Emil Lupu, Research Projects
This page presents the currently active research projects. For past research projects see here]
PRiMMA
Consequence
Efficient, fast and seamless data exchange is vital for today's society. But such data exchange should not violate the confidentiality or privacy of either the data owners, or those referred to in it. To deliver a technology that can effectively meet this goal is an important technological as well as societal challenge.
"Consequence" is a collaborative research project partly funded by the European Commission. It started in January 2008 and will run for three years. The Consequence project will deliver a data-centric information protection framework based on data-sharing agreements.
UbiVal
Emanics
EMANICS is a Network of Excellence supported by the European Commission Information Society Technologies 6th Framework Program. The network brings together 13 of the best research teams across Europe in the discipline of network and service management.
CAREGRID: Autonomous Trust Domains for Healthcare Applications
Future large-scale health-care will involve many different organisations cooperating in patient care, including hospitals, GPs, dentists, pharmacies, drug companies, and insurance companies. With the advent of new wireless healthcare products, it is becoming feasible to contemplate new applications that offer real-time healthcare to patients, and involve complex interactions between many services in many organisations (see scenarios below). Key to their design is the issue of trust, where we want trust-based decisions relating to the interactions between entities – which entity to interact with, what resources should the entity have access to, what information should be released to the entity, how to configure the mechanisms needed to make the interaction secure and how trust levels change over time, based on experience and reputation. Large-scale applications cannot rely on the traditional person in the trust decision loop, but must make use of automated trust decisions. A trust domain is a dynamic set of collaborating entities capable of making autonomous trust-based decisions. Trust domains, with varying trust relationships between them, can be grouped in compositional, hierarchic and ad-hoc peer-to-peer relationships. Examples include a body-area network monitoring the health of a patient, care workers responsible for a patient, a hospital or a regional health authority. In this project, we will investigate techniques for the organisation, management, and interoperation of trust domains to be used as the basis for building large-scale trust-based applications.
Cityware: urban design and pervasive systems
The overall aims of this project are: to contribute advances in our fundamental knowledge and understanding of people’s relationships with urban space and with public pervasive technologies; to develop a set of well-founded, empirically tested and practically applicable principles, tools and techniques for the design and implementation of city-scale, long-term pervasive systems. These developments will involve advances in knowledge, theory and practice in the areas of designing space, context awareness, service discovery, trust, security and privacy. The project will demonstrate and test our advances in fundamental theory and knowledge and our principles, tools and techniques through the design, deployment and evaluation of a city-scale pervasive system that incorporates our research results and through longitudinal empirical studies of people’s lifestyles and relationships with urban space and pervasive technologies, and the effects of our deployed systems on those relationships.
PARIS: A Policy Analysis, Refinement and Integration System
[research:projects:paris Project Web Page]
PAQMAN: Policy Analysis for Quality of Service MANagement
Policy-based management has been proposed in recent years as a suitable means for managing Quality of Service (QoS) in IP networks. Yet despite research projects, standardisation efforts, and substantial interest from industry, policy-based management is still not a reality. One of the reasons for the reticence to adopt this technology is that it is difficult to analyse policies to determine that they will actually work, given the capabilities of managed network devices, and to guarantee the stability of the network configuration, given that policies may have conflicts leading to unpredictable effects. This project aims to address the challenges of policy analysis, policy validation and policy refinement within the specific application domain of Quality of Service for IP networks. Policy analysis includes the ability to check for conflicts in the presence of constraints on the state of the system and identify precisely the sequence of events which would lead to a conflict as well as the ability to check that certain properties are satisfied when a given set of policies is applied. Policy validation relates to the ability to determine whether a given set of policies can actually be implemented on a network configuration given the characteristics of the devices and the traffic profiles. Policy refinement represents the ability to derive lower-level more concrete policies from higher level goals expressed in organisational policies and service level agreements (SLA). Policy refinement cannot be fully automated and the problem is extremely difficult to solve in the general case. We will develop an approach to partially automate this process through the identification and instantiation of domain specific refinement patterns of management policies, which will probably depend on the characteristics of the network devices and of the network itself. More specifically the project is targeted at Differentiated Services (DiffServ) in MPLS environments. In addition we will investigate other application domains such as security and ubiquitous e-health in related projects. To achieve these goals it is necessary to combine formal reasoning techniques with policy-based management approaches and domain specific knowledge on QoS in IP networks. In particular this project aims to provide a holistic approach by combining the analysis and refinement aspects with the design, extension and improvement of the QoS framework developed at the University of Surrey. This will not only provide a framework in which the results of the project can be validated through actual implementation on a testbed but also a framework where it will be possible to explore the limits of policy-based programmability of networks. The project will identify which parts of the QoS management framework can be implemented through a policy-based control and which parts and algorithms are better provided through intelligence within managed objects.
AMUSE: Autonomic Management of Ubiquitous Systems for eHealth
Future e-Science and e-Health applications will involve mobile users, possibly with on-body sensors interacting with a ubiquitous computing environment which detects their activity, current context and adapts accordingly. However, the promise of such ubiquitous computing environments will not be realised unless these systems can effectively "disappear"; and for this they need to become autonomous by managing their own evolution and configuration changes without explicit user or administrator action. This project will develop the architecture, tools and techniques which permit these environments to become self-managing. To provide self-management at varying levels (for individual devices, for simple body-area or home-area networks, as well as large-scale network infrastructures) we advocate the concept of a self-managed cell (SMC) as the basic architectural pattern at both local and integrated levels. We will define, prototype and evaluate architectures based on the SMC pattern and their use in e-Health applications. To this end we will: define and implement the core SMC pattern in terms of the monitoring, service-discovery, context and policy-control services required for basic adaptation mechanisms, investigate how SMCs can be dynamically structured into larger structures and specialise SMCs and their interactions for two e-Health application scenarios.
TrustCoM
TrustCoM will develop a framework for trust, security and contract management in dynamically-evolving virtual organisations. The framework will enable secure collaborative business process management and sharing in an on-demand, self-managed, dynamic value-chains of businesses and governments. The framework will leverage and extend the emerging convergence of open-standards such as Web Services, Grid technologies and protocols for inter-enterprise interactions (using open agent protocols).
Diadem Firewall
The vision of the project is to develop a novel and comprehensive security solution for secure broadband services, by combining the following:
- flexible implementation techniques for high-speed packet processing,
- algorithms for intrusion detection,
- policy-based techniques for automated configuration and decision-handling.
AEDUS
EPSRC Platform Grant