SFScon 2021

Opening SFScon 2021

How do we avoid digital monopolies in medicine? According to Bart de Witte and Viktoria Prantauer from the Hippo AI Foundation, you kill unicorns with open eco-systems and radical open innovation and open AI. In his impressive lecture, Bart & Viktoria will make it clear that Europe’s competitiveness and innovative and innovative strength of Europe can only be ensured in the future if the potential of open AI approaches is exploited. According to Bart de Witte free flow of information is essential for democracy and our society. 

Many European health care systems trace their roots to Bismarck’s idea that we, as citizens, have a social responsibility to redistribute resources when individuals’ incomes and ability to pay for care are unequal. Most Europeans readily accept the solidarity principle – it is deeply rooted in our culture. Europe guarantees fundamental rights such as Article 35 – Health Protection, which states that everyone has the right of access to preventive health care and the right to medical treatment in accordance with national laws and practices.  To ensure this right to medical treatment, it is important that every actor has access to quality information and that medical innovations remain affordable. AI is the key technology of the future and will fundamentally change the German and European healthcare system. While the U.S. follows a market-driven platform capitalism, China is building a panoptic control society. However, healthcare in Europe is highly federalised, which means that Europe does not have the same market conditions as China and the U.S., resulting in an insurmountable competitive disadvantage for the development of data-driven digital business models. Current data accumulation is already following capital accumulation, and it shows how these new business models could lead to data consolidation and, in the final stage, unseen information asymmetry or monopolization of life-saving knowledge. The free flow of information enshrined in European fundamental rights would be disrupted. Quo vadis Europe?

The resilience of our future digital health systems threatens our digital sovereignty. In addition, the intellectual property protection that leads to closed AI exacerbates the already existing crisis of scientific reproducibility. Google has published several papers on its AI performance without releasing data, methods, and source code of its model. It is as if we are creeping back to the dark ages of pre-Enlightenment. Central to Europe’s digital sovereignty and competitiveness is not only the development of AI competencies, but also the development of freely available data and AI models that accelerate the development of open AI. Establishing open AI through open standards in medicine could protect our European markets and lead to a competitive advantage because openness will lead to faster innovation. The speed of bringing innovations to market is likely to become more important in the medium-long term than the copyright protection on life-saving algorithms. Moreover, AI in medicine needs balanced and representative training data to avoid discrimination, so the problem can only be solved by globally oriented organizations. AI is the key technology of the future and will fundamentally change the German healthcare system. While the U.S. follows a market-driven platform capitalism, China is building a panoptic control society. 

Depending on the standards we adopt, the introduction of AI could exacerbate or reduce unequal access to life-saving healthcare. Europe needs to design AI for healthcare based on its value system in such a way that fundamental rights, such as the right to life or health protection, are still guaranteed, as well as the free flow of information. The introduction of AI in medicine should strengthen our democracy, but also the local economy. Access to open AI is hugely important for startups. In a recent survey by PwC, two-thirds of founders:in already criticized competitive distortions caused by data monopolies among a few international corporations. This trend will increase through mergers and acquisitions. By demonetizing data and opening up AI through open source licensing, we can digitally reinvent the social market economy.

Democratization of AI (open source strategy) is needed for sustainable AI development in medicine, in line with our European standards and values. The current federal and European data strategy by far does not contain everything that is necessary for a successful open AI development. Therefore, the establishment of a global non-profit organization for the exchange of data, AI commons and knowledge is necessary. Such an organization should be independent of current political interests. The Hippo AI Foundation  aims to be this organisation, and brings people and data together to build medical reference datasets and artificial intelligence as digital commons. This keeps life-saving medical knowledge extracted from patient:inside data using AI accessible to all, accelerating innovation and reducing R&D costs. As a global non-profit organization, Hippo AI provides a legal framework and structure to shape collaboration and funding for medical open-source projects. For an open-source project to be sustainable and enduring, it requires an organized community of participants to drive development. The Hippo AI Foundation defines and governs a clear process of patient:in led projects to create reference datasets. A clear description of how individuals can contribute to the project and how the evaluation and inclusion of contributions works is provided. This enables effective and accurate prioritization of project steps. The Hippo AI Foundation aims to democratize medical artificial intelligence. This could enable a sustainable improvement of medical care, empowers patients and enables entrepreneurs and researchers worldwide to work on local solutions.

OpenHarmony's journey to Oniro - One year on

We introduced Openharmony at SFSCon 2020. One year has passed and with it much water under the project’s bridge. The project is now officially an Eclipse project, with its own brand. Members and industry partners are joining and the version 1.0 release is behind the corner. This talk provides an update of the vision, objectives, ecosystem, governance model, technology, standards, compliance processes, and all progress made in one intense year of work inside the Oniro project.

Free Open Source Projects often grow into or are designed to become Products. Much has been said about the difference between Project and Product and the challenge of navigating the intersection of the two, however, less has been considered around what happens to the code after it is productized.

In this talk, I will explore the issues that arise when the open-source code used in your Product gets re-compiled and re-distributed. Setting clear expectations in this situation is critical to avoid problems down the road.

Evaluating open source projects is a permanent challenge that OW2 has chosen to meet by defining a unique composite indicator now applied to its projects. This indicator facilitates the evaluation of open source projects from the point of view of corporate information systems managers. The growth of open source software is taking place in two main directions. First, by moving up the layers of information systems: from the operating system to the business applications, open source software is increasingly used by non-IT specialists. Second, by becoming “mainstream”, open source is reaching out to decision-makers who are unfamiliar with open source. For these new users, educated in the commercial practices of proprietary software vendors, open source remains a counter-intuitive model; its technical, legal and community specificities are a source of uncertainty that is not very favourable to positive decisions. Mainstream decision-makers must hear a language they understand. This is the role of the Market Readiness Levels (MRL) method developed by OW2 for evaluating open source projects. With MRL, decision-makers have a familiar indicator that positions open source projects according to the “business” decision criteria they are used to. Open source is moving towards them.

The talk begins with a presentation of the MRL method, its three levels of analysis and the hundred or so criteria taken into account. It then gives the example of a few OW2 projects evaluated by the method and explains what benefits it brings to the development teams, but also to the end-users and the open source in general

Designing a circular digitisation with the upcycling of software and reuse of hardware

Smart phones, smart homes, smart cities, smart farming … the number of connected devices is exponentially growing, yet is still far away from its peak. Every five years we produce more smartphones than there are humans on the planet. Confronted with climate change and the problem that any new electronic and smart device is produced in an energy intense process and with the consumption of rare resources, it is long time overdue to find a more sustainable growth of our digitisation. Time to transform the Internet of linear things into the one of reusable devices!

The talk explores four principles that any further digitisation shall be based on to move into a more sustainable digital society. It gives concrete advise how politicians nowadays can use these findings and apply simple directives that will allow the circular use and upcycling of software, extend lifetime and reusability of our hardware.

A real-time IoT system for monitoring crops remotely

droneONtrap DIVA project applies Precision Farming (PF) techniques in order to create a demonstration system based on IoT smart traps and UAV scans for real-time and remote monitoring of crop diseases. This talk focuses on the traps section of the project, presenting the results of the IoT system based on smart trap nodes installed on fields and a centralized server for collecting, processing and visualizing data in real time.

RDF and its subset Linked Data are great technologies to support ad hoc and distributed information structures. Data can be annotated, point to other data and thus create a rich and computer-readable tapestry of information. The challenge starts, when personal and private data becomes part of that information tapestry. The common approaches for access and privacy controls still stick to the traditional folders-and-files structure. This makes it hard for humans to effectively control and understand

-how to select what is available to whom
-how to tag different privacy spheres
-how to identify data

There are a few options to approach this, but few, if none of them are human-centric. They can be hard to understand, lead to click-fatigue and thus are prone to the implementation of dark patterns.

The talk will introduce a more human-centric approach to these challenges, by establishing common sets of UX and nomenclature. These are derived from core concepts to add connotations, circumstances and relationships to Linked Data, so humans can identify which spheres of life a data point belongs to, and which facet of their identity is used in conjunction with this data.

As a result, the system will be much more human-centric, by mimicking real-life understanding and behaviours to digital systems.

The goal of droneONtrap project is to use Precision Farming (PF) techniques in order to create a demonstration system for real-time and remote monitoring of crop diseases using the combination of 1) traps installed on fields for real time acquisition and remote control of the status of the crop and 2) sporadic multispectral aerial surveys using UAV for a complete analysis of the crop. The presentation deals with the developed technologies and the results of droneONtrap project.

Why free software and the art of cooking have more in common than you may think

What’s probably the most unusual approach to promote the principles of free software without actually coding? Why not try some tasty open source cooking!

The principles of free software communities relate a lot to other areas of life. Many contributors work together on a common goal, where each of you brings in their individual skills and interests. You create something delicious and tasty many benefit from. If you’re passionate, you can excite your friends and family for what you do. When all of us meet, cook together, have a good time and lots of fun, we can even stay surprisingly far from our computers…

In this talk, I will make you hungry for more, will show you why cooking and free software have actually much more in common than you may think, and why working in your local community is even more tasty than in virtual space. Bon appétit!

In 2020 the German government released the award criteria for obtaining eco-certification with the Blauer Engel label for desktop software. Categories for certification include energy efficiency, extending the potential operating life of hardware, and user autonomy … all of which fit seamlessly with Free & Open Source Software (FOSS). The Blauer Engel 4 FOSS (BE4FOSS) project from KDE e.V. seeks to collect, summarize, and spread information related to eco-certification and resource efficiency as it relates to FOSS development.

Free software means users and their communities have the freedom to control the software they use. These freedoms provide real choice: choice in what to install, or uninstall; options to modify software to run more, or less, efficiently; opting to continue support for older, but functioning, devices; and so on. Each of these choices has a cost and/or benefit. For instance, the more (unnecessary) processes a piece of software runs in the background, the more resources the hardware will need. Multiply such costs by hundreds of millions, or even billions, of computer users worldwide, and it quickly adds up.

In short, software efficiency means resource efficiency.

In this talk I will focus primarily on the energy consumption of software, which is also the focus of the Free & Open Source Software Energy Efficiency Project, or FEEP for short. I will walk the audience through the 3 steps for obtaining Blauer Engel certification: (1) Measure, (2) Analyze, (3) Certify. This 3-step workflow will be described in detail, with concrete examples from the KDE software KMail, Okular, and Krita, the first of which is currently under evaluation for certification. I will end the talk with an open call for community engagement, both specifically in applying for Blauer Engel certification and more generally in supporting a resource-efficient, free software future.

THIS PROJECT IS FINANCIALLY SUPPORTED BY: BMU (Federal Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Germany).

Software dependencies can be viewed as graph that only get bigger as software evolved. This lead to multiple challenging situations related to security, quality, licensing and more. Today tools are great but more accurate tools such as FASTEN are under development. Join me to learn how the current dependency management tool are evolving to cope with the growing complexity of software development.

Demand for specific agricultural product quality characteristics and changing climate are significant forces behind innovation in the farming sector. To remain profitable, agricultural practices must continue to innovate and discover new crops and varieties to adapt to the changing environment. For over 30 years, Laimburg Research Center has been undergoing an apple variety testing program growing apple crossbreedings and mutants on the dedicated test sites in South Tyrol. Within this program, researchers routinely evaluate apple varieties for essential agronomical and quality characteristics and provide growing recommendations to farmers.

Commonly agreed semantics is an essential step towards improved interoperability of the apple variety data, which represents a significant body of domain knowledge collected over the years. In this study, we attempt to formalize this valuable knowledge by developing ontology-based visual analytics, so as to fully exploit the potential of the data and gain insights into high complexity datasets (multi-source, multi-scale, and different stages).

The current study focuses on developing prototypical visual analytics for the apple variety testing program in South Tyrol, Italy. Thus, the work aims to create a visual analytics interface to integrate and harmonize information about apple variety testing and its interaction with climate by designing a semantic model enabled to turn the data into knowledge for domain experts.

Ontologies provide a representation of expert knowledge and create standard concepts for data integration, on the one hand opening the possibility to share the insight using a unified terminology, and on the other hand allowing for inference. Building upon relevant semantic models (e.g., agri-food experiment ontology, plant trait ontology, GeoSPARQL), we propose to extend them based on the apple variety testing and climate data. The development of an ontology-based model enables data integration and harmonization and provides a framework for integrating, through relevant concepts and relationships, data sources from different repositories and for defining a precise specification to retrieve additional knowledge. Moreover, as apple variety research is performed on various locations, the geospatial component can enrich the analysis with spatial properties. Finally, the visual narratives designed within this study will give a better-integrated view of relations between data entities and meaningful patterns and clustering based on semantic concepts.

Ekaterina Chuprikova ^1,*, Abraham Mejia Aguilar ¹, Roberto Monsorno ¹, Walter Guerra², Diego Calvanese

¹ Centre for Sensing Solutions, EURAC research – ekaterina.chuprikova@eurac.edu

2 Research Centre Laimburg

* Corresponding author

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 894215.

Oniro is a distributed operating system for mobile/IoT devices envisioned by Huawei and other partners. In such a scenario, our project aims at designing a middleware for dispatching workloads on a distributed architecture composed of several IoT, mobile and edge devices. The project focuses on intelligent orchestration of the workload in a dynamically changing ecosystem.

Thanks to state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence techniques, IoT and cloud computing projects are now automatically analyzed and documented by DECODER. This is increasing workgroup productivity from software designers to SaaS operators, including testers and maintainers. First external contributions are made possible through the ReachOut platform, where beta-testers can try and run several DECODER software in their own environment.

Towards a Sustainability Index for Artificial Intelligence

Many hopes are put onto AI systems regarding sustainability efforts. While AI certainly has immense potential for contributing towards protecting our planetary boundaries, questions regarding the sustainability of AI are less prominently addressed. That is worrisome because the development, implementation and use of AI systems often comes with huge energy consumption, unfair working conditions and intransparent as well as biased applications. In order to move from mostly abstract discussions of the sustainability of AI, in our project “SustAIn” we are thus developing a sustainability index for AI systems to serve as a rating system.

These unprecedented uncertain times heavily challenged companies and public administrations, calling for a deeper data understanding and a better capability to visualize data, make forecasts and take data-driven decisions.

Knowage, as open-source suite for analytics and business intelligence powered by the OW2 community, strengthened its commitment to support any emerging analytical needing.

Knowage 8 collects all recent efforts and will bring new rich pre-built components within dashboards, an expansion of the in-cloud offer and many new functions aiming to further enhance user experience.

This speech will address the importance of an effective data visualization and analysis as well as the detailed presentation of the new innovative functions of the last version.

Precision agriculture (PA) is a complete farm management approach that uses and exploits different sources of information at different scales (spatial, temporal and spectral) provided by varied technology (sensors, satellites, UAVs, robots) for improved resource use efficiency, productivity, quality, profitability and sustainability of agricultural production.
One of the common methods used in PA is spectroscopy. It relies in the analysis of the electromagnetic spectrum in the visible and near infrared ranges. Some of the applications are quality check of fruits, meat, and fish, grading and sorting at-harvest applications for fruits and vegetables, soil characterization, health of vegetation for monitoring diseases, and many others.
Traditionally, the instruments used in spectroscopy are costly and oriented to laboratory applications. Also exist field instruments but the limited temporal resolution impacts in the overall analysis of the applications.
In this work, we develop a low-cost and autonomous hyperspectral sensor node that is able to collect daily spectral signatures, for the quasi-real time analysis in an apple orchard affected by apple proliferation disease. The system is based in Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms using a low-cost spectral sensor.

A real-time algorithm for calculating the best flow condition

We present a method for calculating the optimal motorway speed based on real-time measured data. On the basis of the vehicle flow and the transit speed measured at high frequency (1 minute), an algorithm was developed based on the concept of a “state machine”, which in real time calculates the optimal transit speed. This information can be immediately communicated to drivers via variable message signs. The optimal speed is the one that avoids or reduces traffic jams and ensures maximum flow of a road section.
The system is currently being tested by the A22 Brenner motorway as part of the European LIFE+ project BrennerLEC, but it is conceptually applicable to any motorway equipped with a measurement infrastructure for vehicular transit and signalling to users.

Maximizing yield and enabling new revenue streams

Farmers, around the world, face exhausting manual tasks on regular basis through the production process to manage multiple growth variables for their crops; also, there is high uncertainty about the impact when adjustments to these variables are made. In this context, the market for precision agriculture is growing to 12.7 billion by 2025 with solutions mainly based on Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Cloud Computing for the automation of the agricultural industry. Since there is an increasing demand for technological solutions, the project Interplanetary Precision Agriculture (IPA) is proposed. The current project aims to improve the cultivation process on and off Earth, with technological solutions based on IoT, AI , and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT or Blockchain); hence, a system of systems is laid out. First, Magrito, a holonomic autonomous rover, is introduced to gather crop performance parameters (output variables); second, the IoT devices Habitat Precision PRO, and Water Precision PRO are deployed to gather the growing parameters (input variables); third, the IPA Farm Management System correlates the data captured by these devices to add context (business logic); fourth, all data is sent through the #IOTA Channels Protocol to #IOTA Tangle network, which is one of the most scalable and energy efficient DLTs with zero fees.

OW2, a global open-source software community based in Europe, has recently established the Quick App Initiative, an interest group for global developers to exchange ideas about quick app-related technologies. The group will gather global experts from a wide range of industries and fields to explore new applications in various vertical fields for quick apps while also fostering technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and ecosystem.
I can elaborate on this new initiative and Huawei’s effort on this. I will also elaborate on the macro-understanding from a Huawei European point of view. And I would explain to you business opportunities and the open-source economic models in the world about this initiative and especially in China.

Can free software help us fix software obsolescence?

The European Right to Repair movement is making progress, asking European policymakers for more ambitious and timely regulation to make products more repairable and long-lasting. But software obsolescence is increasingly undermining the success of Right to Repair – not to mention the growing threat of part pairing, manufacturers’ use of software to restrict who can repair what. In a fast changing landscape, the free software community can be a crucial ally in pushing for a real, universal Right to Repair. The talk will present current threats and opportunities for the two movements to collaborate more closely

Lithuania is the place where innovative Italian technological ideas are implemented.

A stroke is an acute disorder of cerebral circulation that damages the cells in the brain. Early diagnosis of stroke and its type determination are very important aspects in order to choose the most appropriate strategy solutions of treatment. Adequate and personalized post-stroke rehabilitation is essential for further treatment of patient and recovery of his health. In order to personalize a rehabilitation process and choose an optimal option, a wide variety of appropriate decisions are needed, including multi-functional hardware and software tools.
The developed multimodal system for personalized post-stroke rehabilitation provides the ability to monitor the brain function, cardiovascular and neuro-motor systems activity. The brain activity and movements will be monitored as the patient repeats physical and rehabilitative play exercises using virtual/augmented reality module in order to assess neuro-motor system performance. Using this system, electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-spectrum infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) solutions will be able to monitor the brain electrical and hemodynamic activity, respectively, and an electromyography (EMG) module will be able to monitor muscle dynamic activity. Cardiovascular activity will be monitored using a smart bracelet. Structural changes in the brain will be monitored by multi-channel bio-impedance measurements. Objective measurement data will be combined with subjective data to help make decisions about post-stroke rehabilitation assistance.
After assessing the post-stroke condition of patient, the physician and the rehabilitator will be able to form a personalized rehabilitation program that defines the system configuration. According to this program, the patient will perform physical exercises and receive feedback, which will be formed according to the parameters of physiological signals from sensors. The patient efforts and progress will also be recorded on the data server. Based on these data, the progress of rehabilitation will be monitored by medical staff, who could respond to the current situation as needed.

How open source can make your life as a software developer easier

Nowadays, the hotel industry is getting more complex. Hotels receive more and more requests from their clients and need to compete against their competitors. From market research, we have found out that larger hotels are getting up to 100.000 requests per year. And they are facing challenges over handling the requests manually.
Our solution – automation of the request handling process. Therefore, we have created an electronic echo (EECHO), A contextual AI Assistant which is based on the open-source machine learning framework RASA NLU as well as Tensorflow. EECHO solves that problem perfectly up to 95% of answering requests. On top of that, we integrated Open data hub to have more options regarding personalized answers. So you can also ask EECHO what you should do tomorrow and EECHO will find the perfect option for you.

The Great Library of Source Code

Software Heritage collects, preserves, and shares software source code from major software development forges, free software distributions, package manager repositories, and more. As such, Software Heritage is the premier digital preservation initiative whose goal encompasses the long-term archival of free software commons for generations to come.
The Software Heritage archive is the largest publicly accessible archive of software source code, having collected 10 billion unique source code files and 2 billion unique commits from more than 160 million software projects.
This talk will provide an update about the Software Heritage project, focusing on increased archive coverage, integration with other initiatives, and way to practically use the archive, for both end users and developers.

The AlpineBits DestinationData is an open standard designed to support the exchange of tourism-related data. Tailored to include the needs of alpine tourism, DestinationData includes standardized JSON messages and a REST API design, providing implementation solutions for basic demands of server-client communication. The consistency of its design is ensured by the adoption of multiple well-established standards, mature technologies, and its underlying ontology which is responsible for making sure that the data being exchanged is well-understood by all parties.

In his talk, Claudenir Fonseca, from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, will present the latest release of the AlpineBits DestinationData, version 2021-04, and its main features. The presentation will focus on the reference implementation of DestinationData, which is powered by Open Data Hub and provides real and open data in a new flavor. The presentation will focus on how to learn and how to consume Open Data Hub data through this reference implementation, as well as present the resources for those interested on implementing their own servers.

Computer-assisted cognitive training can help patients affected by several illnesses alleviate their cognitive deficits, or healthy people improve their mental performance. Adapting the difficulty of the exercises to how individuals perform in their execution is crucial to improve the effectiveness of cognitive training activities. We propose the use of Reinforcement Learning to learn how to automatically adapt the difficulty of computerized exercises for cognitive training. We illustrate a method to be initially used to learn difficulty-variation policies tailored for specific categories of trainees, and then to refine these policies for single individuals. We present the results of two user studies that provide evidence for the effectiveness of our method.

Developing an online platform to manage rides operated by volunteers

MoveAid is a project developed as a collaboration between the Linux User Group of Bolzano-Bozen-Bulsan and the Association for Elderly People’s Rights (ADA) of Bolzano. The aim of this web application is to manage the “trasporto solidale” (solidarity transport) initiative in a more organized and graceful manner. This latter project consists of three associations – ADA, Antea and Auser – providing elderly people with free transportation to medical clinics and other points of interest. The service is currently entirely managed by hand and separetely by every single organization. MoveAid offers a brand new central platform to manage reservations for all elderly people of Bolzano. In this way, not only is the project way easier to manage but also reduces its environmental footprint, by optimizing the usage of the available vehicles.

After the initial years of wireless IoT devices basing their networking on
proprietary protocols, home-grown by one vendor and in-compatibly to anything else, there is a shift to consolidate on IPv6.

In this talk, we will go briefly over 6lowpan as a technology that enabled a lot of these use-cases by providing compression techniques for low-power radio links with limited frame sizes. While its initial development was for IEEE 802.15.4 based networks it was quickly adopted for Bluetooth, NFC, PLC, and others.

This shift allowed the re-use of existing knowledge and concepts of TCP/IPv6 to be adopted into the IoT world, most notably the end-to-end concept, or rather the device-to-cloud concept for IoT. It also resulted in a reduced need for proxies translating between various proprietary networks and your home IP network.

In the future, this hopefully will result in a reduction of product-specific IoT
hubs in a network. An open source blueprint for such a gateway based on All Scenarios OS will be described, together with OpenThread and Matter (former CHIP) as example IPv6 based IoT turnkey solutions.

The Brenner Base Tunnel (BBT) migrated its whole Geospatial infrastructure to an open source solution: implications and results

One of the largest infrastructure projects in Europe decided after having worked for 15 years on a proprietary architecture, to migrate the whole geospatial infrastructure to open source components. The starting situation, the migration process and the final result will be described, along with the advantages of the new architecture. In particular the new multilingual WebGIS interface based on QGIS server will be presented.

The benefits of Linked Data are well known, but the supporting software ecosystem is still somewhat lacking. During this presentation we will look into the approach taken by Joinup: How we start from a formalized ontology, and map this to the Joinup website. We’ll give an overview of the Open Source components that we created for building linked data based CMS applications.

The Construction Industry, and its broader ecosystem, erects buildings, infrastructure, and industrial structures that are the foundation of our economies and are essential to our daily lives. Our mission is to create sustainably better living conditions for people on our planet and beyond.

The Construction Industry, and its broader ecosystem, erects buildings, infrastructure, and industrial structures that are the foundation of our economies and are essential to our daily lives.
The Construction Industry is one of the biggest industries after agriculture worldwide and one of the largest employment creators in the world.

1. According to McKinsey & Company, the construction industry is in for a big change.

The PROGRESS GROUP with xx years of experience if driving this change fundamentally.

A $265 billion annual profit pool awaits disrupters. A value chain delivering approximately $11
trillion of global value added and $1.5 trillion of global profit pools looks set for overhaul.
A changing market environment, technological progress, and disruptive new
entrants will trigger industry overhaul: Industrialization, New materials, Digitalization of products and processes
Today, off-site construction companies primarily manufacture building elements, structures, or
modules for real estate—but also for industrial structures and infrastructure like bridge segments.
Overall, off-site construction is still a relatively young and immature part of the larger construction
ecosystem, with high fragmentation and smaller-scale players that use mostly manual labor.

Off-site construction will see much deeper integration even in flat-pack design such as doors,
windows, and fully preinstalled mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. Data will be flexibly
transferred from BIM models to the automated factory controls for decent customization within
standard designs. The level of integration and connector technology aims to require no skilled labor
on final site and enable extremely fast building times.
While off-site construction is expected to enjoy massive demand growth in the near term, owner
expectations and requirements will increase. For instance, the capability to integrate sustainability
and new materials, and flexible automation (minimal work on final site) will become increasingly
important criteria.

2. INDUSTRIALIZED CONSTRUCTION IN ACADEMIA

IC Goal List:
• Increase labor productivity
• Substitute labor-intensive processes with machines
• Fast-track the rate of construction
• Commission new projects more quickly
• Reduce costs
• Improve overall quality and sustainability
• Make customization affordable

5 Trends:
• Prefabrication – Off-site construction of building elements and assemblies in factories
• Big Data, AI, and Predictive Analysis – Predict the future of construction by mining data generated from future projects while integrating lean construction principles
• Additive Manufacturing – 3D printing of objects by building up structures from small deposits of materials
• Internet of Things – Network of objects incorporated in the building systems
• Robotics – Designing, building, and applying robots to perform work

3. IFC4precast enabling 4IR – 4th industrial revolution in Industrialized Construction
IFC4precast is a completely new concept to support the BIM process in the best possible way, especially for the precast industry. The digitization of the precast industry is progressing at a rapid pace, with the aim of supporting the participating software systems such as CAD, MES, PPS, and ERP with integration and networking. Several strong and well-known software vendors from this industry came together and founded the buildingSMART working group IFC4precast (initiated by customers).

The current development of BIM focuses on the documentation of the construction process by enriching and standardizing architectural and technical building models. The prefabrication process is not deeply anchored in this development at present. As prefabricated products become more and more complex, the demand for a more powerful model data exchange interface increases.

Gold standard for Free Software licensing

Marking code with its license and copyright is a tedious and often confusing task for developers. As a result, users and re-users are confronted with ambiguous information. The REUSE initiative changes that! With three simple steps, it makes adding and reading licensing and copyright information easy for both humans and machines. This presentation will guide you through the REUSE best practices and its tools, and presents how to make clear licensing simple.

A User Driven Design of a Power Architecture Open Hardware Notebook

In 2018 we presented at SFScon the block diagram of the project of our Open Hardware Notebook, after 3 years, in this edition the prototypes are around the corner… We present the Beta tester and Supporters program to produce a first small number of pieces of this notebook useful for GNU/Linux distributions to other OS and for anyone interested in getting their hands on it in preview.

This notebook is designed around GNU/Linux and is a concrete example of a complex Open Hardware electronic design. What’s more is a user driven design that is a plus.

A Case Study of the AI4EBV Project

Machine learning and deep learning methods are widely used in the field of Earth observation, both for image classification and image segmentation tasks. However, the implementation of these methods is often limited by the available computational resources, especially when applied to large-scale high-resolution imagery. Within the scope of the AI4EBV project (https://ai4ebv.eurac.edu/), funded by the Group on Earth Observation Biodiversity Observation Network (https://geobon.org/) and Microsoft, we are assessing the computational cost and accuracy of different machine learning and deep learning models for the task of multispectral image segmentation. We are integrating open digital elevation model and multitemporal Earth observation data, to derive general land cover at a spatial resolution of 30m for the entire European Alps throughout the years 2016-2020. We focus on comparing the accuracy and cost of advanced feature extracting deep learning algorithms (e.g., deep convolutional neural networks) with traditional feature-based machine learning algorithms (e.g., random forests, support vector machines). The algorithms are written in Python-3 and are based on existing open-source frameworks for scalable data analytics (numpy, xarray, and dask) and machine learning (scikit-learn and PyTorch). The developed algorithms are highly optimized, allowing for large-scale image analysis on both multiple CPUs and GPUs in parallel.

An overview on the ease of development of a very complex system

Have you ever stood infront of a Vending machine and wished it could be smarter, remember that you like one sugar with your coffee, that is easier to interact with, easier to pay?
In this talk SECO lays the out our Oniro Blueprint, to build a vending machine for the truly digital age, one that knows and remembers your preferences, one that is easy to interact with even if you have no wallet or coins and one that is truly easy for businesses to manage and maintain while boosting the machine use and revenue.

Finally will be announced the future roadmap for the new and existing services and reference boards from SECO, including the data orchestration platform Astarte.

Compliance in a complex Yocto/Bitbake-based operating system

Compliance with copyright can be a nightmare, especially if the project faces it late in development. Everybody is now figuring out how to use tools and how this could help. We have been tasked with doing it for an entire operating system, something that would take months/man if not years. If you start late, you will finish late. But the gold standard is today to integrate compliance in CI/CD. We present our solutions and those that we have considered or are considering.

In this talk, we will present all the required tools for an end to end project in artificial intelligence and machine learning with a focus on Natural language processing.

Starting from:
– Environment: The step-up needed to start.
– Data processing: Processing and converting raw data to a usable one.
– Prototyping: Creating, selecting, and fine-tuning a model.
– Deploying: Serving the resulted model to be used.

We selected these tools having these reasons in mind:
– Efficiency: Is the tool covers the most utilities needed for the specific step.
– Productivity: Is the tool respecting the “don’t repeat yourself” and “don’t reinvent the wheel” principles, and you can do the maximum with the minimum.
– Ease and Control: The tools that are needed to manage the pipeline and write code.

Who may be interested:
– Machine learning engineers/Data scientists.
– Anyone experimenting with code in an iterative process.
– Anyone working with data.

In december 2020 we started to design this Open Hardware SBC and it would like to be a cheap and accessible PowerPC compatible board. Following the OSHW philosophy that drive all the notebook project, we aim to develop all the schematics and the PCB with the help of the community. Because I’m struggle to complete all the design by myself I would like to share all my work with anyone interested.

flict (FOSS License Compatibility Tool) can check if the license of your software, and its dependencies, are compatible and if they are in line with your license policy.

This presentation will show you how to get started with flict, check a project for license compatibility, apply a license policy, how to get a graph of the compatibility between licenses in your project and finally show how a package, and its dependencies, as built with Yocto can be checked for compatibility.

Artificial intelligence for wireless sensor networks

Within the project named FIRST (artiFicial Intelligence for wiReless Sensor neTworks) supported by the Stiftung Südtiroler Sparkasse of Bolzano through the Fusion Grant, Eurac Research is developing drift compensation and adaptive learning methods to extend the calibration lifespan of low-cost sensors in time. The project aims at comparing several models (multivariate linear regression, random searches, feedforward neural networks, etc.) by exploiting training-set and data-set from real sensors for air quality deployed in a urban area.

A main focus of FIRST is to push the computational workload toward the network’s edge. In this sense, the talk is connected to the SFScon’s topic Intelligent Sensors/Networks of the IoT panel. The contribution is relevant to SFScon cause the entire process will be automatized by means of open-source software components. Moreover, the training-set is consumed via the API of the Open Data Hub, which exposes air-quality data from the certified monitoring stations located in the province of Bolzano.

Attention-based Machine Learning

Ever since the publication of the paper “Attention is all you need” by Vaswani et al in 2017, the Transformer Neural Network has become an ubiquitous architecture used in many machine learning tasks such as Neural Machine Translation, Language Modelling, Image Classification, Image Generation and Time Series Forecasting. In such a short time, a vast amount of variations of this model have been proposed to tackle different tasks, all based on the underlying mechanism which powers Transformers: Attention. This talk acts an introduction to the world of Transformers and Transformer variants, starting with a brief explanation of the model and the Attention mechanism, continuing afterwards with different use cases. The best part? Most of the code you need to reproduce these models is open-source. This way, you can find out for yourself if attention is truly all you need.

Sport climbing is a relatively recent sport, and many new climbing routes are continuously built all around the world. Climbers are interested to climb routes which are: challenging, but within their capabilities; enjoyable; suitable for training; and safe. We would like to first understand the preferences of the climbers by monitoring their behaviour, and then to build a recommender system for supporting them in choosing suitable climbing routes.
Modeling a climber’s behavior will be made by using both explicit feedback, e.g., by leveraging data coming from mobile climbing applications (s.a. Vertical Life), and by using implicit feedback, which can come from data acquired by accelerometers placed on the wall or on the body of the climber. By combining these two data sources, we aim at building a climber’s profile and based on such a profile, to generate recommendations.
Aiming at the overall goal of building a climbing routes recommender system, we have now developed machine learning models to predict whether the climber would agree with the “official” difficulty level of the climbing routes. Usually, climbing route difficulty is given by the route setter or a person who initially built the. However, climbers might have different opinions about the grade of a route, hence in disagreement with the route setter. In our application scenario, climbers manually insert their grades for routes that they tried, by using a mobile application (`Vertical-Life’). We use a range of additional data in order to model why they disagree with the setter. We have created a dataset of indoor and outdoor lead climbs, where the official grade and the climbers’ opinions are stored. We have then implemented two ML models to predict the grade difficulty given by the climbers: linear regression and matrix factorization. For the linear regression model, we constructed features of the climber-route interaction which describe how and when the climber deviates from the setter’s grade, and for matrix factorization, we modelled the grade prediction as a special type of rating prediction problem. We have then used singular value decomposition with normalization taking into consideration the route setter’s grade. We show that the models’ predictions are closer to the climbers’ opinions than a baseline model.
In the future, we would like to develop a full system that could be also able to identify climbers in a climbing gym, detect what type of activities they perform, and measure their performance. This system could be used to enrich the climber’s profile and to complete the design of the recommender. Last, but not least, we would like to incorporate the proposed solution into the Vertical-Life app.

Data Protection becomes increasingly important, especially in the digital world. Data Protection by Design and by Default (“DPbDD”) plays a critical role in this connection and has been enshrined in Article 25 the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). Data Protection by Design requires that data protection principles are to be taken into consideration at the earliest stage of the design process, while Data Protection by Default should ensure that, by default, only personal data that are necessary for each purpose of the processing are processed.

Even though Article 25 GDPR specifically addresses data controllers (e.g. companies or public administrations using software for processing personal data), developers may find it useful to get familiar with DPbDD requirements for creating GDPR compliant software that enables data controllers to fulfill their data protection obligations. This could possibly lead to competitive advantages over competitors who do not design their products with data protection principles in mind.

A challenge for climbing gyms is to find out popular routes for the climbers to improve their services and optimally use their infrastructure. This problem must be addressed preserving privacy and convenience of the climbers. To this aim we developed a hardware and software prototype for the SALSA project. The hardware prototype collects climbing data using accelerometer sensors attached to a piece of climbing equipment named quickdraw that connects the climbing rope to the bolt anchors. The corresponding sensors are configured to be energy efficient, hence become practical when using in large quantity in a climbing gym. Regarding the software prototype, we analyzed data measured by the sensors, detect patterns during climbing of different routes, and develop an unsupervised approach for route clustering.

Router Freedom is the right that end-users of any Internet Service Provider (ISP) have to choose and use a private modem and router instead of equipment that the ISP provides. Since 2013, the Free Software Foundation Europe has been successfully engaged with Router Freedom, promoting end-users’ freedom to choose and use their own terminal equipment – first in Germany as a precedent, and now in many European countries.

In the context of the reform of European telecommunications law, EU Member States are implementing the European Electronic Communications Code (Directive (EU) 2018/1972), which impacts Router Freedom. The new law requires from National Regulatory Agencies to define in their jurisdictions the NTP – network termination point, a demarcation limit at which the ISP’s network ends and connects with the customer’s on-premises equipment. Equivalently to the telephony, the NTP varies between countries and may change over time.

The FSFE has been working with regulators, decision makers, consumer and digital organisations to protect Router Freedom in Europe. The talk is a follow up from previous years, focusing on the updates and new challenges that emerged in the last months.

Technologies such as IoT applied in industrial contexts allow the collection of numerous data and parameters, related, for example, to the functioning of smart objects, consumer preferences, the most frequent causes of malfunction, etc.. All these data have a clear economic value and are very useful for the process of acquisition and training of technologies based on machine learning systems. Companies are increasingly using open data for various reasons, such as customizing the consumer experience. There are, however, some problems. These data, at the same time, are relevant to the progress of the entire society, so the question arises whether these data should be considered trade secrets or data freely available to anyone. The topic is of great interest in legal matters, as one might wonder who owns this data, whether it can be granted to third parties, and if it were to happen, what license should be used to best perform this data transfer?
The talk aims to analyze the different possible answer to this question, hypothesizing the possible change to our legal framework already proposed by the national and international authorities.

a modern data exploration and visualization platform

January 21, 2021 – Apache Foundation publishes an article entitled “Apache Superset first level project” accompanied by keywords such as “big data”, “visualization”, “open source”, “business intelligence” and a long list of companies. The talk will present this product in the form of a tutorial so that anyone can start using it.

Superset was born from a hackathon organized by the AirBnB company which then adopted it as a production tool for analyzing company data. The project was born immediately as an open source product and has met with great success to the point of becoming a project of the Apache Foundation.

When people talk about Digital Transformation (DT) in manufacturing companies, they frequently connect this concept to the automation of the production process. However, there are many other aspects that could be considered to unleash the potential of this transformation. Most of these aspects are related to the identification and the management of valuable information in the company that can be used both internally (to improve the overall processes) and externally (as new digital products/services).
The talk will identify the main challenges and the related open technologies that can be adopted to support this aspect of the DT.

A lean and systematic way to assess business opportunities, to understand whether they are worth investing in.

As Company Builders, we at WhatAVenture continuously assess new business models. Based on our experience, we have developed a structured and systematic approach to do so. In order to decide whether to further invest in a new business idea, it is important to understand early on the risks related to the opportunity. In the speech, the focus will be on a hands-on approach to assess the market desirability, technical and regulatory feasibility, economic viability and contextuality of the business idea. This approach provides a 360°-view already at an early stage, crucial to assess the success potential of new business models.

What can go wrong?!

Thirty years of commercial information security have taught us to orchestrate perimeter controls, to correctly configure AAA systems, to evaluate risks and manage them.
But when we talk about the supply chain, the context dramatically changes and we risk realising we did not understand it all or we naively transferred our risk to an unaware third party.

Winning asset for innovation AND safeguard for fundamental rights in a Big Data analytics and AI environment

In the current globalized and interconnected market, the wise management of (personal) data is one of the key factors for the success of an enterprise. Incredible resources lie silent between the folds of personal information. While new technologies, data analytics software and AI are more and more lustful for information and data to be fed with, the current EU legal framework (led by the notorious General Data Protection Regulation, “GDPR”) dictates a number of entangled and scalable provisions. In particular, the newly-introduced accountability principle, as well as the general risk-based approach and the privacy-by-design principle of the EU GDPR have paved the way for the rising of new models of privacy and data protection compliance. The latter, instead of consisting in a “zero-sum” game, can be shaped in order to achieve both compliance AND added value. The ability of software designers and IT experts in embedding privacy and data protection principles right within the code will more and more play a paramount role in defining successful and ethical business models.
Finally, considering the raising awareness in the public of the risks for their privacy and data, it should not be underestimated how the “privacy-enhanced” nature of a good or software will become more and more an incredible commercial element in marketing initiatives.

How to evaluate open-source projects security can reduce the risks

In the last year, we have seen at least two important supply-chain attacks, on Solarwind and Codecov products, and a new technique, named Dependency Confusion, to hack software dependencies. Protecting software from supply-chain attacks has become a priority both for companies and open-source projects. So, how can developers and engineers evaluate the security health of an open-source project? The answer is evaluating the right metrics for every dependency.

A helper for data scientists

The EDP (Environmental Data Platform), manage by Center for Sensing Solutions of Eurac Research, is a compound of several open-source software and components for data and metadata management. In particular, it provides tools to (i) discover the types of data available, to (ii) process big datasets and to (iii) visualize them. The EDP encompasses openEO, JupyterHub, Maps (based on Geonode) and Geonetwork software, among others.
The EDP portal is a web application which helps the viewer accessing and exploring the environmental data platform, acting as unique access point to the EDP platform.
In more detail, the EDP portal has three main features: an intuitive data discovery interface, a dedicated data processing environment (for python and R scripting) and a comprehensive documentation repository.

Instead of prevaricating around the existing business models that are prevalent and practiced at large, when it comes to open-source software, I intend to explore another dimension of it. Conventional approaches leave the open-source business model struggling to monetize or be a “pseudo-open source” company with monetizing methods that prevent real access in practicality.

A company relying on donations or subsidiary forms of income such as training, may not be able to sustain long term, as it may spend the corpus to keep it running to exhaustion, in most cases funding arriving a little too late. Most open-source companies that survive today, are with the backing of heavily funded supporters.

Alluding to the model I perceive, a crazy sounding one perhaps, is the model of profit sharing post the first year or post the pertinent time frame. An open-source software provider may allow free usage but will have rights to a part of the profit, however small, after a certain indicator of performance has been met. This allows the user to make a positive balance before being burdened with the cost of the open-source product. The performance indicator could be defined specifically for the type of business and the type of software, it could perhaps be a monthly turnover or daily traffic etc.
The ability to have direct monetary return on a product is most important to motivate its improvement and more importantly sustain it. The model proposed can simply be executed by means of a contingent contract. The challenges however would be effective disbursal of the open software, not having it available openly but only through request, and then prevention of unauthorised replication. A possible solution could be, to have a global list of applicable parameters which demonstrate the liability of a company after using the open-source software and making a certain revenue out of it.

Such an approach is sustainable at both ends, if the product is used and the company fails to make a profit on it, they are not liable to pay. Such freedom from liability will motivate higher number of businesses to try and proceed with the open-source offering as a base, therefore a higher volume of businesses will be created.
Other aspects of this model remain open and will be disclosed during the discourse

The technical foundation of a new, decentralized and distributed data economy

The recent ruling of Italian State Court to fine Facebook established that consumers’ data has economic value and represents a counter-performance for online services offered by digital platforms. This enables consumers with bargaining power, involving them into the data monetization cycle. However, only by ensuring consumers’ ownership rights over their data can this data be monetized in a straightforward manner. In fact, as a consequence of the widespread adoption of connected devices generating continuous flows of data, the focus should shift from the concept of Data Privacy – protection of data sets from access by unauthorised parties – to the concept of Data Ownership – freely granting and revoking data access to legitimate parties.

Consumers’ data is the new oil yet Privacy Laws regarding sharing data with third parties limit Data Monetization opportunities. The reason why compliance is difficult is of a technical nature: all current data sharing platforms are centralized and have exclusive control over third party access to consumers’ data. By decentralizing data access control and putting it back into the hands of legal data owners, Companies can create their own Data Streams Marketplaces involving customers and business partners in a data monetization cycle that is GDPR compliant by design.

Digital forensics is a field of great interest for users, developers, CxO, law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, judges, lawyers. Very often the digital evidence analysis has a great impact on prosecutor decisions and people lives.
In all the talk made ad SFScon(s) we’re trying to help people understand what is digital forensics and how to do it avoiding the “black box” forensics and increase our awareness.
This year we’ll see briefly how to go mobile, acquiring messaging applications data (WhatsApp) in a forensically sound mode with ADB and learn how to do acquisition when no extraction is possible.
We’ll show data extraction with the APK Downgrade technique and screenshooting and video registration in case you’re unable to do anything else.

IoT, NEW TECHNOLOGY AND SUSTAINABILITY-DRIVEN INNOVATION
New technologies extend digital capabilities and bring a brighter future for a sustainable development of business.
The Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are emerging as powerful new technologies applied for water and energy management, environmental monitoring, smart industry, smart services and supply chain management.
New technologies have the potential to CREATE AN EFFICIENT, EFFECTIVE AND SECURE ECOSYSTEM taking advantage of connected devices for managing smart services, redesigning sustainable supply chain, distribution and outsourcing processes and reorganizing internationalization projects, facing the major global challenges for sustainable development and circular economy.

The Knowledge Laboratory, in short k.LAB, is a software stack that embraces the FAIR principles: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Its objective is to support linked knowledge across the borders of the domains of single modelers and scientists. k.LAB’s fascinating novelty is the possibility to work in an interconnected manner of knowledge networks, on which resources and models are described without ambiguity. This is achieved through the use of semantics to create a natural language to describe the models and the qualities that want to be observed.
Modelers can develop their models and publish them to the network. Publishing makes them findable and accessible within the network. Since everything in the network is observable, when running a model, k.LAB looks for the best knowledge unit able to resolve the particular request. This can be due to a given rule in a particular location in the world, or the chosen timestep of an environmental model, the availability of data at a needed resolution or just the fact that a different model is describe to work best for the given spatio-temporal context. Much as search engine ranking algorithms do, a reasoner takes care of transforming the observation strategy of the modeler, i.e. the model, into the best possible dataflow to produce the final observations. Interoperability is build and reusability is a natural consequence.
The k.LAB software stack is free and open source and relies on various projects of the Osgeo community as Geoserver, Openlayers and the Hortonmachine.
Initially started in the USA with NSF fundings, k.LAB is now an initiative of a partnership led by the Basque Centre for Climate Change. It currently involves scientists and decision makers from various research centers and organizations like: USGS, Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Universita’ degli studi di Udine, IMaSS at Nagoya University, IH Cantabria and the UNEP.

This intervention aims to illustrate how to do open source in an industrial way by developing a sustainable business model.
The experience of Knowage, the open source suite for analytics and business intelligence, will be shown to highlight how community, cooperation and co-business are key element to make open source a real business enabler.

Exploration of U-Net and Support Vector Machine classification methods for UAV multispectral image segmentation

Recently, many solutions have been introduced to accurately and automatically analyze data acquired with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), in particular by relying on algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. Among these, the most popular are those belonging to the category of neural networks. These techniques allow the development of ad-hoc and end-to-end solutions for the classification and segmentation of different object categories through the analysis of high-resolution multispectral images. In our research, two main methodologies have been explored for the automatic segmentation of crop rows from multispectral images acquired with UAVs. The first is based on Support Vector Machines, know to handle well overfitting issues, and the other through the implementation of “U-Net”, a state-of-the-art Convolution Neural Network.

Open source is more of a philosophy than a thing you can buy. This philosophy is sustainable and has a win-win approach.

As an active open-source developer since 2006, I can advise about the opportunity of using an open-source approach to get the best for your business and let your company grow.

For developers, it’s a good habit that can increase professionalism and produces values for the developer and the community. For a company, it helps to be visible and share your products, thereby increasing profits. That’s why all of the big players moved into it. As a company, you still have time to start in the open-source game and be distinctive thanks to your open-source activity. Don’t wait too much longer, though.

The speech is articulated in these sections:

1) introduction about my personal journey to opensource. This is important to create a rapport with the attendees and create trust in the speaker.

2) what stop opensource to enter the companies until now a complete overview of the issues that prevent the opensource philosophy adoption in companies (patents, intellectual property, etc..)

3) benefits we are loosing in this section I will explain the opportunities and the opportunity revenue of opensource

4) conclusion in this section will be presented a solution to harmonize pro and cons of opensource to create a profitable business model in enterprises that bring benefits to business and to the community

Blockchain is an exciting new field, and a common and developer-friendly use of it is Ethereum smart contracts. Traditionally, these contracts are public but immutable. Historically this has led to various bugs introduced within the contracts’ code, yet with no way to fix them, malicious actors can freely abuse that. This has led to numerous million-dollar thefts. Upgradeable smart contracts promise to allow changing the contract code by the developer. This however opens additional security vulnerabilities which remain unresolved in the current widespread standards. This talk coves our research work in identifying these security issues, and proposing better programming models for upgradeable contracts without these disadvantages.

If you use OpenPGP to secure your email communication, you should consider publishing your public key using Web Key Directory. It allows email clients to automatically retrieve your public key, using the HTTPS protocol. Building a WKD for yourself (or for the members of your organization) is very easy and only requires basic skills in web server administration

The rock climbing community in South Tyrol is an important touristic and cultural factor. Not only locals but also many tourists come here to take practice in both indoor and outdoor climbing. With the project SALSA, we are trying to analyze the activity of climbers. We want to identify, if a person is falling, climbing, and if the climber is taking a break. Furthermore, we want that our application can be used to measure the amount of time a climber needs to finish a certain route. To solve this problem, we used the stereo camera ZED 2, by the manufacturer Stereo Labs. With its body tracking, object detection, and depth-sensing features we were able to measure the relative coordinates and speed of a body in front of the camera. and so to track the movement of a climber. In this talk, I present the first prototype running on the Jetson Nano, a portable computer with a GPU necessary to process the images obtained through the camera.

SAFe, or not SAFe? Pitfalls to Avoid in Agile Transformation

Business agility is a desired property that nowadays all companies would like to possess. That’s why many companies started their agile transformation journeys. On the market, there are more than 20 commercially available methods that aim at enabling companies to succeed in their agile transformation. The most well known among these methods is the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). “Is SAFe for our company? Should we adopt SAFe?” If these are the first questions asked by companies that want to start agile transformation, there is a high danger that they would run into many pitfalls along the way, and fail to achieve the intended business agility. This talk will reflect on what are the right questions to ask in order to avoid the pitfalls in agile transformation and make it more likely to succeed in a company.

Software supply chain attacks aim to inject malicious code into a software product. However, current solutions to vetting the published artifacts are resource-demanding and generate many false positives. Thus, scanning again all and whole ‘most likely good but modified’ packages is hard to manage for FOSS downstream users. In other words, if scanning one file in a package is feasible but not enough and reviewing an entire package is unfeasible due to the high number of false positives, a different solution is needed.

A key observation in the most common software supply chain attacks (typosquatting and hijacked packages) is that only a minimal part of the source code has been tampered with by attackers. Instead, one could focus on the last mile discrepancy between the source code and distributed artifacts (e.g., those present in PyPI). This practice is motivated by the reproducible builds: it is suspicious if the code in the source code repository differs from the code in the artifacts distributed in the package repository.

We will present a single, yet practical approach called LastPyMile to identify discrepancies between the source code and their respective packages. By cleverly combining package scraping and artifact hashing, we can extract the differences in a scalable way. In particular, LastPyMile enables checking the entire codebase of a published artifact 16x faster than the baseline git log approach.

Our empirical assessment of more than 2000 popular packages in PyPI with an analysis of around 10M lines of code shows several differences in the wild: modifications cannot be just attributed to malicious injections. In particular, we observe that, on average there are 5.8% of artifacts and 2.6% of files have changes in Python files.

LastPyMile can be used to extend current package scanning practices for malware injection (which only covers less than 1% of the code of deployed packages) by filtering either the input or the output of such security scanners. LastPyMile reduces the number of alerts produced by a malware checking tool to a number that a human can check. We checked our approach against known malicious packages from the real attacks, and we found that LastPyMile can detect all of them. Also, it removes all the alerts from benign packages, allowing a clear distinction between benign and malicious packages.

Can a team with 3 software developers build a “tailored” product in a few months and replace an enterprise solution that no longer fully satisfies business needs?

In this talk I will tell you how we managed to put a first working version of the new product into production in a few months, combining a strong desire for simplicity, good technical practices, and a lean approach.

At the end of the talk, you will understand that collaboration, feedback, and a process to support the product make any kind of goal achievable!

Hyperspectral Image (HSI) classification amounts to classify images that contain a multitude of spectral bands. In the H2I project we have been investigating how Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be adapted to perform HSI classification. In this lighting talk we present a novel way of viewing the HSI through a simple data format transformation and the new design of the network training strategy. With minor modification for the lightweight CNN based classifier Cifar10, the proposed approach enables the network’s ability to exploit the information between the different spectral bands. The classifier is evaluated extensively, using different strategies, on a dataset for wood recognition. Obtained results in terms of accuracy and training time prove that the proposed approach is lightweight, simple to train, and effective.

The president of the Linux User Group Bolzano will welcome you to the “20th anniversary side-track” and briefly introduce the speakers and the various talks.

A new dynamic for the hyper digital, on-the-go era

Society is experiencing a remarkable period of digital transformation thats is impacting the many ways in which we work and live our lives. Yet, this shift is accompanied by multiple pressures: companies and public services need an app presence to reach customers or audiences; marketplaces are filled by millions of new apps each year making it hard to stand out; users are tired of the search, download, and use (maybe) process … even more so for ad hoc, on-the go needs. Quick app is an implementation of the emerging W3C MiniApp standards. It seeks to complement the current app model in order to better enable tomorrow’s fluid digital needs. In this talk we will explore how the open Quick App Initiative can help us explore the intersection between app quick apps and the digital transformation pressures in order to innovate a new dynamic in mobile applications.

Moodle is a free, open-source learning management system with a huge diffusion that enables you to create powerful, flexible, and engaging online learning experiences which connote a more active, engaging role for users and trainers.

The underlying style of learning for Moodle is called social connectivism: people learn from one another and Moodle’s framework is structured to maximize interactivity with other users and the content itself. Moodle has the full power of placing learning activities within an LMS in a such a sequence that can create a personalized and interactive learning path, plus it has the capability of adding various open-source tools and plugins which extend its domain to the gamification world.

Gamification is a design process that reframes goals to be more appealing and achievable by tapping in to our emotions using the principles of game design. The goal of this process is to keep learners engaged and motivated in a way that is not always present in traditional courses. When it is implemented through elegant solutions, learners may be unaware of the subtle game elements being used.

For inRebus, gamification it’s digital learning’s natural born evolution and means online learning experiences creative and outside the box.

3 examples of open source fisheries and maritime applications

The European Commission’s Directorate-General of Fisheries and Maritimes Affairs – DG MARE – has worked in the past years in 3 projects that have been been made public under an open source licence: FLUX FMC, FLUX TL, and Ocean Tracker. The first two are tools to manage the exchange of fisheries data and to facilitate the expansion of a standard (UN/FLUX) outside of the EU borders. The third one is a tool for countries to share their voluntary commitments for significant and meaningful actions towards a clean, healthy and productive ocean. The context of the presentation is the renewal in 2020 of the Commission’s open source strategy, and subsequently the simplifying of the release of internal projects as open source.

Actually using metrics for making meaninful decisions

Several development teams have metrics and analysis tools available that can be used to support important decisions, but very few of them actually use this information. This talk will introduce software analytics, a technique that can be used to use this information to make decisions and take action. It will also present a Lean Software Analytics Canvas, a simple tool that can be used by small and medium agile teams to incorporate software analytics in their development process. Realistic examples and results based on the experience of applying the canvas in real teams will be also presented.

A sustainable PC for learning during Covid Lockdown

In the period of the first lockdown from spring 2020 to mid 2021, the Linux User Group Bozen-Bolzano-Bulsan has collected PCs and laptop from voluntary donations with the Schoolswap project and given them (about 200 pieces) to students for homeschooling. Summary of events and presentation of the software used from Debian Linux (FUSS), the osTicket system and installation with Clonezilla.

https://schoolswap.bz.it

We brought Linux and FOSS on the desktop of the young generation, which had no prejudice to use it. Last but not least, it is also a social project to enable financially disadvantaged families to fully participate through the help of technology in homeschooling.

Open source is ofter considered as a cure-all against the risk of the EU lagging behind in the global race for digital transition.

Unfortunately, open source solutions demand at every stage of their life-cycle a hefty amount of technical, managerial and financial resources, often higher than with proprietary assets. Hence, whilst building a EU-wide digital strategy or infrastructure upon open source models does sound appealing (and more ethical), in practice such strategies must always be validated against the limited amount of resources the public sector has access to.

This is especially true of digital public services; therefore, a case study on digital public services in the EU will be presented.

This speech aims to highlight the benefits and strengths of open source solutions for enterprises and public administrations willing to gain relevant insights from their data.
Different use cases will be presented in which Knowage, the open source suite for analytics and business intelligence, enabled effective data analysis helping to achieve data-driven decisions.

Measuring FOSS Dependencies in Software Projects

In finance, leverage is the ratio between assets borrowed from others and one’s own assets. A matching situation is present in software: by using free open-source software (FOSS) libraries a developer leverages on other people’s code to multiply the offered functionalities with a much smaller own codebase. In finance as in software, leverage magnifies profits when returns from borrowing exceed costs of integration, but it may also magnify losses, in particular in the presence of security vulnerabilities.

In this talk, I will introduce the concept of technical leverage and present its level on the sample of 8494 distinct library versions from the FOSS Maven-based Java libraries. Then I will discuss the actual opportunities and security risks that technical leverage presents to software developers of small-medium libraries (own code smaller than 100K lines of code) and the developers of big libraries with their own code bigger than 100K lines of code.

We also provide an online demo for computing the technical leverage for real-world software libraries available under the following URL: https://techleverage.eu/

for remote collaboration in a virtual classroom

Virtual Computer Lab is a desktop server in the cloud that can be accessed from a browser. It provides remote collaboration for the students of a class and their teacher. Each user can share his desktop with one or more other users and they can work on it collaboratively. The teacher can also use Epoptes to watch what each of the students is doing, to broadcast his screen to all of them, to access the desktop of each of the students to help them, etc.

The Linux User Group BZ (Bolzano-Bolzen-Bulsan) was the first organiser of the South Tyrolean Linux Day back in 2001. Since then the club has promoted many activities to foster the ideals of the Free Software world. Among them there were workshops, Linux Installation Parties and many press articles. Not to forget about its bi-lingual setting, still uncommon in the local club landscape.

This talk will exhibit some of the picture material from the club’s archive. Since the speaker had not been part of it back then, he will adopt the format of a panel discussion. Two of the very first members will answer the speaker’s questions and tell us enjoyable reminiscences.

Paolo Dongilli is the current FUSS coordinator and has been a former club’s president. Karl Lunger is a CS high-school teacher at the TFO “Max Valier”.

For more information please have a look at the club’s history page: https://www.lugbz.org/who-are-we/history/

This presentation will be an overview of two different services, the Tasking Manager and the OpenStreetMap – OSM extracts for Italy, that have been lately updated and adapted for the Italian OSM community by Wikimedia Italia, the Italian OSM Local Chapter.
The Tasking Manager is an Open Source tool that facilitates collaborative mapping in OSM, very important for the worldwide OSM community.
This talk includes a tour through the Italian version of the Tasking Manager that has been made available for the Italian community of mappers, while explaining how it works and its importance.
OSM extracts is a service that allows anyone that’s interested to download extracted data of Italy from the OSM database either for the whole country or for each region, province or municipality in different formats.

What steps are we taking so people can stay in the community in the longer run?

In this presentation I’ll discuss how we worked out which areas we have discussed to hire for and why we decide it will make a difference.

While this talk is focused on KDE by definition, I’m sure there’s aspects of it that will apply to different communities and organisations similar to ours.

For many systems, it is crucial to continuously assess them during development and operation, e.g., through testing and monitoring, to make sure that they meet their required level of performance. In this talk, I present PPTAM, an Open Source tool we developed at the Free University of Bolzano that makes use of locust.io to conduct performance experiments and to interpret the data so that one can identify performance bottlenecks. Performance checking is integrated into the DevOps process. Finally, we invite teams to contact us if they want to collaborate with us to refine and extend PPTAM installing it in their context.

An highlight of the important changes made in the openSUSE Leap development

The presentation will introduce the attendee to what is openSUSE Leap and what has been changed in its development workflow for reducing the previous contribution barrier between openSUSE Leap and its Enterprise counterpart.
The most visible news is a full binary compatibility between openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise. This presentation will also show the benefits of this shared journey and how the openSUSE community benefits from it.

Javascript is the language used the most for developing a web app or a hybrid mobile app, mainly because it can be executed directly by browsers. Java instead, can’t be run directly in a browser. On the other hand we have the language TypeScript, which is an open-source language that adds compile time type checking to Javascript, similar to Java, with the goal to prevent bugs mainly in the large code base. It is not uncommon for developers to write code using more than one programming language over time.
In this talk you will find out, how I survived adding Typescript/Javascript to the programming languages ​​I work with, after a long experience of development with Java. Let’s go!

Open Data of the past

Open History Map (https://www.openhistorymap.org) is a non-profit based in Bologna, Italy, aiming at the creation of an open map of the past, reconciling and interconnecting data from Digital Humanities, Public History and Digital Archaeology sources. The presentation will cover the philosophy, the technology and the libraries used in this endeavor, explaining how users can reuse, and integrate the data from the platform into their applications or visualizations.

FUSS (Free Upgrade for a digitally Sustainable School – https://fuss.bz.it) has a dual nature: it is a digital sustainability project for schools and at the same time a Free Software product (Debian-GNU/Linux-based operating system and applications) for servers and PCs.

It was founded in 2005 and represents a unique experience in Europe for its organization and structure. The project has led to the migration to Free Software of computer tools used in the teaching activities of all schools in Italian language of South Tyrol: to date 1,900 teachers and 17,000 students use it; it is installed on 4,500 PCs and 65 servers in about 80 schools in the Autonomous Province of Bolzano). FUSS is coordinated and financed by the Italian Education and Training Department of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano.

Member of the national initiative Repubblica Digitale, FUSS has made teaching and learning digitally sustainable thanks to four fundamental objectives: the use of Free Software, the use of open formats, the creation of free content, thus laying the foundations for the fourth objective whose achievement should be guaranteed in each school by definition: free access to knowledge.

What role did Free Software play during the crisis

The Corona crisis has made it clear to us which developments in digitisation we have missed in recent years. Administrations, but also many employers, were not prepared for this. Often, they simply chose some “obvious” solution in order to remain or become workable. Only a few considered the effects and consequences, for example in terms of data protection and privacy, as well as future dependencies on single vendors. In schools, video conferencing solutions that did not comply with data protection regulations were used, some administrations were not able to work at all and many processes are still not digitised.
At the same time, there are also positive examples. Free software has become more and more of a topic and more and more administrations have understood the advantages it brings.
I would like to take a look at the developments of the past year and give an outlook on how we can better face future crises through the use of Free Software and what role governments, public bodies and administrations and the principle of “Public Money? Public Code! play in this.

LibreOffice was announced in 2010. After 10 years, it was necessary to review and update the strategy based on the evolution of the office suite market, to improve the sustainability model. Enterprises are not supporting the project as much as individual users. Over time, this can represent a threat for the sustainability of the project. We have changed our strategy to educate enterprises about the right approach to FOSS, by giving back to ensure the long term sustainability of the LibreOffice project.

In 2020 we unexpectedly found ourselves in a completely new situation, where we could no longer go to school or work.
How could students attend classes while protecting their privacy?
For this reason, the Linux User Group of Bolzano has made available to the schools of South Tyrol 4 instances of the open source software Big Blue Button completely free of charge.

All the projects from the Open Source world has the same issues/needs that involve different area: localization, communication, promotion, organization, development, reporting and so on.
In my free and open source book I introduce all the various points, about my experience in various projects during the years with my learnings and suggestions.

After that many years of development of mobile applications for working in the field, HydroloGIS recently release the new app to support all kind of outdoor activities, SMASH – Smart Mobile Application for Surveyor’s Happiness. SMASH (https://www.geopaparazzi.org/smash/index.html). SMASH is a user-friendly, modern, faster to develop and cross platform app for the eyes of IOS, Android, but also Macos and Linux users. The main functionalities are the possibility to collect georeferenced pictures, notes and GPS tracks logs.
It opens directly on the map view where it is possible to navigate local or online raster and vector data in different formats: Geopackage, shapefile, tiff+png+jpg with wtf, MBTiles, Mapsforge and GPX, all with a custom CRS and the support for standard SLD style definition. Online supported formats are WMS and TMS and there is a nice service catalog and wizard for adding most common WMS/TMS. Geopackage and PostGIS layers also have editing support.
SMASH simplifies the data collection and the export of the survey into easy processable data files (GPX, PDF) or through a direct synchronization with the GSS (Geopaparazzi Survey Server). The Survey Server has been redesigned with the same technology used by SMASH and has now the ability to visualize data in the same look and feel as the mobile app.
Notes serverside-versioning has been introduced to enhance synchronization of data by teams. A redmine plugin is being developed by community members to create a geo-ticketing system.
This presentation gives an insight about the state of the art of the SMASH focusing on the possible applications and customization.

Towards agile formal methods

The term “microservices”‘ is used to denote applications built as suites of loosely coupled specialized services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, such as an HTTP resource API. This architectural style lends itself to decentralization and to the adoption of continuous integration and deployment practices, as reported by several companies (e.g., Amazon and Netflix) that successfully developed and deployed microservices applications in their production environment.
Several configuration alternatives are possible for microservice deployment, for example, serverless microservices using functions, container-based deployment, either physical or virtual machines, or combination of them with different hardware capacity constraints.
Introducing microservices architecture to the software industry often
adds more communication between the different services. This often affects performance (i.e., how the target microservices system performs upon user requests) and scalability (i.e., how the target microservices system performs when increasing the scale of operation) that represent fundamental quality attributes that shall be assured with systematic methods supporting the engineering life-cycle. Available architecture alternatives and their parameters lead to non-trivial choices. These choices (i.e., the underlying deployment environment and its configuration) significantly influence the performance of the whole application.
For this reason, performance testing of microservices is challenging in the IT industry that usually adopt agile practices combining software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). In this context, there is still a lack of rigorous foundations that can be practiced, and systematically replicated.
Indeed, the work on agile and DevOps has been mainly driven by industry, with little contribution from formal approaches envisioned by academic research. Mainstream approaches to performance assessment in industry focus on the passive monitoring of the system response time or resources utilization to detect anomalous performance and scalability issues, such as bottlenecks. Even approaches based on load or stress testing, usually extract a set of performance indices and statistics that are difficult to use for guiding engineering decisions because of missing connections with system-level requirements.

The main goal of this work is to overcome the aforementioned limitations by enabling automated decision gates in performance testing of microservices that allow requirements traceability. We seek to achieve this goal by endowing common agile practices used in microservice performance testing, with the ability to automatically learn and then formally verify a performance model of the System Under Test (SUT) to achieve strong assurances of quality. Even if the separation between agile and formal methods increased over the years, we support the claim that formal methods are at a stage where they can be effectively incorporated into agile methods to give them rigorous engineering foundations and make them systematic and effective with strong guarantees.

On August 12, 2004, a new project entered the world of commons: OpenStreetMap.
As soon as he was born it was not easy to imagine his future, but the premises that led to his birth were very clear: to satisfy the need to have access to a free database of geospatial data with the contribution of all.
The project, as a child, immediately became a giant that made its heavy entry into the world of ICT.
Inside OpenStreetMap we find many stories to learn from, we find a huge innovation laboratory from which companies have grown up, we find stories that have changed people’s lives, brilliant ideas and much more.
Let’s walk this path together, also seeing the contributions that South Tyrol has been able to make.

Family Matters

Once upon a time, nearly 40 years ago, the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement began. As it gained momentum across the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there were inevitable conflicts of ideology and practice. This-License or That-License, a business model that works for some projects but not others, and how an individual Open Source maintainer still manages their own sustainability in society.

Despite the fractures that we have felt in our growing family, we have been consistently pulled together by a force of gravity driven by our shared values. As we have been driven further apart than ever before by the pressures of this global pandemic, many of us are left questioning about who we are and what we will become. Meanwhile, a new generation of people are entering and have entered the world of FOSS. With the arrival of these new members of our FOSS community comes new conflicts and contradictions—often intimate and familial in nature—in our collective communities.

In this session, speakers Justin W. Flory and Mike Nolan frame the development of FOSS culture and community as living in an intergenerational family and all that encompasses: the great, the bad, the lovely, and the ugly. They offer their own explorations into what makes the people of the Free and Open Source movement who they are. The exploration looks closely at aspects like mentorship, physical space, common values, and time for reflective communication to build a healthy family on the foundation of love, and how to think about the new generations discovering Free and Open Source for the first time.

X-Road® is open-source software and ecosystem solution that provides unified and secure data exchange between organisations. The basic idea of X-Road is that members of an ecosystem exchange data through access points (Security Servers) that implement the same technical specifications.

X-Road is a digital public good verified by the Digital Public Goods Alliance, and it’s released under the MIT open source license and is available free of charge. X-Road is used as a national data exchange solution in Estonia, Finland, Iceland and many other countries around the world.

To better understand the direct and tangible environmental impacts of the use of X-Road, the current emissions profile across X-Road’s operations and services was assessed by a research project. As a result, an emissions calculator to assess X-Road’s environmental footprint was built. The calculator gives a clear picture of the total carbon footprint of X-Road, as well as its individual components.

The calculations used in the process were derived from peer-reviewed literature and tailored to X-Road use cases in Estonia and Finland. However, the emissions calculator is comprehensive enough to perform calculations for any X-Road instance residing in any region.

In my talk, I’m going to give an overview of X-Road first. Then, I’m going to discuss the research project, its different phases and deliverables. The main scope of the presentation is to discuss how to evaluate environmental footprint of an open-source software and what are the key elements that affect the result.

Using OpenAI Gym and GNU Radio to Improve 5G

The openAI foundation built with Gym a toolkit for developing reinforcement learning algorithms and applying them in different environments.
GNU Radio on the other hand is a free open source tool for software radio and signal processing.
Those two tools combined create a powerful framework for researchers when it comes to applying machine learning approaches to radio-related problems.
In this talk, we will focus on how we can improve the next generation of mobile communication using reinforcement learning and open-source software, accessible for everyone.

What you need to know about protocols and how to build your own open-source protocols

Our world is on a fast track to incredible changes, especially in technology.
As developers, we used to help build machines. Then we started building websites for businesses to represent them to a larger audience. Then we started building apps for every other product, sometimes more than one.

In our new digital world, the next generation of developers won’t be building apps. We will be building protocols – middleware that enables decentralized applications (dApps) – and interfaces for the protocols. The world wide web is branching into decentralized networks and these networks will host countless protocols to play around with.

This talk will cover how protocols work in decentralized networks, highlight a few important use-cases, and explain how to build your own open-source protocols on one of the most prominent DLTs of our times: IOTA.

Why IOTA is a disruptive technology for IoT

Bitcoin is capable of transferring a token between two addresses in the registry. Ethereum is able to transfer many tokens. Transferring tokens between two addresses is functionally similar to transmitting information between two internet address. So we can wonder if it is possible to use Bitcoin or Etherum to transmit data as securely as we transfer tokens? The answer is no!
The increase in Token value makes the cost of transfer marginal.
Conversely, the increase in the data’s value comes from its volume (particularly the data produced by IoT devices), which also implies a proportional increase in the cost of transferring it to Ethereum or Bitcoin. This is why we use IOTA, the only DLT that does not require the payment of fees for storing data into the registry and this has allowed us to create the first decentralized IOT platform.

The president of the Linux User Group Bolzano will give a short presentation of which activities the association is carrying out and how it plans to develop them.

You can have your cake and eat it too

Open Source virtualization is sometimes perceived as being out of date. But cloud platforms as well as large scale deployments of containers ultimately rely on hypervisors and virtual machines to deliver both portability and abstraction from the bare metal. As such the conversation may have switched to containers, but it does not mean that virtualization has become irrelevant. Several initiatives highlight that it is quite the opposite, and the XCP-ng project has started to take advantage of the latest development effort to deliver isolation of containers and their runtimes.

Closing the LUGBZ 20th Anniversary side-track

IOTA MAM and Internet of Underwater Things systems

The main problem of the IoT control devices and sensor is the lack of secure direct communication with thefinal trust point and different types of corruption and spoofing can occur. This introduces a great opportunity for data tampering and cyber-attack in addition no one can trust the sensor data in the first communication step.
No one guarantees that a right sensor sends out the right data due to no authentication and no truthfulness of sensors that are connected with a trusted point. The middle point is the first trusted point but no one can guarantee correctness and truthfulness in the data before this point. The aim of this talk is to reach out a new way to directly connect an embedded devices system, in this case, an underwater things system directly with a DL endpoint. The final purpose is to avoid an intermediary gateway step and port down the entire client system directly on embedded IoT devices, this will allow the device to directly communicate with blockchain with no additional middle step.
The entire project covers the needs to reach a secure and authenticate communication directly from the sensor node and in this way guarantee the CIA properties from the bottom.
We have therefore developed a solution that exploits the advantages of the IOTA MAM protocol and the advantages offered by the DL technology offered by IOTA to set up a protocol that allows direct communication between IOTA Tangle and low-level devices.
The solution is based on IOTA technology and IOTA environment and uses MAM protocol for message exchange on tangle. This protocol allows to sign and encrypt the message and thanks to the solidity of IOTA tangle is easy to reach the continuous availability and accessible to the service.