous cyber-defence framework will be built for providing intelligent ways of isolating the devices under an attacker’s control (or infected) and effectively responding to and mitigating large-scale attacks.

The Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (EMME) region faces rapid population growth (currently about 400 million inhabitants) as well as political and socio-economic instabilities. These challenges, experienced by a part of the world that is already hot and arid, are exacerbated by droughts and the extreme weather conditions associated with rapid climate change. Extremes of temperature, in combination with increasing air pollution and windblown desert dust, could in the near future lead to intolerable conditions, ultimately compromising human habitability and promoting migration. Since climate change and air quality share many common sources, it appears logical to focus on the development of amelioration strategies that combine the goals of limiting climate change and reducing air pollution. It has been estimated that mankind may have a relatively small-time window - up to the middle of the century - in which to implement solutions to these challenges, particularly as far as climate change is concerned. Edu4ClimAte will engage Advanced Partners (from France, Austria, Germany, Finland) to strengthen the scientific excellence of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) from twin islands of widening countries (Greece, Cyprus) with a view to establish a “regional hub of knowledge” in air pollution and climate change research and innovative solutions, engaging their respective surrounding ecosystems from the quadruple helix in addressing these societal challenges over the wider EMME. Edu4ClimAte will enhance local, regional, and international clusters led by its consortium with a view to build the foundation of an inclusive European Universities Alliance made of Advanced and Widening HEIs in Climate & Atmospheric Sciences to optimally support the current EU Green Deal ambition and its regional challenges, train and educate the next generation of researchers and innovators to achieve the EU long-term 2050 climate-neutrality objectives.