Projects at Madeira-ITI

This overview lists the current projects at Madeira-ITI, sorted by start date.

UBI Metrics
Vassilis Kostakos
1 January, 2011

This objective of this project is to develop a standardized multidisciplinary framework for experimentally evaluating real-world ubicomp systems with increased external validity. This multidisciplinary project brings together researchers from Computer Science, Economics, Cultural Anthropology, and Urban Design, in a consortium between the M-ITI and the University of Oulu, Finland.

Urban Flows and Networks
Vassilis Kostakos
15 June, 2010

The objective of the project is to utilize the data produced by the city of Oulu's UPI (Urban Pervasive Infrastructure) and other sources for modeling and exploiting urban flows and networks. This data captures a rich subset of the everyday life and activities taking place in the City of Oulu. As interactive communication technologies play an increasing role in our everyday lives, the infrastructure that supports these activities can be in important source of understanding the type, frequency and characteristics of citizen's activities. Crucially, a characteristic of these technologies is mobility, and increasingly mobility has become an important aspect of technology usage and user needs.  Hence, this project considers capturing and analyzing various types of flows and networks of everyday life in the City of Oulu. By capturing and analysing these flows and networks, our project will develop services that better fulfill Oulu's stakeholders’.

SPAEN: a Software Platform for Automated Enterprise-wide aNalytics
Vassilis Kostakos
1 June, 2010

Email is a pervasive communication medium, and most organisations use email to co-ordinate their activities and contact their clients. Due to its popularity, email is an excellent proxy for identifying and mapping social relationships that are generated as a by-product of daily activity. This 14-month project will develop a software platform that can passively monitor the email activity of organisations and generate enterprise-wide analytics regarding these relationships, also known as social capital. This technology has at least two potential applications: the use of analytics to monitor and assess organisations’ performance, and to identify opportunities in promoting enterprise-wide strategy and marketing communication. This project is a collaboration between the University of Madeira, M-ITI, and Inovisoft, funded through the +Conhecimento program of the regional government of Madeira.

Leveraging community content for disaster awareness and emergency response coordination
Vassilis Kostakos
8 May, 2010

This project aims to utilize online social networking and microblogging services, coupled with crowdsourcing, to enable civilians and emergency responders to quickly build up a picture of the various aspects of the event. The emergence of microblogging websites as a source of real-time news aggregators has spurred research interest in developing automated techniques for analysing and visualising their content to provide an overview of various events (floods, earthquakes, forest fires). This is an IBM Faculty Award given to Vassilis Kostakos in 2010.  The award was made in recognition of the research excellence of our institute, and to further enhance our links with industry.

AEminium
Nestor Catano
4 May, 2010

The AEminium project proposes a platform that builds in concurrency by default: instead of sequencing code, programmerrs express dependency information that is used by a compile-time checker to verify correctness conditions and by the libraries and run-time system to enable concurrent executing. As a result, developers can write parallel code in a natural style and have confidence in its correctness and performance.  

Favas: A Formal Verification Platform for Real-time Systems
Nestor Catano
4 May, 2010

  This project aims at developing mathematically well-founded and practically useful technology to verify real-time systems. We are interested on mathematical formalisms and formal methods techniques. We plan to extend the Frama-C tool so as to verify real-time safety properties as well as realtime liveness properties, prioritising the efficiency of our solution so as the render it useful for real-world real-time applications, e.g., avionics controllers. We also plan to use refinement calculus techniques to build parts of a real-time operating system.

Madeira Life
Jos van Leeuwen
1 September, 2009

aims to become the ultimate portal and social web for the Madeira region. The Madeira region represents a small part of the world and is literally strongly bounded. As a consequence, the social interactions of its inhabitants in the physical world are more restricted than in other parts of the world, which actually offers a potential for creating special interactions. Visitors of ‘Madeira Life’ will not just interact with a virtual world, but with the real world of Madeira. The project integrates mobility, location-awareness, and physical connections in the real world with social web and communication services for both cultural and commercial activities in the region.
This project is a three-year collaboration of Lab:USE with ZON Madeira, Madeira Tecnopolo, and Carnegie Mellon University, funded through the +Conhecimento program of the regional government.

Novel sensing techniques for urban transport
Vassilis Kostakos
1 September, 2009
This project aims to develop novel and inexpensive techniques for sensing passenger behaviour on public transport. Detailed passenger behaviour includes knowledge of where passengers get on the bus and where they get off the bus.  The existing electronic ticketing systems on the Horários do Funchal busses only record when/where passengers get on the bus.  There is currently no data about where individual passengers get off the bus, hence it is impossible to derive an O/D matrix from ticketing data alone.  In addition, other public services can benefit from people localization data, such as environmental control and analysis, socio–economic evaluation, mobility planning and control, urban planning and control, health planning and control.
 
SINAIS
Nuno Nunes
1 September, 2009

SINAIS aims to motivate sustainable behaviour in individuals and communities, regarding their resource consumption and transportation activities. The project is funded by the Portuguese National Science Foundation under the framework of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program. This is a 3-year research project led by Lab:USE at the University of Madeira in a consortium that involves Carnegie Mellon University, the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, the Portuguese Catholic University and several companies and government agencies.

Web Security and Privacy
Vassilis Kostakos
1 September, 2009

This multidisciplinary project addresses issues of security, privacy and trust in the context of web and location-based services. This project will carry out fundamental research in 5 key themes:

  1. Build tools to enable end-users to effectively control their privacy, focusing on social networking websites.
  2. Create training material and automated systems to combat phishing, in the context of the web and location-based services.
  3. Develop and evaluate mechanisms and design principles to help users decide whether or not they can trust different types of digital services.
  4. Test automated approaches to detecting copyright breach and enforcement of copyright policies in the context of peer-to-peer networks and related services.
  5. Use formal methods to validate policy languages developed in the context of online social networking.
ZON Service Engineering
Leonel Nóbrega
1 September, 2009

ZON Service Engineering is a project that will provide the real-world setting to test and drive breakthrough ideas in business IT alignment, SOA and service design. In particular it will contribute to create a new set of languages and tools that will enable practical implementation of the BITAM-SOA architecture in a real-world scenario of a complex service-oriented company like ZON Madeira. Practically, the project will encompass the re-engineering of ZON services, including metrics that are considered by the company stakeholders to reflect their business concerns. ZON Service Engineering is a 3 year joint project between ZON Madeira, Madeira Tecnopolo, University of Madeira and University of Porto. It involves partners from Software Engineering Institute | Carnegie Mellon and the University of Hawaii. It is funded under the +Conhecimento initiative and led by University of Madeira.