Swiss Sense Synergy

The SwissSenseSynergy project aims to bring together research from closely related fields that have recently emerged due to the proliferation of wireless computing devices. In particular, the ubiquity of smartphones as well as plans to deploy large numbers of small, local-range base stations (femto cells) creates many opportunities for synergistic computation as well as numerous privacy and security concerns for the users. The overall goal of SwissSenseSynergy is to provide a unifying framework for secure localisation and privacy-preserving location-based services. This is sure to lead to many innovations in the intersection of localisation, resource allocation, decision making, location-based services and privacy preservation.

The project partners have been chosen deliberately to bring together capabilities not available at any one institution. Each partner is represented by experienced researchers in the field of wireless communications, distributed computing, simulations and experimental evaluations, statistics as well as security and privacy.

 

UniGe’s partial work won Swisscom Innovation Award 2015.

The Swisscom Innovation Award 2015 is a competition targeting the best degree dissertations in the field of information and communication technologies. The competition is organized and supported by Swisscom, the Swiss Informatics Society and the ICT Switzerland. The key criteria of the competition are:

  • Focus; directly tied to a theme in the world of ICT,
  • Unique contribution; highly creative and innovative content,
  • Functionality; the ideas presented are extremely viable,
  • Business relevance; real-world insights and outcomes.

Blaise Carron, student of the University of Geneva did his bachelor thesis at the TCS Lab under the supervision of Dr. Orestis Evangelatos and Prof. Jose Roim. The title of his thesis is: “Crowd Enabled Framework for Smart Environment” and it was among the three winners in the Swisscom Innovation Award. The aim of the thesis is to augment a fixed sensing infrastructure of a smart environment with mobile crowdsensing resources and to make them interoperable to the system’s backend services.

This work lies behind the Objectives 1 and 3 of the University of Geneva of the SwissSenseSynergy project in which we expand our existing infrastructure and testbeds with mobile sensors and we augment it with mobile crowdsensing. In particular, the outcomes of this work are directly related to the Task 3 (Mobile CrowdSourcing) and Task 5 (Smart Environments, IPv6 and testbed expansion) of UNIGE. Via the implemented mobile android application, a user can augment the information that the smart environment collects by providing sensing data from her smartphone. Once the user registers herself to the backend system she is able also to interact with the actuators that are deployed inside the smart environment such as turn on the lamps or put down the curtains. The application is agile and it could report the information to any location and IP in which a Syndesi 2.0 server is running. The data reported from the smartphones sensors are harmonically interconnected with the data from the fixed resources. A user or a Web Service via a Syndesi 2.0 Web API can access all the crowd and fixed reported data.

Links:

http://cui.unige.ch/fr/nouvelles/swisscomaward2015/

https://ict.swisscom.ch/2015/11/analysis-of-security-primitives-in-public-clouds/

 

UniBE’s indoor localization work has been accepted by IEEE IPIN Indoor Localization Competition.

IEEE IPIN Indoor Localization Competition is one of the most well-known indoor localization competitions.

The competition is aimed at bringing together the academic and industrial research communities for evaluating different approaches and envisioning new research opportunities for the indoor localization area, where no accepted standards do yet exist. IPIN 2016 Indoor Localization Competition is based on the experience of previous editions sponsored by IPIN and EvAAL, the precursor organization behind the event, ensuring experience, solidity and a well-founded scientific method (http://evaal.aaloa.org).

UniBE’s infrastructure-less indoor positioning solution provides real-time localization by fusing WiFi signals, smartphone’s onboard IMU sensors, and floor map.

The competition will happen on October 4-7, 2016, at the University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain.

 

A dissertation from UniBE’s PhD student received the Fritz Kutter award 2016.

The dissertation on indoor localization (“Fine-grained indoor positioning and tracking systems”) from UniBE’s PhD student Zan Li has received the Fritz Kutter award 2016.

 

UniGe’s partial work won the UNIGE Digital Fellow Award 2017.

The partial work on “Competing Crowds” (http://crowd.unige.ch) of the subproject of UNIGE is among the three winners of a competition to become University of Geneva Digital Fellows at Swissnex San Francisco in 2017 (https://www.unige.ch/international/en/collaborations-et-partenariats/digital-fellows). UNIGE’s PhD student Julia Buwaya represents the SwissSenseSynergy project at several events at Swissnex SF (http://www.swissnexsanfrancisco.org/) and in the greater Bay Area of San Francisco from April to May 2017.

 

SwissSenseSynergy press release

The SwissSenseSynergy has been featured in the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) news. The full text of the press release is available here.

Publications | SwissSenseSynergy
  • Luca Luceri, Felipe Cardoso, Michela Papandrea, Silvia Giordano, Julia Buwaya, Stephane Kundig, Marios Constantinos, Jose Rolim, Zhongliang Zhao, Jose Carrera, Torsten Braun, Aristide Tossou,   Christos Dimitrakakis (2018). VIVO: a Secure, Privacy-Preserving and Real-Time Crowd-Sensing Framework for the Internet of Things (In Press). Pervasive and Mobile Computing Elsevier.
  • Jakob Schaerer, Zhongliang Zhao, Torsten Braun and Severin Zumbrunn, “SDNWisebed: A Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Network Testbed,” submitted 2018.
Partners | SwissSenseSynergy

The SwissSenseSynergy project consists of four sub-projects and four partners. It is coordinated by University of Bern, Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics:

  • Prof. Torsten Braun (project leader)
  • Dr. Zhongliang Zhao (technical coordinator)

University of Bern

  • Institute: Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Prof. Torsten Braun
  • Senior researchers: Zhongliang Zhao and formerly: Andreea Hossmann-Picu and Desislava Dimitrova
  • PhD researcher: Zan Li, José Luis Carrera, Mostafa Karimzadeh
  • The objective of this subproject is.
  • Details of the sub-project: Details.

University of Geneva

  • Institute: Department of Computer Science, Prof. José Rolim
  • Senior researchers: Constantinos Marios Angelopoulos, Orestis Evangelatos
  • PhD researcher: Julia Buwaya
  • The objective of this subproject is.
  • Details of the sub-project: Details.

SUPSI

  • Institute: Institute for Information Systems and Networking, Prof. Silvia Giordano
  • Senior researchers: Michela Papandrea, and formerly: Anna Förster
  • PhD researcher: Luca Luceri
  • The objective of this subproject is.
  • Details of the sub-project: Details.

Chalmers University, Sweden

  • Institute: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Prof. Aikaterini Mitrokotsa and Dr. Christos Dimitrakakis
  • Senior researchers: none
  • PhD researcher: Aristide Tossou
  • The objective of this subproject is.
  • Details of the sub-project: Details.