SFScon 2020

Find out more about the newly adopted Open Source Strategy of the European Commission and the Open Source Programme Office (OSPO), hear new developments and ask all your questions

Leveraging FOSS is an attractive proposition, yet managing FOSS and licensing obligations is often an after thought. Business risks and negative branding impacts are ignored, or willingly glimpsed upon, when an organization is in startup mode, however in larger companies and organizations, no lines of code should be pushed upstreamed or shipped with product unless, development shouldn’t even begin unless a comprhensive and state of the art FOSS license compliance policy and practice is in place. So do you go about building a new one, when none exists yet. Which standard do you look at? Which best practices do you follow? What processes do you build to make sure that the policy ultimately folllows the busines needs while mitigating risks as opposed to blocking business completely?

Is open source really a public good? Or is it a common good?

Game theory applied to open source can be used to explain how participants profit from open source, but existing models work from the assumption that all contributors receive the same benefit from the decisions made. They do not. For example: Some may benefit more when software is faster, while others benefit when it is more configurable. It is often necessary to choose between the two.

What happens to the general social welfare captured and made available by an open source project when a narrow economic interest dominates its decision making?

a personal perspective

Today Free Software is a means to stay competitive since the complexity of software systems is still increasing and a company can only offer state of the art products and services by integrating a large amount of Free Software. For a single company the use of Free Software and especially the active engagement in the ecosystem increases its innovation capabilities in different dimensions. The presentation gives a short overview on the current state of Free Software adoption in the industry. Based on figures a personal perspective is presented.

Business Model issues for companies using open source in the platform economy

An overview of how businesses have developed models using open source software and how these have evolved in the last decade around the platform economy.

Amanda has spent considerable time researching this area and the economics of this for a book chapter and the open core wars as part of the response to allegations of strip mining by Cloud Companies.

An insight into the whys and how of the Open Core Wars.

Linux Kernel, keepalived, conntrackd

This talk explains the installation and configuration of a Linux high availability network gateway using keepalived and conntrackd. This results in an active-standby topology. Necessary scripts are implemented to keep the configuration in sync of both gateways. Keepalived is used to manage active-standby negotiation. Conntrackd is used to synchronize network states across the gateways.

Traffic data represent essential information used by city administrators, consultants and developers for traffic management, road network planning and pollutant emissions estimation. Demand for widely spread and low-cost monitoring traffic systems, together with interpretation and analysis of traffic flows and patterns, is therefore rapidly increasing. In this talk, we present our solution to tackle this huge challenge: a BT traffic monitoring system and a dedicated set of data-analysis algorithms.
Currently many vehicles moving in the urban environment carry a BT device (e.g. speakerphone systems, satellite navigation system, infotainment, smartphones, etc.). The presented monitoring system allows to detect the BT signals sent by these devices in order to count the transiting vehicles in the chosen road section. By counting the transiting vehicles in many locations within a target city, or neighborhood, it is possible to identify the main patterns of the devices which send a unique identification signal (MAC address): if the sample is sufficiently wide, a statistical analysis can lead to the identification of the distribution, intensity and time evolution of the traffic flow, and creation of origin-destination matrices. All these information results of essential importance both for network managing purposes.

As open source becomes more and more part of the software development lifecycle, enterprise development factories need reliable policies driving repeatable practices to ensure open source is being managed appropriately. This talk reviews the practices needed for an Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) and proposes automation within the developer workflow as the most effective approach to policy compliance.

What has been done and what is still missing

In the last 20 years italian Public Administrations (PAs) have introduced many different rules, norms and regulations concerning adoption of free software in PAs.
Specific legislation was proposed and/or introduced at the national and regional levels.
Many local PAs have adopted rules and regulations on the subject.
We review and comment critically the present situation.

Lessons learned from three years R&D

There is the saying, hardware is hard. It’s true and it’s even harder to create hardware that honors the ideas and ethics of free software. The ultimate hardware challenge these days is building a smartphone.
If hardware wouldn’t be challenging enough the software stack to run on it following the same principles isn’t any easier. The majority of smartphone stacks are not free, at least not fully – radio stacks (esp. cellular), graphics acceleration (GPU), media acceleration (VPU) etc. Striving for RYF rules out a lot of hard- and software choices. And even more a lot of necessary plumbing is simply missing in the free software world.

The presentation will highlight some key issues and how we tackled them.

PySyft is an open-source framework that enables secured, private computations in deep learning, by combining federated learning and differential privacy in a single programming model integrated into different deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, Keras or TensorFlow.

In this talk, I will present the main functionalities of PySyft and will showcase two main use cases on which I have personally worked on at the National Research Council (CNR) of Pisa within my Master’s Thesis:

1) PySyft for IoT applications – Distributed training of Deep Neural Networks on Raspberry PIs
2) PySyft for research – Reducing the data consumption of federated learning in a mobile scenario via Neural Network quantization.

Monorepos with the open source toolkit Nx

So..you might not necessarily be a large team and distributed across the globe. But do you have multiple different apps across your company, like backend & frontend maybe, that need to integrate with each other? Or do you have a library of reusable UI components shared with all your teams? Or maybe you don’t because publishing is hard, versioning even more and then there’s backward compatibility! In this talk, I’m showing you how big companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft solve this, why a monorepo might be a good choice and how the open source toolkit Nx, in particular, can help you with that.

How to keep an open source project enterprise ready

The talk will show what happen when a new version of openSUSE is released and more fixes and updates are starting to be delivered via the maintenance process. During this introduction the attendees will be able to understand how the teamwork efforts of the openSUSE community and SUSE allow the delivering of a great open source distribution. Always following the open source knowledge sharing approach, the attendees will be made aware of key information for starting to contribute to the project with a particular focus on the area of packaging and testing.

We present a computational pipeline implemented in R programming language to perform to detect in the protein-protein human interactome the protein-protein interactions that are most likely affected by the state of the gene coding for Protein Tyrosine Phosphatase, Receptor Type, G (PTPRG) and by different treatments in a well-established cell model of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML).

The final concrete result of this research is a free software that allows oncologists to identify the protein-protein interaction pathways not properly working in patients suffering from CML, as well as he pathways that are altered by the pharmacological treatments currently being tested.

The protein encoded by PTPRG gene belongs to the family of the protein tyrosine phosphatase (PTP), which are known to be signalling molecules that regulate several cellular processes including cell growth, differentiation, mitotic cycle, and oncogenic transformation. The study considers also the effect of the treatment with tyrosine kinases inhibitors (Imatinib) both in presence and absence of activity of endogenous PTPRG, a oncosuppressor gene downregulated in CML patients. Tyrosine kinases phosphorylate proteins on tyrosine residues, producing a biologic signal that also influences many aspects of cellular function including cell growth, proliferation, differentiation, and death inhibition of tyrosine kinases represents a strategy to disrupt signalling pathways that promote neoplastic growth and survival in hematologic malignancies and likely in other neoplasias as well. The data used in this study derive from the analysis carried out by microarray hybridization of the CML cell transcriptome (K562) in different conditions. The cells were transfected with full length PTPRG and compared to several controls: cells transfected with the empty vector, cells transfected with the same protein that presents a mutation on the catalytic domain (D1028A) and cells treated with a tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) utilized in clinic (Imatinib) targeting the oncogene BCR/ABL1. We designed a pipeline to efficiently analyse the networks of thousands of genes and to catch both their dynamics and static properties. We considered first the genes that resulted to be differentially expressed, and then the differentially expressed genes that are transcription factors in groups of patients who have undergone the tyrosine treatment and/or exhibit a different (active or non-active) status of PTPRG gene. We calculated the subgraphs induced by these genes on the graph of human interactome. We analysed the nodes of these subgraphs through both with standard and new centrality metrics able to quantify both the topological and the dynamical properties of the nodes.

The comparative analysis of static properties and dynamic behaviour of networks induced by different endogenous conditions and pharmacological treatment has revealed partial similarities between the conditions produced by the pharmacological treatment with TKI and those produced by PTPRG overexpression. These similarities reveal valuable insights into the possible mechanisms of action and the side effects of treatment with TKI. The analysis software that we represent is therefore an indispensable tool to support the experimental analyses aimed at fully understanding the interaction mechanisms of modern and future pharmacological treatments for CML.

The work has been done in collaboration with the doctors of the General Pathology division of Department of Medicine of the University of Verona, Italy.

The new Open-Source-Architecture for the digitalization of the Municipalities in South Tyrol

The IT-Strategy of the “Gemeindenverband” has the goal to support and improve the digitalization of the 116 municipalities and the 7 District Communities present on the South-Tyrolean territory. “Goffice 2.0” follows this strategy in order to extend, modernize and innovate the main IT-infrastructure of the municipalities and to achieve an End-to-End/Citizen-To-Administration digitalization of the business processes and procedures within the boundaries of the national and local laws, using the state-of-the-art technology. The main infrastructure will be a collection of modular microservices, that are able to interact with the main public and private third-party software in use in South-Tyrol and in Italy, like RDBMS, DMS, ERPs, local and national WEB-Portals and infrastructures and with the national digital Identity called SPID. The citizens will be able to identify themselves with their digital identity, they’ll fill out a Web-Form and will send the generated digital document and the embedded data to the back office of the municipalities. The document will be automatically registered, and the data will populate and activate the digital processes and procedures that are managed by the officials using the new back-office-software. The answers to the citizens and the official documents will be sent to the citizens through the South-Tyrolean portal called myCIVIS and even by email in order to close the digital lifecycle and to avoid the use of analog and materialized communication.
The new architecture and the new services will be built and published as a shared service for all the public administration in Italy and as an Open-Source-Project that can be reused and extended by the interested communities and by the companies on the market. The software will be produced following the principles of “Security by Design” and “API-First” and the whole software lifecycle will be managed with agile methodologies. The project will be structured in four main deliverables: the analysis of the new architecture, the build of a new, modular and innovative architecture and the development of two end-to-end eGovernment services, one for private citizens and the other for the companies in South Tyrol.
Goffice 2.0 will be the Open-Source-Foundation for the development of digital services and for the back-office digitalization of the local municipalities at least for the next 5-10 years.

In collaboration with the NOI Techpark we created an Open Source system to automate the small info sign you can find at the entrance of every room of the NOI Techpark. To realize that we used a Spring Boot backend, an Arduino to connect E-Ink displays to the backend and some cron jobs to automate the content of the displays with real time data.

Research is continuously relying on smart solutions to detect patterns within data to answer an enormous variety of different questions. In recent years, the impact of programming languages for automatization and handling big amounts of data is continuously rising. The R language firstly focused on statistical data analysis. Within the last 10 years a strong community grew around the language leading to create a package ecosystem dealing with, among others, spatial data analysis, machine learning, web development, reproducible research and open data. The rapid growth of features and packages can make it hard to follow the latest updates while learning the language. Because of the wide choice available, also experienced R developers can have trouble finding the best way to conduct a specific analysis.

For this reason, we created the BolzanoR group in Bolzano, Italy. The aim is to connect both researchers and non-researchers using the R language throughout our region. The organization of the group takes place in Gitlab (https://gitlab.inf.unibz.it/rmeetupbz/meetups) and the self-made website (https://rmeetupbz.pages.scientificnet.org/website/). We use these playgrounds to exchange code snippets and to develop future activities. Moreover, we bundle all the packages, publications, people, codes, markdown documents that are created in the province and brainstorm about ideas that are eventually new topics in research or which could have an impact on this region. Another big pillar of our activities are the weekly meetings which are organized as one-hour sessions with a dedicated topic and brainstorming activities.

We now assembled roughly 60 people in the group with a regular attendance of 10 to 20 people contributing to various activities such as the analysis of social media data, the access of environmental databases, the development and exploration of packages, the development of Shiny applications (e.g. the MeteoBrowser South Tyrol; http://meteobrowser.eurac.edu/) and other activities. This talk presents ours activities, structure and developments intending to spread the word and invite other people to join the initiative to actively broaden the open source community in the autonomous province of South Tyrol.

The many faces of a global FOSS community

LibreOffice was announced in 2010 and will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2020. During these 10 years, the global community has grown from a small group of volunteers – mostly based in Europe – to a large and diverse group of free software advocates active in most countries. The presentation will discuss the challenges faced by the community during its incredible growth over the past 10 years.

Global problems need global solutions!

In a time when humanity needs to work together to find solutions for a crisis, we cannot afford to reinvent the wheel again and again. Global problems need global solutions! It is Free Software that enables global cooperation for code development. Any proprietary solution will inevitably lead to countless isolated solutions and waste energy and time which we as humanity cannot afford in such a critical situation.

Free Software licences allow sharing of code in any jurisdiction. Solutions developed in one country can be reused and adapted in another one. International development agencies and humanitarian movements can help to contain the spread of COVID-19 in any country around the world with the availability of Free Software solutions.

Already before this crisis hundreds of organisations and tens of thousands of people demanded that publicly financed software developed for the public sector must be made publicly available under Free Software licences. It is now even more important than ever before to tackle this crisis.

Do you want to promote Free Software as well? Then the campaign framework of “Public Money? Public Code!” might be the right choice for you; no matter if you want to do it as an individual or as a group; no matter if you have a small or large time budget.

A feasibility study in the Dolomites

One of the most impressive mountain areas in the Alps are the Dolomites. Tourists visit the Dolomites for outdoor activities such as hiking, skiing, climbing, cycling and many others. However, unexpected events, such as weather conditions, poor experience in mountains, underestimation of the terrain conditions, bad planning, weak technical skills, among others, can increase the risk of accidents. The activities that represent better these events are ski touring, rock/ice climbing, mountaineering and hiking. In this work, we propose a localization system based on LoRa (pycom) and Bluetooth (beacon) devices to find lost people inside of the natural park Bletterbach GEOPARC. The system consists on a wearable sensor device worn in a helmet that transmits actual position to fixed stations. In case of emergency, the stations provide the last checking point to a centralized system, and authorities can start a procedure to find the victim with the aid of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV transmits the exact coordinate to mountain rescue teams, and terrain conditions (imagery) to effectively plan the rescue mission. This work aims to accelerate the process of search and rescue operations that could be extended to different scenarios.

Computer-assisted cognitive training may help patients affected by several illnesses alleviate their cognitive deficits, or healthy people improve their mental performance. The talk presents a web-accessible system, called MS-rehab, developed specifically for the cognitive rehabilitation of patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, but usable also in other contexts. MS-rehab embeds an AI-based mechanism that adapts the difficulty of cognitive training exercises to the trainee’s performance. The AI-based mechanisms proved to be superior to a mechanism designed by medical experts in a live experiment.

The energy consumption and efficiency of buildings is determined by a multitude of factors. The aim of the IDEE project is to develop a technological infrastructure based on semantic technologies for the integration of data concerning buildings, with an emphasis on the energy-related data, and to provide techniques and tools for the visualization and analysis of such data. For the integrated access to the data, IDEE will rely on the open-source system Ontop. The project will develop a case study based on the municipality of Merano. Unibz collaborates in IDEE with R3GIS and Alperia.

Explore a decentralized, permissionless and worldwide community

Communities are thriving on a multitude of channels, platforms, apps and also in VR worlds. These activities comprise a series of challenges for a community manager and FOSS comes to the rescue through specialized dashboards, self-hacked tools and new models to measure and reward value creation. Insights in a community manager’s toolbox to foster communities and connect with people all over the world that share passion.

The “BLUESLEMON” project aims to develop a low-cost automatic system for monitoring landslide surface displacement using beacons, provided by Beacon Südtirol-Alto Adige project, and drones. This talk focuses on how FOS spa exploits short-range wireless networks, in particulary Bluetooth, in order to recognize beacons positions from a drone reconnaissance flight.

First experiences at the NOI Techpark

It is now one year that Pepper was configured and programmed to welcome visitors at the NOI Techpark. We created various applications, for example, to inform visitors about where to find a specific room, company, or a coffee. What we also did: we logged anonymously which commands visitors to use more, which less, what became popular, whatnot. In this talk, Johannes Brunner and Andrea Janes will present the experiences made with the robot as well as one year of data about the interactions of visitors with the robot.

How do these guys simulate the spread of COVID-19?

Agent-based modelling is widely used in simulation scenarios where different kind of systems are acting together. These systems can be modelled as agents, and they have their own intelligence – just like e.g. humans or autonomous machines. One very recent example, where such simulations are used, is predicting the spread of the COVID-19 virus. This is not the main topic of this talk, but I would like to show how Fraunhofer Italia used this method in modelling apple logistics. The main question was how optimized containers for the fruit transport and storage can be optimized in terms of sustainability. The tool used for these studies is the GAMA platform and the GAML program language, which are both open source and have a very active community. In the talk I would combine principles of agent-based modelling the open source software kit and our results we achieved and what we plan in the future.

The aim of “BLUESLEMON” project is to develop a low-cost automatic system for monitoring landslide surface displacement using drones and BT beacons. The proposed drone architecture is developed to go beyond the current state-of-the-art techniques and is characterized by autonomous navigation capabilities. The UAV platform is equipped with obstacle-detection sensors and collision-avoidance algorithms, allowing the smart UAS to be easily employed for autonomous navigation, even in case of diverse environments or applications (search-and-rescue operations in alpine environments or automatic surveillance in urban areas).

How leadership in an open source community can work, in ten lessons learned

Many activities these days, be it sports, social work, arts or free and open source software, are organized in some sort of community. If backed by a respective organization, this not only helps with setting up a structure, but also puts statutes and rules in place that set forth the values and ideals all contributors should share. Inside these communities, there can be various roles. Some of them are formalized, like the board of directors or the supervisory board, others are within dynamically grown groups that can change frequently. Either of those are ideally composed of experienced and enthusiastic community members who take leadership and responsibility.

Based on my experience from the last 16 years, I’d like to point out common problems when working in an international free and open source community, share mistakes I’ve made and tell how you can hopefully avoid them.

Godot is one of the most used Open Source Game Engine and its totally free to use. You can create 2D and 3D games for PC, Mobile, Web with an intuitive IDE. It’s lightweight but still powerful and uses its own language GDScript, really similar to Python and easy to learn. After a quick presentation about Godot we’ll create a quick game together!

QGIS is the most popular and used Geographical Free Open Source software in the whole world, growing fast and being a serious competitor to the near monopolistic proprietary alternative.

QGIS is born in 2002 thanks to Gary Sherman that was looking for a simple way to visualize geospatial data stored in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database. In the following years more people got involved in the project and QGIS stared to become a complete GIS software with support for both vector and raster data. During these 18 years more and more people developed specialized geospatial algorithm to extract information from the data and to provide a simple interface for the end user. Different milestones have been reached, e.g. the support for thirdly part software, like GRASS, SAGA, Orfeo Toolbox and R; a Python interface has been added so that it is easy to develop new spatial algorithms as *plugins*. Thanks to these features QGIS quickly became popular and widespread. Public administration, private companies, Universities and GIS expert use QGIS and are investing resources back to the project.

The success of QGIS is due not only to work of developers and the resulting powerful and easy functions, but also to the strong community behind the software: document writers, translators participate not only *building* QGIS as a software but by growing QGIS as a **community**.

Open Source Community Artificial Intelligence

IAQOS is an open source artificial-intelligence-based system that socially interacts with people in the informal environment of an urban district. Like other Artificial Intelligences, it feeds on data; unlike other Artificial Intelligences, the modality of data acquisition is relational rather than extractive. IAQOS, thanks to the active participation of artists in its creation and implementation, dialogues with the city and its inhabitants, with the aim of “feeding” on the narratives produced by the communities, and giving citizens new opportunities for relationship, reflection and interconnection.
The first pilot project happened in Rome. At the moment there are other two different IAQOS, in Bolzano and Ancona. From January 2021 it will also be in Milan and Barcellona.

Ideas on how to improve time series models

Human beings have shown fascination for what the future would hold since the beginning of time. In data science and statistics, the process of forecasting is based on time series data, which can be defined as a sequence of observations taken sequentially in time. Statistical forecasting tries to predict what future observations will be, based on past ones. A clear example of how this is beneficial in practice is sales forecasting. Companies make use of sales forecasting to try and understand their customer demand, in order to improve inventory management and cut down production costs.

Many statistical methods exist and can be used for forecasting. Stochastic processes like and ARIMA are some of the most well-known methods. Recent advances in machine learning and particularly deep learning have created new possibilities for forecasting, which are mainly based on Recurrent Neural Networks, also known as RNNs. These neural architectures have the ability to model sequential data, which makes them optimal for time series forecasting.

Another important task for the forecasting field is that of the analysis of indicators, i.e., individuating explanatory, causative factors from which it is possible to draw conclusions on the direction or values of the focal signal. In simpler words, this would mean finding data which is external to our current data, hence; exogenous, and use it to see if it can help the forecast accuracy. This is something that human beings do often on their own at a subconscious level. Going back to the sales example, we already know that if we run an umbrella shop, we’re going to sell more products when it rains. However in the field of data science, indicator analysis and multivariate time series forecasting is often times neglected.

This talk will bring together all these topics and help the listeners understand what forecasting is, the most famous methods used for it and in the end it will demonstrate how Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) Neural Networks are able to learn non-linear relationships in time series with augmented exogenous indicators and improve forecasts. The research project itself was performed under the supervision of Prof. Marco Cristani and it will be presented here in a concrete and practical application.

A standalone low-cost mobile prototype with accurate localization capabilities and communicating environmental measurements in real-time can definitely expand the current picture of urban data characterized by limited spatio-temporal resolution. Sensor data enrichment with kinematics, high-frequency and robust positioning data plays a crucial role in IoT devices for mobile microclimatic monitoring application. Indeed, spatially enriched real time kinematic sensors lead directly to fast, reliable and accurate information over-time. This, in turn, allows to create added-value services (smart cities, transportation, e-health, smart home, social, etc.) for life quality improvement of urban communities. The design, prototyping and experimental activities have got funded the DPS4ESLAB project.

The process of collecting, cleaning and preparing raw data to deep analyses can be very expensive.
The new R/Python widget provided by Knowage, the open source suite for business intelligence, allows to embed R and Python scripts directly within an interactive analytical dashboard.
With this widget data scientists and developers have at their disposal a wide range of data already configured and ready to be used, while users have easy access to all the analyses made by experts.
This new feature really makes a great contribution filling the gap between data science and data visualization!

The development of advanced services that are the promise of smart cities are based on a connected infrastructure, devices (e.g., cars, IoT devices, etc.), and software systems. Therefore, the exchange of data among such components is a prerequisite that is based on the definition of common protocols and data formats that needs to be open to assure the availability in the long run. However, too many protocols and formats can create confusion and fragmentation that can produce the opposite effect making difficult the creation of a uniform architecture.
This talk will explore the main protocols and data formats used in the context of the smart cities identifying the main characteristics and the overlaps.

Two-factor or Multi-factor authentications are considered to be among the safest protection tools to safeguard access to data and applications, especially for home banking services.

But can they be defeated?

Identification and Acquisition

Digital forensics is a field of great interest for users, developers, CxO, law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, judges, lawyers.
Last year in SFScon19 we could see how to analyze and avoid the “black box” forensics and increase our awareness.
This year we’ll see briefly some interesting updates in Linux distributions for Digital Forensics and learn how to do the first two steps on the field (yes, it’s a CSI lab).
The talk will present how to do identification and acquisition of digital evidences on the scene (as first responders) with practical examples of acquiring digital memories with the Guymager software.
We’ll show data carving and reporting with open / free software forensic investigation tools (Autopsy, Linux Leo, Photorec, etc.).

PPC64 Open ISA and A2I Core along with the PPC64 Open Hardware Notebook PCB and Libre-Soc project.

This year IBM released the A2I POWER processor core design and associated FPGA environment. In 2019 IBM opened the POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The Power Progress Community released the PCB of the Notebook Motherboard based on Power Architecture with Cern Open Hardware License. Libre-SOC is a software-hardware project that aims to deliver a physical POWER compliant SOC that comes complete with a CPU, GPU, VPU, and DDR controller. We will discover these concrete projects.

experience with NOI's St.Virtual Project

Jitsi Meet is an Apache-2.0 licensed video conference system that runs in the web browser via WebRTC.

This talk presents the installation, configuration and some usage experience of Jitsi Meet at the basis of the St. Virtual project at NOI.

DataPlotly is a plugin for QGIS that allows to create D3 like plots from spatial data. It is build on top of plotly, a javascript library which offers easy API for many languages such as Python, R, Matlab and NodeJS.

The plugin was created back in 2017 for the upcoming QGIS 3 version: today the plugin has been downloaded more than 50,000 times.

Creating plots is out of the main scopes of QGIS but thanks to the simple Python API it is easy enough to create additional scripts and plugins. Thanks to these APIs, DataPlotly is today a well maintained Python plugin with a growing community of developers, users and testers.

DataPlotly plots are completely interactive so that plot elements are directly linked with map items; therefore the user is able to query map items from the main plot canvas.

Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign launched in March 2019 during the annual QGIS User Conference, the functionalities of DataPlotly were extended: a complete refactoring of the code, more plots but especially the creation of plots in the layout composer.

More and more people are using the plugin to analyze the data and to create complex output reports of data (e.g. the Covid-19 pandemic).

the Beacon AR Indoor Navigation Mobile Tool

The Beacon Südtirol – Alto Adige project (https://beacon.bz.it/project/) developed a hardware and software Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure for the South Tyrol Province. The project deployed 3.500 beacons, small Bluetooth devices that, by providing a unique identifier, enable the development of mobile applications that can offer localized and contextual services. The developed infrastructure, which is available as open source, is used to develop added value services for the region.
Suggesto is developing a new mobile app for the Centro Trevi that exploits beacons to support visitors to access and use the services of the center. One of the implemented tool is to precisely drive visitors searching for a specific publications, to the floor, room, and shelf where the sought book is located using Augmented Reality techniques. Beacons enable the application to localize the user within the center. Augmented Reality markers are used to precisely locate the user and the smartphone in the space. Indications over impressed on the camera view indicate the correct path to follow. During the talk, we will demonstrate the App and discuss the major technical issues we had to solve; finally we will present the first user evaluation results.

Producing wet snow maps by harmonizing different types of multidimensional raster data over South Tyrol

Earth observation data are images collected by satellites orbiting the earth. The growing amount of new satellites and the continuation of established missions lead to a rapid increase of data with different specifications. The Copernicus Open Access Hub for example provides access to 10 PB of data. OpenEO (https://openeo.org/, a Horizon 2020 project) developed a unified API to foster interoperability and reproducibility across cloud services while reducing complexity for users. The openEO R client serves as an entry point for R users to efficiently interact with big earth observation data on cloud platforms from within the R language. The client is available as an R package (https://github.com/Open-EO/openeo-r-client) and enables users to create efficient and scalable workflows that can be processed by different cloud services and access resources that would otherwise be hard to access using R. This presentation showcases the potential of openEO and its R client to process and harmonize different types of multidimensional raster data sources. A single workflow combines the advantages of radar, optical and meteorological data to create a time series of wet snow maps over South Tyrol. This information product can further serve as an input for hydrological forecasting or avalanche prediction.

This presentation is about engaging mainstream users for OSS ecosystem sustainability. Open source is becoming mainstream but there are still looming uncertainties about the sustainability of its ecosystem made of some keystone projects and many SMEs. The user is the missing component of the OSS ecosystem’s sustainability. We must put the user back into the equation.

This presentation introduces the Market Readiness Levels index, the OW2 OSS Good Governance initiative and the ReachOut beta-testing platform. three initiatives leveraging the resources and experience of OW2’s European community of open source projects with the ambition to engage mainstream users and make them more comfortable and more committed to the long-term term sustainability and success of the European open source ecosystem.

The emergence of the cloud computing paradigm in combination with the latest technological developments is supporting the shaping of many existing solutions to tackle water management in agriculture. The talk aims to show how the novel approach of FIWARE, that moves beyond the data management, namely context information management, brings huge benefit when it comes to flexibility, scalability and interoperability of IoT solutions. The outcome is a complete context-aware system combined of the various Generic Enablers, capable of making autonomous irrigation decisions (using Complex Event Processing) which are not solely based on sensor-related measurements, but also on the integration of different sources of information such as weather forecast data. By doing so, optimal management of water resources according to the predicted weather conditions has been achieved.

The FLOSS community's response to global crises

We live in a dark time of pandemic and recession. The world is changing. Is technological freedom something we only worry about in good times, or is freedom still important in times of challenge? If we are still relevant, how can the FLOSS community contribute to moving the world forward?

The setup of a performant Spatial Data Infrastructure to work with heterogeneous big data is a common requirement to solve. A unique platform that can integrate different data types (raster, vector, table data, timeseries) and provide web services for data discovery, visualization and processing is not easy to find in the open source community or it could result a very expensive commercial product to buy. In the DPS4ESLAB project (http://www.eurac.edu/en/research/technologies/CenterforSensingSolutions/projects/Pages/Data-Platform-and-Sensing-Technologies-for-Environmental-Sensing-LAB.aspx) we are setting up, for our Institute and partners, a web platform to solve all these issues using open source components and integrating them by the openEO (https://openeo.org/) API. Furthermore, the development of a Graphical User Interface will provide an easy access to the datasets and services to better focus on the analysis.

This talk will present the main results of the DECODER H2020 project (https://www.decoder-project.eu). The main goal of the project is to offer a unified platform (the PKM, Persistent Knowledge Monitor) for hosting all kinds of documents related to a given software project, including source code, manuals, bug reports. A variety of tools are interacting with the PKM to fill it with additional information and/or take advantage of information provided by other tools. This includes notably the results of static analyses, program proofs, and test case generation on the one hand, and the extraction of more formal specifications from natural language documents using natural language processing techniques. Nearly two years after its start, DECODER is finalizing the first prototypes of its main tools and aims at deploying a beta-testing campaign for the final year of the project.

Sport climbing brings together multiple parties i.e., climbers, climbing gym operators, route setters and climbing coaches, each with a specific set of goals. For example, climbers are interested in improving their climbing performance while climbing gym operators are constantly trying to improve their services and make optimal use of infrastructures.

We asked a question, which IoT devices and software tools can be combined to provide effective solutions to problems faced in the everyday climbing practice. We think such systems can be designed to be both privacy-preserving and almost invisible to their users.

In this talk we present an example of a climbing monitoring system that aims to provide statistics related to the frequency of ascents and -to some extent- climbing performance.

Making the most of Open Data Hub, Wikidata, DBpedia and other sources of high quality data

Linked Open Data is the most usable kind of Open Data. An example of a well integrated source of Linked Open Data on tourism and mobility is the Open Data Hub operated by NOI. We will use the SPARQL querying language, a W3C standard, to query the data and show how this differs from other access methods. The tour will start by querying the end point directly from the command line with tools, like curl. Then, one by one, well known data science software packages. like R and Pandas, will be used to directly work with these datasets, to perform statistical calculations and generating graphs from data.
In the final part, these software packages will be used to query data from other well known data sources, like Wikidata and DBpedia.

Knowage is the open source suite for business analytics that satisfies traditional requirements as well as innovative and challenging informative domains, combining traditional data and big data sources into valuable and meaningful information. This talk will provide a general overview of the suite and its capabilities with a special focus on the features that allow the full customization of your analysis. More in detail, the speaker will show how to build a fully customized user experience on your data and information, using the native functions of Knowage together with the embedding of HTML code and R/Python scripts and the application mashup.

The goal of the EU project FASTEN is being able to perform a more sophisticated analysis of security-vulnerability propagation, licensing compliance, and dependency risk profiles (among others) by relying on the call-level dependency network of the whole software ecosystem. We outline the purpose and structure of the project, and present some preliminary results.

The Internet of Everything is aiming to connect 1.5 billion devices by 2022.
But what is happening now that the protocols are closed source or the devices have to talk with centralized private clouds? The need for trust in the Internet of Everything protocols is palpable and the IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is striving to solve this trust issue with innovative bio-mimicking research in the field.

Recommender systems play an important role in our online experience and are involved in a wide range of decisions. Multiple stakeholders demand explanations for the corresponding algorithmic predictions. These demands have triggered significant interest from researchers in academia and industry in methods able to explain why recommendations are provided to users. Despite this interest, no comprehensive toolkit for explainable recommender systems is available to the community yet. In this talk, we introduce XRecSys, a software toolkit that includes several state-of-the-art recommender algorithms, and explainability methods thereof.

Getting a traditional, hardware based company like GARDENA into the IoT era comes with many challenges. Within such organizations, understanding and making use of the potential of FOSS can be challenging.

This talk is about about a small team convinced management to support FOSS work beyond the legal necessities.
Also, one year after introducing the product to the market, some insights regarding the usage of FOSS within GARDENA will be given.

How we learned to stop worrying and develop contracts as code

Drafting legal texts, especially when it comes to contracts, is often similar to writing code: modularity and reusability, version and branch control, collaborative editing and issue management are needs shared between developers and lawyers — even if the latter may not always realize it :).

In the end lawyers and developers face similar tasks, but lawyers can’t really leverage cooperative tools like git.

Having some software development background we wondered if we could use the same paradigms to produce legal documents, and to create a toolchain which should be easy to use for everybody. Git, Markdown, Pandoc, Mustache, Make (and some hand-made filters and scripts) did the trick. And we have a nifty presentation toolchain too! All with reveal-md and little else.

We can now produce documents and presentations using little else than a text editor and pretty much standard FOSS tools, roughly in the same way as software is written. And we think that this toolchain may be useful also to produce and manage business documentation, academic publications, and so on.

Components with known vulnerabilities (#9 from OWASP Top 10 list of Web Application Security Risks) are the most frequent cause of severe security breaches. The famous examples are the Equifax breach due to an outdated Apache Struts library, the Panama Papers data leak due to an old unpatched version of Drupal, and the Ubuntu forum breach due to an outdated Forumrunner add-on. Still, developers often keep third-party components used in their projects outdated.

To find the incentives of developers’ motivations for (not) updating dependencies of their projects, we interviewed developers of 25 different companies located in 9 countries and analysed their strategies for (i) selecting new dependencies, (ii) updating currently used dependencies, (iii) using automatic dependency management tools, and (iv) mitigating bugs and vulnerabilities for which there is no fixed dependency version.

In this talk, we will share our observations of the influence of security concerns on the current dependency management practices and recommendations (both based on observations and direct developers’ recommendations) on how to address the lack of attention to the security of third-party components.

Hence, the key takeaways of this talk are the following:
– you will learn the current developers’ practices of managing software dependencies
– you will discover the implications of the most popular dependency management strategies
– you will have the ideas on how to adjust the dependency management of your software projects to make them more secure

What does it mean for a trained neural network to be Free Software? What needs to be shared to allow users to exercise their freedom to adapt and improve it? Do our current licences fit the task?

More and more software-mediated tasks are being accomplished using trained neural networks, in part because the hardware that facilitates deep learning has become so much faster and cheaper. How does the FOSS licensing and development model interact with this trend? Challenges include:

+ A lack of clarity around the extent and character of IP present in a trained neural network
+ A reproducibility problem around the generation of a trained neural network from its ‘source’ data and parameters
+ Reliance on closed hardware drivers to achieve realistic training rates

At a time when our personal freedoms rely more and more on decisions made by such systems, are traditional models of software freedom failing to protect us?

Python REST API framework

BASE is an open source python framework based on tornado asynchronous web framework, which represents an upgrade by adding a decorators library that enables fast and simple development of REST-API based applications and it reduces the need for coding frequently used segments of code. Besides that, BASE can be used as an engine for web sites.

Today, pretty much all companies have embraced open source. But while they’re all keen to use open source, at lot fewer actually contribute to it.

And yet, there’s real value in doing so. Companies use their contribution to open source to boost recruiting (Facebook claims 75% of their new engineering recruits mention Facebook’s open source program as a key reason they accepted their offer), increase their market, build a moat around their business, or position themselves as leaders in their field.

In this talk, we’ll look at the different ways contributing to open source can benefit a business and become a competitive advantage. We’ll look at the open source strategies of different companies, big and small, and provide you with the knowledge to start building a business case for open source in your own company.

Hypothesis Engineering for Innovative Projects

In an increasingly turbulent business environment represented by the Internet era, software development has to be more flexible and agile, both in large companies and startups. Continuous experimentation becomes an important alternative paradigm of software development. It is an alternative to execution-oriented approach where software development is only fulfilling a list of defined requirements.

To be effectively experimentation-driven, a very first step is for all stakeholders involved in software development to move from a requirement, feature-driven mindset to hypothesis thinking. This new way of thinking is focused on taking product assumptions as hypotheses that should be tested and developing experiments to test these assumptions, before creating the final software product.

In this talk, we will introduce the concept of hypothesis engineering, and present a set of industry practices and techniques to foster hypothesis thinking and handle hypotheses.

AlpineBits Standard

The AlpineBits HotelData standard has been published in its 10th release by October 2020. While the standard allows a great amount of use cases, there is one open AlpineBits implementation for the Open Data Hub. It is freely available on Github and can be used as reference implementation. The middleware acts between the Open Data Hub infrastructure and the classical AlpineBits server interface to publish open data from the Open Data Hub. The presentation talks about the architecture and some helpful hints and tricks on how to approach an AlpineBits implementation.

IoT and AI enable the so called ‘SERVITIZATION’, aiming at supplying not only a product but also the so called ‘SMART SERVICES’ for customers care
management and after sale relationships.

Privacy and Cybersecurity by design: companies need to consider GDPR and privacy compliance issues and related risk for cybersecurity already in the design
process of smart devices to effectively implement data protection and cybersecurity principles.

The new challenge for companies is the management of new services and big data in one hand and safety in the use of interconnected devices on the other
hand.

Companies, in this situation, are becoming a constant target for hackers and cybercriminals who access unlawfully IT systems and networks creating business
interruptions, temporary inefficiencies and, sometimes, severe operational and reputational damages.

Everyone hates typos and fortunately spelling correction algorithms were invented! Last year I worked on a project bringing spell checking to a Django web application. The problem with spell checking is that it tends to be CPU intensive and it’s not what you want to run on your synchronous Django workers. Fortunately Rust and WebAssembly, a new binary instruction format for the Web, came to the rescue!

In this talk we’ll see:
– what is WebAssembly
– what is Rust
– how you can integrate WebAssembly in your project

Under a corporate point of view, free and open source software can offer material improvements such as costs reduction, flexibility and customization of services and thus let the company be able to adapt to new market trends and strengthen its business continuity.
On the other hand, however, open source software may have some disadvantages, e.g. lack of technical assistance, uncertainty about the legal liability framework and vulnerability to cyber-attacks.
Since the community is free to modify OSS, its developments are also unpredictable and such a changing and unforeseeable scenario may imply some hurdles to smoothly perform a forward-looking risk assessment within the governance and management of corporate tools.
The complexity of the cybersecurity risk-assessment for open source software may threaten managers’ and supervisors’ liability since they are responsible for the implementation of adequate governance tools and cybersecurity models.

What is the benefit to build and maintain agile engineering OpenSource communities on social media platforms?

In the more and more fast-moving digital world, people tend to develop a new understanding of communities. No time should be wasted, real-time response for even the most sophisticated technical questions is being expected. Besides, all these should be delivered for free and with unlimited support.

Old-school ugly forums are out; agile social media might be the better fit.

In 2020 the coronavirus pandemic is forcing us to find new ways of working together. And the digital transformation process happens now, now questions asked. Probably, the Gartner Hype Cycle will need some modifications. Just a few examples are the exploding VR-, AR- or drones-technology.

However, the rapidly advancing processes in the communities can also have a bright side. They can handle as a test field for future work methods and collaboration forms.
We need to identify the early adopters, understand the new requirements, and try to transform today’s community members into future customers.

We can, and we should!

Discussion Round

Open source software is now fundamental to the creation and deployment of almost all software in almost all industries. How can we prepare the next generation to both understand the importance of software freedom to our society and delight in the possibilities that being free to use, improve and share the work of others brings to their personal and future work lives?

Migrating large, complex, multi-tiered applications to Kubernetes can be a challenging task. In the talk, we share the experience of migrating our service-based, unified monitoring solution, NetEye 4 (https://www.wuerth-phoenix.com/en/solutions/it-system-management/unified-monitoring/), to a more modern micro-service oriented solution like Kubernetes, with the ultimate goal of providing a monitoring solution as a Service for large and multi-tenant infrastructures

Currently, NetEye 4 is built on top of the Red Hat cluster technology, which provides a set of features to implement resilient applications. With this technology, each tier of NetEye 4 is indeed high-available and distributed across multiple physical servers.

However, the burden to obtain a high-available, highly performing and scalable solution is high: it requires custom implementations to leverage the full set of functionalities offered by the infrastructure, which is not always available out-of-the-box.

Can Kubernetes be the possible solution to these problems? Which complexity is hidden under the hood of Kubernetes? Is Kubernetes complexity justified to fulfill our vision of offering unified monitoring as a Service and optimizing scalability in large environments? To answer these questions, we decide to use a product-testing method to explore potential solutions.

Risk Allocation to help Technological Development

The autonomy of decision-making of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology products, opens the discussion on multiple ethical and legal issues, that aim to find a solution on how to regulate AI defective product liability, social risk and consumers’ safety.
If the debate on the legal qualification of such products, in particular intelligent robots, is still far away from finding a common answer, the problem of products’ liability has been partly solved by adapting the already existing rules on manufacturers liability to AI algorithm’s developers.
Due to various inadequacies showed by this kind of approach, such as incompatibilities between the definitions of machine learning algorithm and manufactured product, the European Commission has targeted this issues, providing hypothetical different solutions that may pursue a new legal scheme able to increase social confidence in AI technology and enlarge the sample of potential investors.

The importance for strategic IT infrastructure development in Europe

We often talk about the need to regulate the use of data, to improve public procurement to ensure FOSS gets used and developed (public money, public code), and how to better regulate major social networks and cloud service providers in order to protect the ownership and control of our data (personal or even just sensitive data), in order to ensure and safeguard our digital freedom. While this is indeed important in its own right, we often overlook the need to nurture viable and strong ecosystems of FOSS software and solutions. Such a need is tightly related with adequate regulation and acceptance of FOSS across public and private sector. If there’s a strong enough ecosystem of strategic IT infrastructure and other critical software stacks in Europe, we will be able to improve both our collective ability to choose and remain digitally free and sovereign, as individuals, collective entities and countries. Specific cases will be discussed: virtualization through XCP-ng, the Gaia-X initiative, but also email clients and office suites.

The COVID-19 pandemic shows how dependent people are on the Internet for their work and personal life The whole internet traffic, encryption, business and work interaction are transferred through personal routers. Since 2013, the FSFE has been advocating for Router Freedom in Europe with outstanding results in Germany and effects beyond its borders.

Now, a new set of rules will challenge Router Freedom’s national implementation on EU Member States on the context of Net Neutrality. Router Freedom is regulated by three sets of rules. The first one comes from the Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), which establishes that people are free to choose their own digital equipment. The second set are the new Guidelines on the Location of the Network Termination Point (NTP), drafted by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC). National legislation and administrative acts in each EU member state will compose the third set. These are to be implemented locally by states’ National Regulatory Agencies (NRAs) in accordance with the aforementioned Net Neutrality Regulation and Guidelines on the NTP.

The challenges for Router Freedom can be divided into three groups:

1. The vague terms used by the Guidelines on the NTP. Allowing NRAs to decide the location of NTP based on “technological necessity” opens a dangerous precedent for discretionary and abusive interpretation of the Guidelines.

2. The lack of commitment by NRAs to protect Router Freedom. NRAs have been extremely conservative in applying penalties against Net Neutrality violations. Even worse, some countries, like Ireland and Portugal, have completely failed to establish sanctions against non-compliant ISPs.

3. The abusive behaviour of ISPs. ISPs are very creative in forcing their routers on customers, creating barriers that can completely block Router Freedom.

The talk will summarise what has been achieved and what is to be expected for Router Freedom.

A central authentication server to rule all your services

Many companies or organizations run not only one ore two services, but 10 and more.
Often each of these services has its own isolated user management implementation, or talks to other micro services over hardcoded API keys.
The OAuth2 standard supports multiple authentication mechanisms to rule all of these requirements in one central place.
Don’t reinvent the wheel with every new application.

The dawn of a decentralized data economy

In cities there will be 75 Billion of connected IoT devices by 2030. The availability of IoT real time data through data exchange hubs holds the promise of making our cities smarter, safer, cleaner and more efficient. These are objectives we all share as citizens – but we do not want to give up control over our personal data to achieve them. The question then is – how can IoT and Data Privacy be reconciled? The unexpected answer is – with Blockchain. Blockchain will empower citizens to control access to their IoT live data, significantly increasing their trust & willingness to collaborate in making cities a better place to live.

Who says that if you are a developer, you stay a developer for the rest of your work life?
Who says that if you are a Senior developer, you have all the skills to become a Project Manager?

The aim of my Master Thesis is giving a general overview about the Project Management and how the profession of Project Manager should not be undervalued in a Team especially if we speak about Virtual Context like distributed teams or remote working.

I will discuss the nowadays state of the art technique, trying to understand which one best meets the requirements of an IT project.

I will also try to expose the limitation of Traditional Management but also the limitation of brand new technique like Agile.

Planting early seeds for blooming compliance

All small businesses are short on money and time, often putting free and open source software compliance (FOSS) at the bottom of their priorities. But FOSS compliance is not merely a matter of legal risk, it can deeply affect a company’s reputation and with it, the ability to hire engineers, form partnerships, and present a good external image. Moreover, a basic level of FOSS compliance is generally a must for companies going through funding rounds and M&A events. And a compliance journey also implies understanding the provenance of third-party software in use with other applications such as security or quality.

Traditionally, FOSS conferences have featured presentations by large companies that begin with “my Open Source Program Office handles…”. They describe tooling and processes for companies with thousands of employees, none of which small companies can even attempt to replicate. What small companies need is a way to prioritize their tasks and risks and to break down the process of getting into compliance into discrete and tangible steps supported by free and open source compliance tools. Some steps make sense at a one person company, others at 50 and yet others at 500.

This presentation aims to help small businesses understand:
-the basics of what is necessary to be compliant with most FOSS licenses,
-which products pose the highest FOSS compliance-related risks,
-which entities are most likely to cause legal trouble for them,
the first steps they should take on their journey to becoming compliant,
-the common challenges in early compliance efforts,
-an overview of what comprehensive compliance should look like at -the end of the compliance journey,
-and what are the free and open source tools they can use to fulfill their compliance tool needs for efficient and cost effective compliance automation.

Usage of version control systems (VCS) such as Git, which is an established software engineering practice, is challenging for machine learning (ML) projects. Artifacts produced by ML pipelines, such as datasets, pre-processed data, trained models, are often large in size. Once generated, they have to be stored on a disk since reproducing them over and over is expensive. Unfortunately, traditional VCSs have restrictions on handling such large artifacts. Not using version control instead makes reproducibility of results unreliable.

DVC (Data Version Control) not only version-controls large artifacts but also keeps track of the commands that are run to produce them. It detects changes made to the input data and knows which steps in the pipeline have to be rerun to keep the final result up-to-date. By adopting DVC machine learning community can make a big step towards the reproducibility of research.

Recently, Intellectual Property Offices around the world have questioned the possibility of patenting and/or protecting under copyright law works achieved by artificial intelligence systems.
Regardless the requirements for access to intellectual property protection, none of the relevant jurisdictions allows for AI systems to be considered as inventor /author under their patent law and copyright regimes.
Then, who has the right to the exclusive use of those works?
The talk aims to analyze the different possible answer to this question, hypothesizing the possible change to our legal framework already proposed by the authorities.

Catch Solve is a new start-up incubated at NOI Techpark. As for all start-ups in the initial phase it was necessary to identify the business model and numerical business plan. These economic forecasts are full of unknowns and variables for everyone. In order to be able to find guidance in this situation and to have at least some certainty, it was very useful to make visual numerical simulations using charts on some basic economic parameters such as fixed costs, variable costs, investment costs, sales prices, liquidity, necessary credit, etc..
For this reason, we created a small software, which will be released open source, displaying the overall picture and the effects in real time of possible variations on the parameters thus helping to better comprehend at least the feasible economic ranges and the efficiency of the company’s economic drive.

Linux as a VXLAN Gateway with eVPN MP-BGP

This talk explains the installation and configuration of frr routing protocol suite for Linux. FRR is an implementation of eVPN MP-VPN using VxLAN.

This talk explains the basic configuration of vxlan gateway using debian linux with frr to achive eVPN MP-BGP. Linux itself is used to specify the VxLAN interfaces via iproute2, while FRR is used to achive eVPN with multi-protocol BGP. MP-BGP is needet to dynamicaly anounce L2 and L3 route across the VxLAN fabric.