Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 & H2020 Projects

ACANTO

Participants : Axel Legay, Thomas Given-Wilson, Sean Sedwards, Olivier Zendra.

Start: 2015. End: 2018.

The population of the advanced countries is ageing. This simple and widely recognised fact has important implications for health, society and economics. The most evident is in the number of people who report activity limitations, which grows significantly with age as clearly shown in the following chart. Activity limitations have an adverse effect on a person’s productivity, on the quality of her social relations and, ultimately, on her quality of life. Policy makers confronted with a problem of challenging complexity: how to develop an effective strategy to fight the physical and cognitive decline of older adults in the face of ever shrinking financial resources for health care and social services.

In this context, technology can be of considerable help to care–givers to extend the range and the efficacy of their actions. The ACANTO project (http://www.ict-acanto.eu) aims to develop a portfolio of technical solution that can serve this purpose. More specifically, our goal is to spur older adults into a sustainable and regular level of physical exercise under the guidance and the supervision of their carers.

The key elements of ACANTO are a robotic friend (the FriWalk) that sup-ports the user in the execution of daily activities that require physical exercise and an intelligent system that recommends activites that a senior user perceives as compelling and rewarding.

The FriWalk takes the form of a standard walking assistant, but it is in fact an intelligent robot that is able to localise itself, to sense the surrounding environment, to plan a course of action that suits the user needs and to guide the user along safe routes. The FriWalk is also a personal trainer that can support the user in the execution of a training programme, monitor the motion of the user in search of muscular or gait problems and report them into the user profile (that can be inspected by doctors and physicians).

The second key idea of ACANTO is that physical exercise is actually “concealed” within compelling activities (such as shopping, taking walks in museums and exhibitions etc.). Such activities have a social dimension (they are proposed to group of users) and are chosen based on the interest and on the past experiences of the user. At the heart of the recommendation system there is a social network which is created and developed by primarily using information collected by the FriWalk using “physical” observations on her behaviour and on her emotional state. For this reason, we call this social network “cyberphysical”.

This project aims at developping an autonomous system to drive groups of citizens with respect to point of interest. Those citizens are supposed to communicate, and one of the objective of Tamis is to build a robust and secure system to guarantee this communication. Axel Legay and Olivier Zendra are the permanent researchers of Tamis involved in this project. The project supports two postdocs in Tamis.

DIVIDEND

Participant : Laurent Morin.

Start: 2014. End: 2017.

The DIVIDEND project (http://www.chistera.eu/projects/dividend) attacks the data centre energy efficiency bottleneck through vertical integration, specialisation, and cross-layer optimization. Our vision is to present heterogeneous data centres, combining CPUs, GPUs, and task-specific accelerators, as a unified entity to the application developer and let the runtime optimize the utilization of the system resources during task execution. DIVIDEND embraces heterogeneity to dramatically lower the energy per task through extensive hardware specialisation while maintaining the ease of programmability of a homogeneous architecture. To lower communication latency and energy, DIVIDEND refers a lean point-to-point messaging fabric over complex connection-oriented network protocols. DIVIDEND addresses the programmability challenge by adapting and extending the industry-led heterogeneous systems architecture programming language and runtime initiative to account for energy awareness and data movement. DIVIDEND provides for a cross-layer energy optimization framework via a set of APIs for energy accounting and feedback between hardware, compilation, runtime, and application layers. The DIVIDEND project will usher in a new class of vertically integrated data centres and will take a first stab at resolving the energy crisis by improving the power usage effectiveness of data centres.

Laurent Morin from Tamis is involved in this project

EMC²

Participants : Axel Legay, Olivier Zendra.

Start: 2014. End: 2017.

EMC² (Embedded Multi-Core systems for Mixed Criticality applications in dynamic and changeable real-time environments https://www.artemis-emc2.eu) is an ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking project in the Innovation Pilot Programme ‘Computing platforms for embedded systems’ (AIPP5). Embedded systems are the key innovation driver to improve almost all mechatronic products with cheaper and even new functionalities. They support today’s information society as inter-system communication enabler. A major industrial challenge arises from the need to face cost efficient integration of different applications with different levels of safety and security on a single computing platform in an open context. EMC² finds solutions for dynamic adaptability in open systems, provides handling of mixed criticality applications under real-time conditions, scalability and utmost flexibility, full scale deployment and management of integrated tool chains, through the entire lifecycle. The objective of EMC² is to establish Multi-Core technology in all relevant Embedded Systems domains. EMC² is a project of 99 partners of embedded industry and research from 19 European countries with an effort of about 800 person years and a total budget of about 100 million Euro.

EMC2 (2014–2017) is at the border between formal methods and security. We in Tamis are mainly using the fundings to develop the Plasma toolset that is used by our statistical model checking and symbolic model checking tools. The permanent members of Tamis who are involved are Axel Legay and Olivier Zendra. The project was initiated during the lifetime of the ESTASYS.Inria team.

ENABLE-S3

Participants : Axel Legay, Jean-Louis Lanet.

Start: 2016. End: 2019.

The objective of ENABLE-S3 (http://www.enable-s3.eu) is to establish cost-efficient cross-domain virtual and semi-virtual V&V platforms and methods for ACPS. Advanced functional, safety and security test methods will be developed in order to significantly reduce the verification and validation time but preserve the validity of the tests for the requested high operation range. ENABLE-S3 aspires to substitute today’s physical validation and verification efforts by virtual testing and verification, coverage-oriented test selection methods and standardization. ENABLE-S3 is use-case driven; these use cases represent relevant environments and scenarios. Each of the models, methods and tools integrated into the validation platform will be applied to at least one use case (under the guidance of the V&V methodology), where they will be validated (TRL 5) and their usability demonstrated (TRL6). Representative use cases and according applications provide the base for the requirements of methods and tools, as well as for the evaluation of automated systems and respective safety.

This project is industry driven and has the objective of designing new technologies for autonomous transportation, including to secure them. Tamis tests its results on the case studies of the project. Axel Legay and Jean-Louis Lanet are involved in this project. The project supports one postdoc in Tamis starting in 2017.