The International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies (Ada-Europe) conference has successfully established as an international forum in software technologies for critical embedded systems, with participants from both industry and academia. The 21st International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, took place in Pisa, Italy, from June 13 to June 17, 2016. The conference was co-chaired by Marko Bertogna (Professor at University of Modena, Italy) and Luís Miguel Pinho (CISTER/INESC-TEC, ISEP).

Various topics of interest were present, under the general umbrella of reliable software systems, with a rich program of both scientific peer-reviewed papers (published by Springer LNCS 9695), industrial presentations, and tools demonstrations. Special focus was given to the topic of safe and predictable parallel software technologies. This is an important challenge for the design of smart cyber-physical systems,and is a topic being tackled by CISTER within the P-SOCRATES European project. A special session was dedicated to the integration of safe parallelism within the Ada language, a collaboration work being done by researchers and industrialists in USA, Canada and Portugal.

The conference also featured keynote talks, from Alan Burns, Professor at the University of York, UK, on programing languages for future cyber physical systems; Guido Ghisio, responsible for Automated Driving Technologies at Magneti Marelli, Italy, on challenges for the automotive platform of the future; and Marc Duranton, senior member of CEA, France, on the HiPEAC (European Network on High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation) vision.

The “Smart Anything Everywhere” (SAE) is a Horizon 2020 initiative centered around networks of digital competence centers for supporting SMEs and mid-caps across the economy in digital value creation. These centers, usually research technology organizations (RTOs) or technology transfer-oriented university institutes, cluster a wide spectrum of technical and application knowledge to support digital innovation.

SAE innovation hubs gives SMEs an opportunity to experiment with new digital technologies, try them out in their processes and work together with technology suppliers to adapt it to their specific needs. In June, CISTER researcher Vincent Nelis represented CISTER at the SAE workshop organized in Brussels. The workshop brought together high-level speakers from the European Commission, industries, competence centers, and key players in European digital technologies to share ideas on topics related to the reindustrialization of Europe and the key role to be played by SMEs.

Also in June, Vincent Nelis gave a pitch on the P-SOCRATES project, an FP7 project led by CISTER, at the "Advanced Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems Collaboration Workshop", organized along with the SAE event by HiPEAC. This collaboration workshop brought together the "Cyber-Physical Systems", "Advanced Computing" and the “Mixed Criticality Systems" project clusters financed by the European Commission under FP7 ICT Call 10 (2013), H2020 ICT Call 1 (2014) and Call 4 (2015). The main objectives of the workshop were to identify synergies and possibilities for cooperation between projects/participants; provide a better overall understanding for both the Commission staff and the project partners, of what is happening in this area of research and innovation, with possibility for Project Officers and project partners to informally assess the global progress; and identify and exchange of best practices, especially in the areas of standardization, exploitation, platform and ecosystem building.

CISTER researcher Luis Miguel Pinho organized and coordinated a thematic session during the HiPEAC Computing Systems Week held in Porto at the Science and Technology Park of University of Porto (UPTEC). The session was on "Time, energy and other resources analysis for predictable parallel programming of cyber-physical systems". The event was jointly organized by the TACLe COST Action (IC1202 Timing Analysis on Code-Level) and the P-SOCRATES FP7 project.

There were two technical presentations, one from Daniel Gracia Perez (Thales, France) and another from researcher Vincent Nélis (CISTER, Portugal). In addition, Clemens Grelck (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) gave a presentation about a new COST Action proposal, to be submitted later in 2016. CISTER researchers Konstantinos Bletsas and Luis Miguel Pinho (the latter as the designated chair) have a central role in the preparation of this proposal, which aims to build a new community around the analysis of systems with respect to their resource requirements (time, energy, platform) and the associated trade-offs.

Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, visited Porto this April, invited by the city mayor, Rui Moreira. In these two days the Commissioner toured the city’s innovative companies and institutions.

The commissioner visited the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (P.PORTO) where, in an informal meeting, P.PORTO’s researchers presented advancements and achievements in notable international projects led by P.PORTO. In this meeting, CISTER researcher Vincent Nélis presented the results of the P-SOCRATES project, an European project led by CISTER, and discussed the project’s vision and exploitation opportunities for the foreseeable future.

A short video montage of the meeting is available at: https://www.ipp.pt/pportotv/investigacao

The P-SOCRATES project, an H2020 international project led by CISTER, is a 3-year initiative that fosters the convergence of High-Performance Computing and Embedded Computing domains. The project aims at developing an execution environment able to deliver high throughput, making it suitable for computationally-intensive applications, but also a predictable throughput, so that guarantees can be provided on the responsiveness on the software functionality. The project is now entering its last phase during which all the individual components are to be assembled.

On the 4th of March, the technical leaders presented to the Industrial Advisory Board their individual advancements regarding the tools and techniques developed in the project. The IAB gathers representatives of companies including Airbus, Bosch, Saab, Honeywell, and Kalray. Their feedback was as positive as it was encouraging. Discussions are already going on about an eventual integration of some of the components of the project into their flagship products. The meeting was held in Madrid with the participation of CISTER's researchers Miguel Pinho (project coordinator) and Vincent Nélis.

P-SOCRATES (Parallel SOftware framework for time-CRitical mAny-core sysTEmS), is an European project led by CISTER aiming to develop new techniques for exploiting the massively parallel computation capabilities of next-generation many-core embedded platforms in a predictable way.

During the last conference of the European Network of Excellence on High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation (HiPEAC 2016) the P-SOCRATES consortium organized a technical meeting and a public workshop.

The workshop (4th Workshop on High-performance and Real-time Embedded Systems - HiRES 2016) co-located with the 2nd DreamCloud (Dynamic Resource Allocation and Management in Embedded, High Performance and Cloud Computing) workshop, included presentations of ongoing work and preliminary results, as well as invited talks from Prof. Akash Kumar (TU Dresden, Germany) and Dr. Gerard Rauwerda (co-founder and CTO of Recore Systems, the Netherlands).

The P-SOCRATES technical meeting had the dual purpose of preparing the work for a successful 3rd milestone of the project, as well as to prepare the forthcoming meeting with the project Advisory Board, which includes representatives from leading European companies, such as Airbus Defense and Space (France), Airbus Innovation Group (Germany), Bosch (Germany), Expert Systems (Italy), Honeywell (Czech Republic), MBDA (Italy), Saab (Sweden), Kalray (France) and Rapita Systems (UK).
 

CISTER leads the ISEP participation in the European Project MANTIS. ISEP’s participation counts also with solid contributions from GECAD. CISTER’s Luis Lino Ferreira represented ISEP in the MANTIS kick-off meeting that was held in San Sebastian, on the 3rd and 4th of June. The meeting involved several project partners in a very intensive set of work sessions aimed at coordinating the activities. ISEP is part of a Portuguese consortium integrating INESC-TEC, UNINOVA and ADIRA.

The overall concept of MANTIS is to provide a proactive maintenance service platform architecture based on Cyber Physical Systems that allows to estimate future performance, to predict and prevent imminent failures and to schedule proactive maintenance.

In this project CISTER leads two work packages, one related to dissemination and another related to the development and integration of sensors into industrial equipment (development of sensors for maintenance, their communication protocols and middlewares). CISTER will also collaborate with the Portuguese consortium on an industrial pilot.


On May 4-6, Luis Miguel Pinho and Vincent Nelis, from CISTER, attended the second review meeting of P-SOCRATES, organised in Oslo, Norway, within the block review week, organized by the European Commission (CNECT A3) which brought together the “Advanced Computing project cluster”: the group of FP7 projects working in the area of Advanced Computing and financed by the European Commission under ICT Call 10. During the meeting the consortium presented the current status of his work, with the progress and results achieved so far. The overall feedback was that the P-SOCRATES project has successfully met all its objectives in developing individual software/analysis components, the integration of those components being the target for the next milestone next year. The official review report, received last week, provides very positive remarks, both on the technical outcomes of the period, as well as in the proactive and collaborative work of the project partners.


The CarCoDe project reached its completion in June 2015, and the partners of the project organized a final event in Castelo Branco, Portugal to discuss the final results internally, and to disseminate them to the general public. On June 2nd, the CarCoDe consortium held the General Assembly, attended by Michelle Albano from CISTER, which focused on preparing the final reports for the project, and setting up the workshop scheduled for the following day.

The workshop was attended by important actors in the Portuguese and international automotive industry and PAs, such as BMW, Toyota, the European Commission, Airbus, Portugal Telecom, Alcatel-Lucent, the Municipality of Castelo Branco, and Business Association of Beira Baixa. The workshop had media coverage by both the national television SIC, and the magazine Exame Informática.

CISTER Researchers Luis Lino Ferreira, Geoffrey Nelissen, Eduardo Tovar and Luis Miguel Pinho participated in the 2015 Artemis/ITEA Co-summit held in Berlin. They were representing CISTER as members of several ongoing and finalized European projects, namely: EMC2, CONCERTO, Arrowhead, ENCOURAGE, CarCode and P-SOCRATES.

The Co-summit 2015 organized by ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking on embedded systems and ITEA, the EUREKA Cluster on software-intensive systems and services – counted about 700 participants from industry, academia, public authorities and press from all over Europe. This year's theme was: Smart Industry: Impact of Software Innovation.

During this event, Eduardo Tovar participated in the Artemis General Assembly and the election for the Artemis Steering Board as a candidate. Luis Miguel Pinho was invited to present a talk in the Speakers Corner on Mixed Criticality related to the actual status of the CISTER-lead European project P-SOCRATES. Geoffrey Nelissen represented CISTER in the CONCERTO booth and Luis Lino Ferreira was also representing CISTER in the CarCode and Arrowhead booths.
Finally, Luis Miguel Pinho and Luis Lino Ferreira, together with the ENCOURAGE project leader Arne Skou, received the achievement award for the successful finalization of the ENCOURAGE project.