Autor: Osane Uriarte

Deployment of applied computational RFID solutions

Asier Perallos Ruiz

DeustoTech (Mobility unit)

Applicants for post-doctoral positions must hold a Ph.D. degree in Telecommunications/ Computer Science/ Engineering obtained in the past three years, with evidence of research productivity and an excellent track of publications. Applicants must show that their previous research or industrial work is related to some of the above-mentioned subprojects. Other criteria that will be considered are: Experience in developing and characterizing radio-frequency systems. Ability to design and model radio-frequency circuits. Fluency in English (understanding, speaking and writing) is also essential. Ability to work in a team and collaborate with people in complementary disciplines. Circuit analysis and PCB design will be very well evaluated.

• Information Sciences and Engineering (ENG)

An emerging research line on CRFID is being consolidated at DeustoTech Mobility. CRFID involves the use of passive tags that integrate a programmable microcontroller and a sensor of different natures in order to deploy solutions for IoT applications. We have interest in extending this research field integrating sensors with RFID passive tags, and designing and implementing smart and programmable tags with the aim of, finally, deploying a robust prototype and making it closer to the market and final applications. The applicant will consider the problems related to the transmission and reception, storage, powering and management of the radio signal, the energy harvested, the microcontroller and the sensor. Subsequently, we are looking for a highly qualified and independent postdoc that would develop this research direction. Specifically, the project will involve, but it is not restricted to, the following: Further develop the RFID passive platform, reader and tags, already available at the department. Design and produce new combinations of sensor-tags, or newer wireless programmable sensors powered by radio frequency signals. Optimize different aspects of the integration between tags and sensors, identification and reading protocols, energy harvesting or backscattering signals.

[1] Alanson P Sample et al. “Design of an RFID-based battery-free programmable sensing platform.” In: IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement 57.11 (2008), p. 2608 (cit. on p. 8). [2] WA Serdijn, ALR Mansano, and M Stoopman. “Introduction to RF energy harvesting.” In: Wearable Sensors. Elsevier, 2014, pp. 299–322 (cit. on p. 5). [3] Pavel V Nikitin and KV Seshagiri Rao. “Antennas and propagation in UHF RFID systems.” In: RFID, 2008 IEEE International Conference On. IEEE. 2008, pp. 277–288 (cit. on pp. 2, 3). [4] Franco Fuschini et al. “Analytical approach to the backscattering from UHF RFID transponder.” In: IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters 7 (2008), pp. 33–35. [5] Nikos Kargas, Fanis Mavromatis, and Aggelos Bletsas. “Fully-coherent reader with commodity SDR for Gen2 FM0 and computational RFID.” In: IEEE Wireless Communications Letters 4.6 (2015), pp. 617–620.

Currently, there are several research lines in DeustoTech Mobility: Soft Computing, Cooperative Communications, Location Based Services and Passive Ambient Sensing among others. Focusing on the latter research line of Passive Ambient Sensing, several projects have been completed using RFID technology particularly for tracking and traceability purposes. Several solutions for monitorization of goods and vehicles have been explored using non-invasive systems with RFID technology that can collect data to be used for the optimization of deliveries or real-time fleet management. Now, this research line is evolving to include the so-called Computational RFID systems (CRFID). These systems integrate sensors with programmable microcontrollers into passive tags, and represent a hot research topic.

RFID technology is an auto-ID technology used to identify an electronic code stored into small tags using radio frequency signals coming from a reader device. The main and most attractive feature of this technology is that tags are passive devices that do not need batteries and are powered by the reader’s signal. RFID is increasingly becoming used not only as a substituting technology of barcodes, but it is also used in electronic tolls, access control, or traceability of goods among other applications. Given the importance of IoT and wireless sensor networks, RFID is being used in applications integrating sensors and programmable microcontrollers in passive tags. Now tags are able to perform simple calculations and transmit back the value of an integrated sensor. This new technology is called computational RFID (CRFID) and is increasingly becoming relevant in the field of sensor networks. A set of this type of sensors can be powered using an RFID reader defining a network called RFID sensor network. This type of networks present several challenges such as intermittent power, capture effect, detection errors or the optimization of the streaming protocols.

At DeustoTech Mobility in the are of Passive Ambient Sensing, a fully functional and configurable prototyping platform based on SDR and GNU-Radio is available to fully experiment the whole CRFID system, hardware and software. We are also working with WISP (sensor.cs.washington.edu/WISP.html) and FARSENS (www.farsens.com) sensor tags in the UHF range. Both tags have an available sensor and microcontroller allowing the customization of the identification and sensing protocols.

DeustoTech Mobility is actively participating and coordinating several H2020 projects such as TIMON (2015-2018, GA:636220 ; http://www.timon-project.eu) and POSTLowCIT(2016-2019, GA: 2015-ES-TM-0239-S, http://www.postlowcit.eu). In addition to this, the research group is highly active in international forums, being part of ECTRI, the European research association for sustainable and multimodal mobility, a european platform involving all the most outstanding research centres in transport (www.ectri.org/About/Accueil.htm). Apart from carrying out this research, the applicant is expected to be actively involved in international projects, international networking and research proposal preparations of international projects. DeustoTech Mobility has established a collaborating network with Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) and the University of Washington (USA), being the latter the cradle of “computational RFID”. This relation materializes in joint publications, pre and post-doctoral stays and the promotion of international collaboration for new project proposals.

The proposed project will be focused on the consolidation of this research by deploying new passive sensors and new interrogation protocols to obtain robust RFID sensor networks. The optimization of the hardware, software and the available resources to provide a fully functional passive network will be needed in order to be applied to IoT applications such as the following example scenarios: Scenario 1: an RFID noise sensor network where these sensors are located in inaccessible locations and can capture the noise of a vehicle passing by. These sensors will be powered by the vehicle passing-by or any other empowered device and will receive their measurements. Scenario 2: an RFID accelerometers network to detect resonance in road infrastructure (bridges, buildings). Also, it could be located in different parts of the body to detect movements for indoor/outdoor positioning. Scenario 3: an RFID temperature sensor network in a freezing van that will track the temperature of several perishable goods along the different stages of the supply chain. Scenario 4: a wireless gas emissions station. This station would contain several RFID sensors that measure different types of gases, and will provide information every time it is powered by an RFID reader. It can be powered by a passing vehicle or by an operator.

The potential offered by these networks is very high because neither a line of sight nor accessibility to the sensors is needed to be read. Tags do not need batteries, thus they do not need to be replaced. In addition, the cost of each tag can be less than 10 cents, their size can be less than a small stick and their interrogation range can reach 8-10m. The applicant will contribute to generat impact on any Smart city scenario, where data needs to be acquired and later analyzed to provide services.

The potential of this application is related to the ability of the computational sensor to work without a power supply source. This brings the possibility to include the device on unaccesible places, such as inside walls or car tyres, and they still can be identified and their sensors read.

Since the main purpose of this proposal is to design and implement new types of sensors, scenarios where vulnerable groups receive information to improve their lives can be included.

Advanced Localization Techniques on Smart Devices for Inclusive Location-based Services

Alfonso Bahillo Martínez & Luis Enrique Díez

DeustoTech (www.deustotech.eu) is a private non-profit institution of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto for applied research in new technologies. Since 2005 DeustoTech mission is to support the ICT activity in business and society through research, the development of technologies, innovation, and knowledge transfer. We focus our activity around TRLs 2-7 and articulate it into four applied fields: Industry, Mobility, Energy, and Society, having a fifth, the Chair of Applied Mathematics, as a transversal activity and support for the previous four. We are characterized for working with data of heterogeneous nature, throughout its life cycle and in compliance with ethical principles and humanists who define the University of Deusto. The MSCA IF candidate will be incorporated in the Mobility research group at DeustoTech. This research group is committed to respond to the current and future needs of society and industry in the field of mobility and transport by means of technology and data fusion applications. Nowadays, the Unit belongs to 3 European collaboration networks and participates in 5 European Projects, as well as is currently developing several consortiums and partnerships for future international projects. Actually, 7 international students are hosted by the Unit, as well as more than 10 international fellowships have been carried out by members of this Unit. For more information: http://mobility.deustotech.eu/

We are looking for post-doctoral researchers with strong background in at least one of the next areas: – Information Fusion through Bayesian Inference – Human body and RF signals interaction – Pedestrian inertial navigation system – Machine Learning techniques for indoor localization – Human-Computer Interaction Researchers with experience in the application of any of the previous techniques in the field of localization systems will be especially welcome. Advanced command of English (C1 or equivalent) is desired. Knowledge of Spanish is not a requirement.

• Information Sciences and Engineering (ENG)
• Mathematics (MAT)

Location Based Services (LBS) have a growing interest in the market, from the user’s, applications developers’ and mobile operators’ perspectives. User location-based information has transversal demand on numerous commercial applications and is a real problem solver in societal challenges, such as health and mobility. One in six people in the EU has a disability that ranges from mild to severe making around 80 million who are often prevented from taking part fully in society and the economy because of environmental and attitudinal barriers. Over a third of people aged over 75 have disabilities that restrict them to some extent. The EU has a strong commitment for improving the social and economic situation of people with disabilities. For this, the Commission has defined an Action Plan in the scope of “European Disability Strategy 2010-2020: A Renewed Commitment to a Barrier-Free Europe”, where the access and mobility of people with disabilities in urban areas, its facilities and transportation system are a key priority, understanding accessibility as a precondition for participation in society and the economy. All these new technical capabilities present exciting challenges for signal processing practitioners and researchers, and open promising opportunities to empower people with disabilities to interact with and through the world.

– T. Otim, A. Bahillo, L. E. Diez, P. Lopez, and F. Falcone, “FDTD and Empirical Exploration of Human Body and UWB Radiation Interaction on TOF Ranging,” IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, pp. 1–1, 2019. – Rebernik, N. Goličnik Marušić, B. Bahillo, A. Osaba, E. (2019). A 4-dimensional Model and Combined Methodological Approach to Inclusive Urban Planning and Design for ALL, Sustainable Cities and Society Vol. 44, January 2019, Pages 195-214. DOI: 10.1016/j.scs.2018.10.001. – L. E. Díez, A. Bahillo, J. Otegui, and T. Otim, “Suitability Analysis of Wrist-Worn Sensors for Implementing Pedestrian Dead Reckoning Systems,” IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 18, no. 12, pp. 5098–5114, May 2018. – Bahillo, A., Díez, L.E. and Arambarri, A., 2016. BLUE CARE: A COOPERATIVE LOCATION NETWORK FOR HANDICAPPED PERSONS. Procedia Engineering (2017) pp. 67-75 – A. Bahillo, T. Aguilera, F. J. Álvarez, and A. Perallos, “WAY: Seamless Positioning Using a Smart Device,” Wireless Pers Commun, vol. 94, no. 4, pp. 2949–2967, Jun. 2017.

– Underground Built Heritage as catalyser for Community Valorisation Funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology, COST Action CA18110. Duration: 48 months (Abr. 2019 – Abr. 2023) – STING: Trains Positioning by Fusing Data coming from Heterogeneous Technologies. Funded by CAF I+D. Duration: 36 months (Jan. 2017 – Dec. 2019) – BLUE: Enabling Ubiquitous Location-Based services. Funded by the Basque Department of Education, under Grant ref. PI_2016_0010. Duration: 24 months (Jan. 2017 – Dec. 2018) – ESPHIA: Enabling Seamless Positioning for Helping Inhabitants Anywhere. Funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, TIN2014-56042-JIN. Duration: 36 months (Oct. 2015 – Oct. 2018) – CYBERPARKS: Fostering knowledge about the relationship between Information and Communication Technologies and Public Spaces supported by strategies to improve their use and attractiveness. Funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology, TUD COST Action TU1306. Duration: 48 months (Abr. 2014 – Abr. 2018) – LORIS: Localization Cooperative Systems for People and Objects in Diverse Environments. Funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, TIN2012-38080-C04-03. Duration: 36 months (Jan. 2013 – Dec. 2015) – LEMUR: Continuous localization in extensive environments using ultrasound and radiofrequency. Funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, TIN2009-14114-C04-02 Duration: 36 months (Jan. 2010 – Dec. 2012)

The proposed research plan is encouraged to cover three research disciplines in a “bottom-up” proposal. This research proposal is the result of an interdisciplinary encounter among an anthropologist, a landscape architect and a telecom engineer that was made possible by the COST Action TUD1306, called CyberParks (http://cyberparks-project.eu). Therefore, the interdisciplinary of this research proposal is guaranteed though the co-direction of experts from those different knowledge areas which will be melted to be able to address the research proposal. The knowledge areas to be integrated are: – Dynamic information fusion methods for positioning. The main motivation behind this knowledge area is based on the current need for a dynamic positioning system which autonomously adapts to the availability of external signals depending on the environment – Behavior analysis and mapping. – Social Inclusion. One of the greatest challenges, regardless of the city’s size, organizational structure, socio-political capacity or development stage, is as of how to become fully inclusive to fit the needs of all their citizens, including those with disabilities and diverse impairments. Hence, this area provides an overview of existing city concepts, tackling them from inclusion perspective.

We plan the next mechanisms to successfully implement the interdisciplinarity: – Refine the plan proposal (objectives, scope and roadmap) agreed among the co-directors and the MSCA IF candidate for the three years period. – Skype meetings every two weeks to check the progress of the MSCA IF researcher and to establish the next steps to follow. – Face to face meetings every 24 weeks. – At least two short-term research stays every year, and one long-term research stay at the University of Antwerp and/or the Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia.

The research project is clearly aligned with the topics defined by the H2020 programme: – From a technical point of view, it is aligned with the work programme «Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies», both in the area of «Information and Communication Technologies» and in the area of «Space», as its objective is the design of location systems in intelligent devices including the use of the European Global Navigation Satellite System (Galileo, EGNOS). – From the application point of view, the objective of developing inclusive and accessible applications is clearly aligned with Societal Challenge 1, (Health, demographic change and wellbeing) and Societal Challenge 4, (Smart, Green and Integrated Transport). In fact, there are currently several project proposals under review in calls for the previous programmes.

Through research training provided by the institutions from different countries, sectors and disciplines, this research proposal will trigger cooperation between organizations from the academic sector such as the Universities of Deusto and Antwerp and non-academic sector such as the Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia. It will enhance skills development and knowledge-sharing, enhancing researchers’ employability and providing them with new career perspectives. Three main types of stakeholders who may be interested in the results of this research project have now been identified, existing contacts and collaborations in the past: – Associations of people with different types of disabilities, as they are the main end users of this research project. In the past, there has been collaboration or contact with associations such as “Discapacitados sin fronteras “(Disabled without frontiers) or ONCE (Spanish Blind Association). – Town councils and other public bodies interested in being able to offer better and more accessible services to citizens. In the past, there has been collaborations with public bodies in cities such as Bilbao or Zaragoza in Spain, or Maribor in Slovenia. – Different agents in the health field, especially interested in the study of active aging or people with psychiatric problems. In this field, there exist active collaborations and contacts with several teams in the field of psychiatry of Sacyl (Public Health Service of Castilla y León, Spain).

The choice of inclusiveness and accessibility as the target characteristics of the LBS to be developed in this research project will maximise the public benefit by supporting the development of applications that will address major societal challenges. In particular, the main stakeholders (public administration and associations of people with physical disabilities) will benefit from the results of this project in different ways: • Access to high technology developers specialized in seamless positioning and Location Based Services implementation. • Gaining knowledge on inclusion aspects in urban areas that will serve to the preparation of studies related to transport, mobility, urban planning and accessibility, etc. • New business models related to co-operation between public administration and its stakeholders (citizens, companies, associations). • Opportunity for closely collaborating cities and associations of people with physical disabilities, having the opportunity to boost the accessibility of urban areas to all the citizens. Opportunity to exchange experiences and best practices. In addition, user location-based information has transversal demand on numerous commercial applications. Revenues of context-aware smartphone apps will hit € 30.6 billion by 2019, up from € 11.7 billion in 2015, so there is also a great commercial opportunity, which can be reflected in the obtaining of patents or creation of spin-off companies

The main innovative aspect of the research project is the focus of the development of LBS in the field of accessibility and inclusiveness. This implies focusing on a market and type of problems generally forgotten and also brings with it the need to work from multidisciplinary strategies, which always is challenging and stimulating. Another important aspect of the offer is the possibility of working on a project that covers a wide spectrum of the life cycle of a product, as the project will include from basic and applied research tasks (TRL 2 to 5) to developing and testing systems that can be used in an operational environment with real services (TRL 7).

One of the University of Deusto’s key duties is to be fully aware of problems within the institution itself and the society we live in. For this reason, it should take specific steps to boost integration and real equality of opportunity for people with specific support needs. Timely specific action is required to enable them to enter higher education in equal conditions and ensure their full integration in the university community. DeustoTech, as one of its institutions, is included in this service of social action and inclusion. The main aims consist of achieving full normalization, equal opportunities and gradually adopting the steps needed to ensure that the University of Deusto is an inclusive educational institution. Furthermore, the University of Deusto provides them with guidance and support on the transition to the labor market jointly with special job centers and companies at large.

Large scale collaborative logistics optimization by artificial intelligence

Enrique Onieva Caracuel https://www.linkedin.com/in/enriqueonieva/

DeustoTech (www.deustotech.eu) is a private non-profit institution of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto for applied research in new technologies. Since 2005 DeustoTech mission is to support the ICT activity in business and society through research, the development of technologies, innovation and knowledge transfer. We focus our activity around TRLs 2-7 and articulate it into four applied fields. We are characterized for working with data of heterogeneous nature, throughout its life cycle and in compliance with ethical principles and humanists who define the University of Deusto. Within the University of Deusto and DeustoTech, the scientist in charge participates in the Mobility Research Unit. The unit is actively participating and coordinating several H2020 projects such as TIMON (2015-2018, GA:636220 ; http://www.timon-project.eu ), POSTLowCIT(2016-2019, GA: 2015-ES-TM-0239-S, http://www.postlowcit.eu) and LOGISTAR (2018-2021, GA: 769142, https://logistar-project.eu/). In addition to this, the research unit is highly active in international forums, being part of ECTRI, the European research association for sustainable and multimodal mobility, a European platform involving all the most outstanding research centres in transport (www.ectri.org/About/Accueil.htm). Apart from the research group, for the development of this project, we will count with the support of external collaborators, with which we have an active relationship.

We are looking for post-doctoral researchers with a strong background in metaheuristics, or related optimization methods. The candidate must have a proven track record on publications in journals and conferences related to these areas. The candidate must have good programming skills and must prove enough independence to program their own methods. Knowledge and experience in programming languages, like Python or Java, is a requirement. Knowledge about some distributed computing frameworks as Apache Spark, Tensorflow, Pytorch, etc is also desirable. Additionally, experience in research projects will be welcome, particularly in H2020 or similar international programmes. Researchers with experience in the application of metaheuristics and modelling of optimization problems in the following fields will be especially welcomed: vehicle routing, supply chain, transhipment, logistic systems.

• Information Sciences and Engineering (ENG)

Statistics show a problem with transport efficiency in Europe: that vehicles are operating partially filled. EU statistics show a range of between 24% and 28% empty vehicle running, and capacity utilisation by weight ranging from 54% to 57%, over the latest 10 years period. Together these two observations result in an overall efficiency score of European road transport of around 45%. Horizontal collaboration among different companies is one of the most promising approaches to deal with this issue. It consists of the collaboration among two or more firms at the same level of the supply chain by sharing resources, operations, etc. The research proposed is related to the optimization of this horizontal collaboration. The first objective aims at developing richer optimization models that combine interdependent problems to improve the applicability of the solutions in a real environment. The second objective consists on the design of these models according to the robust optimization paradigm to provide solutions adapted to the risk aversion of the decision-maker. The third objective entails the development of high-performance and robust methods by the hybridization among different metaheuristic classes or metaheuristics with other techniques, on one hand; and on the other hand, to create highly scalable and efficient optimization algorithms leveraging new distributed computation paradigms and using a design that facilitate its deployment in cloud platforms at a big scale.

E. Osaba, R. Carballedo, F. Diaz, E. Onieva, A.D. Masegosa, A. Perallos. Good practice proposal for the implementation, presentation, and comparison of metaheuristics for solving routing problems. Neurocomputing 271: 2-8, 2018 Journal JCR Ranking: 24/133(Q1); Google Scholar Citations: 4 E. Osaba, X. S. Yang, F. Diaz, E. Onieva, A. D. Masegosa, A. Perallos. A discrete firefly algorithm to solve a rich vehicle routing problem modelling a distribution system with recycling policy. Soft Computing-A Fusion of Foundations, Methodologies and Applications, 21(18): 5295-5308, 2017 P. Lopez-Garcia, E. Onieva, E. Osaba, A. D. Masegosa, A. Perallo. GACE: A meta-heuristic based in the hybridization of Genetic Algorithms and Cross Entropy methods for continuous optimization. Expert Systems with Applications, 55, 508-519, 2016 E. Onieva, E. Osaba, I. Angulo, A. Moreno, A. Bahillo and A. Perallos, «Improvement of Drug Delivery Routes Through the Adoption of Multi-Operator Evolutionary Algorithms and Intelligent Vans Capable of Reporting Real-Time Incidents,» in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 14( 2): 1009-1019, 2015 E. Onieva, U. Hernandez-Jayo, E. Osaba, A. Perallos, X. Zhang, A multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for the tuning of fuzzy rule bases for uncoordinated intersections in autonomous driving, Information Sciences, 321: 14-30, 2015.

MOMENTUM: Modelling Emerging Transport Solutions for Urban Mobility. European Union’s H2020 Programme. Topic LC-MG-1-3-2018: Harnessing and understanding the impacts of changes in urban mobility on policy making by city-led innovation for sustainable urban mobility [Grant Agreement]. Coordinating Institution: EMT Madrid S.A. Total budget consortium: 2,927,875€. Total budget host unit: 204,000€. Duration: 2019 – 2022. LOGISTAR: Enhanced data management techniques for real time logistics planning and scheduling. H2020 programme – MG-5.2-2017: Innovative ICT solutions for future logistics operations [Grant Agreement 769142], Funding consortium: 4.997.548,75€. Funding host unit: 811.000€. 2018 – 2021, Coordinator: University of Deusto Low noise and low carbon freight delivery for Postal Operators to ensure last mile connections through optimized urban and long-distance transport (PostLowCIT), CEF Transport Programme, European Comission, 2015-ES-TM-0239-S, Funding consortium: 1.033.273€, Funding host unit: 302.925€, 2016 – 2019, Coordinator: Correos TIMON: Enhanced real-time services for optimized multimodal mobility relying on cooperative networks and open data. H2020 – MG-3.5a-2014 – Cooperative ITS for safe, congestion-free and sustainable mobility [Grant Agreement – 636220], Funding consortium: 5.605.213 €, Funding group: 943.750€, 2015 – 2018, Coordinator: University of Deusto

The research posed in this thesis is located on the intersection among two knowledge areas, Intelligent Transportation Systems and Artificial Intelligence. Below, we briefly describe these areas: Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs): According to the EU Directive 2010/40/EU, ITSs are advanced applications which without embodying intelligence as such aim to provide innovative services relating to different modes of transport and traffic management and enable various users to be better informed and make safer, more coordinated and ‘smarter’ use of transport networks. ITSs integrate telecommunications, electronics and information technologies with transport. Artificial Intelligence: This discipline can be seen as a group of methodologies that aim at performing tasks that are usually assumed for humans as Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, Reasoning, etc. In this project, the MSCA research will mainly focus on Logistics, a subarea of Intelligent Transportation Systems that refers to the process of coordinating and moving resources – people, materials, inventory, and equipment – from one location to storage at the desired destination. In addition, optimization methods, a subfield of Artificial Intelligence that has experienced great advances in the last decade, and with the posibility of shaping the Logistics of the future. In particular, meta-heuristic approaches will be studied, which have shown great potential in the resolution of real cases.

Interdisciplinary will be achieved by the inclusion of the candidate in the operation of on-going projects in the field of logistics, such as those cited previously. Within those projects, the candidate will have the possibility to interact with real potential clients for the developments as well as providers of real problems to face during the hosting.

The research proposed in this thesis is aligned with the H2020 societal challenge on Smart, Green and Integrated Transport, especially with two of its key objectives: Better mobility, less congestion, more safety and security. As will be explained below, the research done in this work could contribute improve the mobility of goods. Global leadership for the European transport industry. The research proposed here would help to improve the design, planning and reliability of European distribution networks, and therefore to the global leadership of the European transport industry.

Within the framework of the on-going projects, as well as future ones, the candidate will interact with stakeholders in the logistic field, who provide him with data and real operational challenges. This collaboration will be continuous on time, by means of periodicals meetings for definition of requirements and presentation of results.

Successful Logistic operation depends on available resources and underlying dynamic variables. Changes can have significant effects across the entire network, causing delays and requiring recourse actions which significantly compromise efficiency, including repeated delivery attempts and underloaded vehicles. Industry practice relies on historical data to predict demand cycles, congestion rates, workforce availability or travel times. This tends to treat each aspect as independent, and is not responsive to real-time events. Most operations rely on human monitoring of event streams, and human-to-human negotiation to respond to change. Fundamental techniques have been developed, but rarely applied to logistics operation. For optimization models, the aim is twofold. First, to develop richer optimization models that combine interdependent problems to improve the applicability of the solutions in a real-environment, and second, design these models according to the robust optimization paradigm to provide solutions adapted to the risk aversion of the decision-maker. With respect to optimization algorithms, the aim is to methods by the hybridization among different metaheuristic classes or metaheuristics with other techniques, on one hand; and on the other hand, to create highly scalable and efficient optimization algorithms leveraging new parallel computation paradigms and using a design and an implementation that facilitate its deployment in cloud platforms at a big scale.

There are several methods, products and services for route planning and logistics operation management. But there is not a single product in the market focus in the area of the collaborative logistics, where different stakeholders may share information in order to get benefit from the potenctial pooling of resources, reducing so empty space in vehicles and empty kilometres, enabling to consolidate freights among different stakeholders.

One of the University of Deusto’s key duties is to be fully aware of problems within the institution itself and the society we live in. For this reason, it should take specific steps to boost integration and real equality of opportunity for people with specific support needs. Timely specific action is required to enable them to enter higher education in equal conditions and ensure their full integration in the university community. DeustoTech, as one of its institutions, is included into this service of social action and inclusion. The main aims consist of achieving full normalisation, equal opportunities and gradually adopting the steps needed to ensure that the University of Deusto is an inclusive educational institution. Furthermore, the University of Deusto provides them with guidance and support on the transition to the labour market jointly with special job centres and companies at large.

Smart Water Systems – Tools to build more resilient water infrastructures

Cristina Martín Andonegui LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristina-martin-andonegui-95a49a53/ SCOPUS: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3919-2738

DeustoTech (www.deustotech.eu) is a private non-profit institution of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto for applied research in new technologies. Since 2005 DeustoTech mission is to support the ICT activity in business and society through research, the development of technologies, innovation and knowledge transfer. We focus our activity around TRLs 2-7 and articulate it into four applied fields: Industry, Mobility, Energy and Society, having a fifth, the Chair of Applied Mathematics, as a transversal activity and support for the previous four. We are characterized for working with data of heterogeneous nature, throughout its life cycle and in compliance with ethical principles and humanists who define the University of Deusto. The Host Research Unit counts with a consolidated team leading research in environmental sector, including water.

We are looking for a Science Bachelor or Engineer with interest on environmental issues. Experience on language programming (C++, Matlab, R, etc.) will be required. Master degree at Environmental Science, Environmental Engineering, or similar would be valuable. We would also appreciate recognisable experience in research tasks (collaborations with scientific groups, participation in international conferences, publication of research articles, etc.).

• Chemistry (CHE)
• Information Sciences and Engineering (ENG)
• Environmental Sciences and Geology (ENV)
• Life Sciences (LIF)
• Mathematics (MAT)

Water resources are getting stressed due to the concentration of people living in urban areas and the effects of climate change. On the top of that, water infrastructures are getting ineffective and operation and maintenance is demanding too much energy. This research proposes to develop new tools to assess the current water infrastructures, both along the water distribution network and integrated drainage system. These techniques allow, on the one hand, improving the operational and maintenance operations, facilitate the water reuse and facilitating the decision-making process. The program includes: • The development of novel and standard ontologies, together with the implementation of interoperability protocols is crucial to make compatible all the information featuring water systems and make it available to different actors. • Artificial intelligent techniques make possible the design of advanced maintenance methods, the implementation of prompt alarm systems, the on-line communication tools, etc. • Agent-based modelling makes possible to emulate the usage of water infrastructures under different scenarios, derived from behavioural patterns, economic activities, etc. • Quantitative Risk Analysis assesses water infrastructure performance under highly uncertain variables such as population movements, distribution of water uses, or the effects of climate change. The new tools will be validated on real case studies following EU recommendations for monitoring and reporting

1 – C. Martin and E. Ayesa (2010). An integrated Monte Carlo methodology for the calibration of water quality models. Ecological Modelling 221, pp. 2656-2667. Indexed in the WoS: I.F. (2010): 1.769. Q3 (ECOLOGY), ranked: 68/130 2 – C.M. Cardona, C. Martin, A. Salterain, A. Castro, D. San Martín and E. Ayesa (2011). CalHidra 3.0 – New software application for river water quality prediction based on RWQM1. Environmental Modelling and Software 26, pp. 973-979. Indexed in the WoS: I.F. (2011): 3.114. Q1 (COMPUTER SCIENCE, INTERDISCIPLINARY APPLICATIONS), ranked: 11/99 3 – A. Donoso-Bravo, J. Mailier, C. Martin, J. Rodríguez, C. Aceves-Lara and A. V. Wouwer (2011). Model selection, identification and validation in anaerobic digestion: A review. Water Research, 45, pp. 5347-5364. Indexed in the WoS: I.F. (2011): 4.865. Q1 (WATER RESOURCES), ranked: 1/78 4 – L. Benedetti, J. Langeveld, A. Comeau, L. Corominas, G. Daigger, C. Martin, P. S. Mikkelsen, L. Vezzaro, S. Weijers and P.A. Vanrolleghem (2013). Modelling and monitoring of integrated urban wastewater systems: Review on status and perspectives. Water Science and Technology, 68(6), pp. 1203-1215. Indexed in the WoS: I.F. (2013): 1.212. Q3 (WATER RESOURCES), ranked: 44/81 5 – C. Martin and P.A. Vanrolleghem (2014). Analysing, completing, and generating influent data for WWTP modelling: A critical review. Environmental Modelling & Software, 60, pp. 188-201. Indexed in the WoS: I.F. (2014): 4.420. Q1 (COMPUTER SCIENCE, INTERDISCIPLINARY APPLICATIONS), ranked: 4/102

1 – EfiNET: Integrated system for the efficient management of the smart water systems Hazitek 2016-2018. UDEUSTO has developed an integrated tool for modelling and simulation of smart water networks that facilitates leakage detection. 2 – EstolZAIN: Decision Support Tool for the optimal operation of integrated drainage system. UDEUSTO has developed an integrated software tool that facilitates the advanced maintenance of sewer systems and predicts urban flooding episodes 3 – H2020 – WASTE WASTE4THINK (Moving towards Life Cycle Thinking by Integrating Advanced Waste Management Systems) – GA 688995. UDEUSTO coordinates this project with the main objective of moving forward the current waste management practices into a circular economy motto, demonstrating the value of integrating and validating several eco-innovative solutions that cover all the waste value chain. 4 – SAVINGFOOD: Pilot activity against food wastage in Gipuzkoa. UDEUSTO designs the protocols for safe and secure edible food donation including cooked food in collaboration with main actors in the donation chain. 5 – TarifAQUA: Decision Support Tool for water tariff design in the region of Biscay (Basque Country). UDEUSTO develops a new software system that estimates water tariffs for municipalities in relation to the water network efficiency.

– water sector – circular economy – mathematical modelling – decision support tools – awareness raising

The candidate will work on a highly interdisciplinary group where all the previous knowledge will be worked on. The candidate will collaborate with researchers of different background (mathematicians, engineers, chemists, and social scientists) and be in touch with people from water industry as well as public utilities and administrations in order to achieve the objectives of the project.

The topic is a cross-sectional topic covered in calls of several H2020 programmes: Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials, Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies – Space, Food security, sustainable agriculture… and the bioeconomy programme. See for example: ● LC-CLA-15-2020: Understanding water-energy-food nexus and streamlining water related policies ● LC-CLA-13-2020: Climate resilience of coastal cities ● LC-SPACE-24-EO-2020: Copernicus evolution: Mission exploitation concept for WATER ● LC-SPACE-25-EO-2020: Big data technologies and Artificial Intelligence for Copernicus ● FNR-07-2020: FOOD 2030 – Empowering cities as agents of food system transformation Other European programs related to the proposal are: ● Bio-based Industries for Development and Growth in Europe according to SIRA Agenda ● PRIMA partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area ● LIFE Programme: Environment and Resource Efficiency Finally, there is a long list of water policies related to water: Water Framework Directive (1), Drinking Water Directive (2), Flood Risk Directive (3), as well as the Water Reuse Strategy (4) and EU Climate Action (5). 1) http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/water-framework/index_en.html 2) http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/water-drink/legislation_en.html 3) http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/flood_risk/index.htm 4) http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/reuse.htm 5) https://ec.europa.eu/clima/citizens/eu_en

The smart operation and efficient management of water resources is related with efficient use of resources, with the concept and circular economy (water reuse) as well as with important topics related to the economy of water and the development of new governance models where local clustering structures become relevant. In this line, we identify the following key stakeholders in Europe: ● Public Water Utilities (CABB, Aguas de Txingudi, Aguas de Gipuzkoa, etc.) ● Private Water Operators (FCC AQUALIA, INIMA WATER, etc.) ● Universities (UGent, NTUA, SUEZ, SACYR AGUA, etc.) ● Research Centres (TNO, VITO, DTU, etc.) ● Water Engineerings and Consultancy Firms (SEIPA, WELLNESS TELECOM, VirtualWare, DHI, ISLE UTILITIES, etc.) ● Policy makers (URA, Confederaciones Hidrográficas, Regional Governments) ● Networks, Clusters and International Organizations (AEAS, IWA, WssTP, etc.)

The results of the project will be directly incorporated in GeoWorldSim, the multi agent simulation platform developed by the hosting institution. The platform is currently used by different stakeholders (research institutions, SMEs and large enterprises and public authorities) in several projects that covers all stages of the research spectrum (from a pure research context to commercial environment). The results of this project will enlarge the portfolio of features that GeoWorldSim which will be disseminated as a whole or with respect to the different applied sectors. The results will be presented to relevant stakeholders completing all the water value chain. For example, the results will be presented to: – water utilities and operators (Consorcio de Aguas Bilbao Bizkaia, Aguas de Gipuzkoa, EMASESA, Canal de Isabel II, etc.) – water governance bodies (URA, Confederaciones Hidrográficas, etc.) – user associations (farmer unions, city councils, food industries, etc) – water related consultancy firms (FactorCO2, Isle Utilities, etc.) – water engineerings (DHI, AQUALIA, AKTOR TECHNICAL, etc.)

While the classic water and wastewater (ww) management relies on water utilities that centrally manage the entire water cycle, this research provides the tools and methods to enable the circular economy of water. The project proposes the development of several digital services that optimise the operational settings along ww infrastructures and provide a wide perspective of integral water cycle. The impact of the results will be assessed in terms of environmental health and overall positive performance. New markets, financial instruments and business models facilitated by strategic agendas of Europe will ease the uptaking of the results.

One of the University of Deusto key duties is to be fully aware of problems within the institution itself and the society we belong to. For this reason, the project will include specific steps to boost integration and real equality of opportunity for men and women with specific support needs. Timely specific action is required to enable them to enter higher education in equal conditions and ensure their full integration in the university community. DeustoTech, as one of its institutions, is included into this service of social action and inclusion. The main aims consist of achieving full normalisation, equal opportunities and gradually adopting the steps needed to ensure that the University of Deusto is an inclusive educational institution. Furthermore, the University of Deusto provides them with guidance and support on the transition to the labour market jointly with special job centres and companies at large.

Towards Smarter Environments bringing together Human and Machine Intelligence

Diego López-de-Ipiña Diego Casado Mansilla

DeustoTech [1] is a private non-profit institution of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto for applied research in new technologies. Since 2005 DeustoTech mission is to support the ICT activity in business and society through research, the development of technologies, innovation and knowledge transfer. We focus our activity around TRLs 2-7 and articulate it into four applied fields: Industry, Mobility, Energy and Environment and Societal Challenges, having a fifth, the Chair of Applied Mathematics, as a transversal activity and support for the previous four. We are characterized for working with data of heterogeneous nature, throughout its life cycle and in compliance with ethical principles and humanists who define the University of Deusto. In this project the Societal Challenges [2] groups is involved through the DEUSTEK Basque University System. Societal Challenges research unit has a strong background in humanizing, i.e. giving place to human-centric and human-driven, application of Data Science, IoT and Human Interaction technologies. That includes, sustainable awareness rising through IoT, empowering the citizen towards participating in the city daily decisions and governance, or engaging employees towards promoting healthy or sustainable habits in the workplace avoiding attrition of campaigns. [1] http://deustotech.deusto.es/ [2] https://morelab.deusto.es/

The candidate would be integrated in a highly multidisciplinary research group. As such it is of utter importance the communication skills and their ability to understand the different perspectives that the research topic has. Moreover, experience in one or more of the following fields in needed: • Crowdsourcing techniques – user-generated data verification and processing • Cognitive technologies to transform unstructured data into structured information • Recommender systems and conversational agents • Gamification and persuasion for designing behaviour change interventions • Knowledge modelling and exploitation • Transparent and Interpretable AI

• Information Sciences and Engineering (ENG)
• Mathematics (MAT)

This position will explore the potential of smart solutions and environments grounded on the extensive usage of data and analytics through the collaboration of machines and humans. It faces the challenge of how to make sense out of data, progressing from data into knowledge, through the collaboration of people & machines. A Data Scientist is sought with expertise on Hybrid Intelligence (HI), which is an approach for combining human and machine intelligence for decision making and data interpretation. HI benefits from the human ability to express and deal with complexities and the automation, availability and accuracy that machines provide. The interception of the following areas to give place to Smart Environments will be explored: • Machine Learning: ML methods can be used for activity recognition performed to detect what a user is doing, e.g. walking or resting. ML can also be used to correlate user actions into activities that configure behaviours. • Human Computation: is about involving citizens to annotate the world or correct/validate inferences performed by machines, gamification can be used to improve and validate the results driven by machines. • Knowledge modelling & exploitation: human and machine-driven knowledge can be effectively merged and represented in a Knowledge Graph (KG), combining data gathered from machine learning and human contributions. KGs are exploited to infer new knowledge or build recommenders through transparent and interpretable algorithms

1. Diego Casado-Mansilla, Ioannis Moschos, Oihane Kamara-Esteban, Apostolos C. Tsolakis, Cruz E. Borges, Stelios Krinidis, Ane Irizar-Arrieta, Konstantinos Kitsikoudis, Ander Pijoan, Dimitrios Tzovaras, Diego López-de-Ipiña. (2018) «A Human-centric & Context-aware IoT Framework for Enhancing Energy Efficiency in Buildings of Public Use» In IEEE Access. vol. 6. p. 31444-31456. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2837141. Q1: Impact factor 3.244 (2018) 2. Diego López-de-Ipiña, Liming Luke Chen, Nathalie Mitton, Gang Pan. (2017) «Ubiquitous Intelligence and computing for enabling a smarter world» In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. p. 1-3. DOI: 10.1007/s00779-017-1015-3. 3. Unai Aguilera, Diego López-de-Ipiña, Jorge Pérez Velasco. (2016) «Collaboration-Centred Cities through Urban Apps Based on Open and User-Generated Data» In Sensors. vol. 16. p. 1022. DOI: 10.3390/s16071022 4. Diego Casado-Mansilla, López-de-Armentia, Juan, Ventura, Daniela, Garaizar, Pablo, López-de-Ipiña, Diego. (2015) «Embedding Intelligent Eco-aware Systems within Everyday Things to Increase People’s Energy Awareness» In Soft Computing Journal. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. vol. 20. p. 1695-1711. DOI: 10.1007/s00500-015-1751-0. 5. Unai Aguilera, Oscar Peña, Oscar Belmonte, Diego López-de-Ipiña. (2016) «Citizen-centric data services for smarter cities» In Future Generation Computer Systems. ISSN: 0167-739X. JCR Impact Factor (2017): 3.997, Q1(COMPUTER SCIENCE, THEORY & METHODS), ranked 10/104, (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2016.10.031

1. H2020 – GREENSOUL (Persuasive Eco-awareness for User Engagement through Networked Data Devices). GA 696129. UDEUSTO is developing and testing a set of persuasion mechanism to reduce the energy consumption in public buildings. 2. H2020 – PARITY (Pro-sumer AwaRe, Transactive Markets for Valorization of Distributed flexibilITY enabled by Smart Energy Contracts) – GA 864319. UDEUSTO is developing a socioeconomic model of the barriers that hinder the participation on flexibility markets. 3. Basic Research – SentienThings (Towards augmented everyday objects that self-adapt and co-educate users to underpin their pro-environmental behaviour through persuasive technologies) – TIN2017-90042-R. UDEUSTO is developing several augmented objects connected to internet that will interact with their users in order to foster more sustainable behaviours. 4. Industrial project – FOODBAR (Eata, Cognitive and social intelligence for competitiveness of miniature food sector project). IBM Coorporation. UDEUSTO develop a cognitive app to recommend food based on the profile and tastes of the user. 5. H2020 – WeLive (A neW concept of pubLic administration based on citizen co-created mobile urban services). GA 645845. UDEUSTO was the Technical coordinator of this Project fostering the co-creation of open and user-generated data public services.

• Knowledge modelling and enhancing • Behaviour and persuasion theories • Gamification & persuasive Technology • Human and Machine Intelligence • Transparent and Interpretable AI

The candidate will work on a highly interdisciplinary group where all the previous knowledge will be worked on. The candidate will collaborate with researchers of different background (UX experts, Big Data experts, engineers, experts in behaviour change, interface designers, Internet of Things, and social scientists) in order to achieve the objectives of the project.

The topic is a cross-sectional topic covered in several of the calls of the H2020. See for example: • DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-02-2019 • DT-SPACE-EGNSS-2-2019 • ICT-13-2019-2019

We traditionally work on these projects with public sector in projects involving piloting in cities and public buildings. We also work with innovative research centres and companies across Europe: • Councils (Bilbao, Vitoria-Gasteiz) • CERTH (Greece) & Foundazione Bruno Kessler (Italy) • European companies, e.g. ENG (Italy)

A better modelling, enhancement and understanding of knowledge is paramount to give place to smarter environments, where more intelligent processes and collaboration between people and environment can take place. AI by itself cannot give place to truly smart environments which please the demands and needs and users. Users may adapt their behaviour to optimize process, e.g. reduce energy consumption, but systems have to adapt, adequate to people profiles and preferences, to really regard them as “intelligent”. Smarter environments can be applied to have more energy efficient, more secure and healthy, more efficient working and living environments. Its applications are ample.

This research will serve as demonstrator of how hybrid intelligence can supply the deficiencies and social reservations of raw AI. Intelligent processes and services have to be designed for the people and taking into account people’s rights, needs and demands. This research work will pursue Transparent and Interpretable AI.

One of the University of Deusto’s key duties is to be fully aware of problems within the institution itself and the society we live in. For this reason, it should take specific steps to boost integration and real equality of opportunity for people with specific support needs. Timely specific action is required to enable them to enter higher education in equal conditions and ensure their full integration in the university community. DeustoTech, as one of its institutions, is included into this service of social action and inclusion. The main aims consist of achieving full normalisation, equal opportunities and gradually adopting the steps needed to ensure that the University of Deusto is an inclusive educational institution. Furthermore, the University of Deusto provides them with guidance and support on the transition to the labour market jointly with special job centres and companies at large. In this project this policy will be fully taken into account. In fact, profiles will be created in an inclusive way including factors like the gender, the socio-economic status, the functional diversity, the cultural background, etc. User models for every profile should have to be created and conclusions for every group should be made. Finally, a holistic assessment has to be made not only contrasting the results but also assessing interventions that works in an inclusive way.

Agent based modelling of distribution systems

Cruz E. Borges Hernández

DeustoTech [1] is a private non-profit institution of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto for applied research in new technologies. Since 2005 DeustoTech mission is to support the ICT activity in business and society through research, the development of technologies, innovation and knowledge transfer. We focus our activity around TRLs 2-7 and articulate it into four applied fields: Industry, Mobility, Energy and Environment and Societal Challenges, having a fifth, the Chair of Applied Mathematics, as a transversal activity and support for the previous four. We are characterized for working with data of heterogeneous nature, throughout its life cycle and in compliance with ethical principles and humanists who define the University of Deusto. Within DeustoTech, the Energy & Environment [2] host a multidisciplinary team that contribute to develop more efficient and sustainable processes, novel technologies and methods for sustainable urban planning and operation in the fields of prompt alarm systems, advanced monitoring systems, agent-based modelling, optimal operation and control of complex supply networks, decision support tools, etc. [1] http://deustotech.deusto.es/ [2] https://energia.deusto.es/

The candidate would be integrated in a highly multidisciplinary research group. As such it is of utter importance the communication skills and their ability to understand the different perspectives that the research topic have. Moreover, experience in one or more of the following fields in needed: * Knowledge of a object oriented language. * Knowledge of artificial intelligence model techniques. * Experience with distribution networks models.

• Information Sciences and Engineering (ENG)

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have been an active area of research in the last three decades. What started as isolated systems for simple problem-solving have turned into full-scale simulation platforms that are able to integrate several state of the art technologies. In this research proposal we aim to continue developing GeoWorldSim platform [1] to include new functionalities to expand our uses cases: * Gridification of the platform: GeoWorldSim is actually a massive parallel platform that works using a publish-subscribe paradigm. From this point it is easy to port it to be able to run in a cluster. Nevertheless it is needed to study how to minimize the amount of information exchanged. * Integrate the platform with IoT deployments to create a mixed environment: actually a smart ambient lab is deployed at our premises. It would be quite interesting if GeoWorldSim could be used as a predictive control system of the smart lab. * Integration of evolutionary algorithms and MAS: MAS platforms could be use not only to understand phenomena but also to optimize complex situations. Evolutionary algorithms seems the perfect way to do such optimizations. The objective is to built a simulation platform for distribution networks that will help urban planners to understand (and optimize) the impact that different policies have on the population. [1] http://www.geoworldsim.com/

Diego Casado-Mansilla, et al. (2018) «A Human-centric & Context-aware IoT Framework for Enhancing Energy Efficiency in Buildings of Public Use» In IEEE Access. vol. 6. p. 31444-31456. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2837141. Ander Pijoan Lamas, et al. (2018) «Transport Choice Modeling for the Evaluation of New Transport Policies» In Sustainability. vol. 10. DOI: 10.3390/su10041230. O. Kamara-Esteban et al. (2017) “MASSHA: An agent-based approach for human activity simulation in intelligent environments”. Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 40, pp. 279-300. DOI: 10.1016/j.pmcj.2017.07.007 O. Kamara-Esteban et al. (2017) On-demand energy monitoring and response architecture in a ubiquitous world. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 21 (3), pp. 537-551. DOI: 10.1007/s00779-017-1014-4 Cruz E. Borges et al. (2013) «Evaluating combined load forecasting in large power systems and smart grids» In IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. vol. 9. p. 1570-1577. DOI: 10.1109/TII.2012.2219063.

H2020 – GREENSOUL (Persuasive Eco-awareness for User Engagement through Networked Data Devices). GA 696129. UDEUSTO is developing and testing a set of persuasion mechanism to reduce the energy consumption in public buildings. H2020 – WASTE WASTE4THINK (Moving towards Life Cycle Thinking by Integrating Advanced Waste Management Systems) – GA 688995. UDEUSTO coordinates this project with the main objective of moving forward the current waste management practices into a circular economy motto, demonstrating the value of integrating and validating several eco-innovative solutions that cover all the waste value chain. H2020 – PARITY (Pro-sumer AwaRe, Transactive Markets for Valorization of Distributed flexibilITY enabled by Smart Energy Contracts) – GA 864319. UDEUSTO is developing a socioeconomic model of the barriers that hinder the participation on flexibility markets. H2020 – ATELIER (AmsTErdam BiLbao cItizen drivEn smaRt cities) – GA 864374. UDEUSTO will, apart of on carry on several actions to foster energy efficiency and the deployment of renewable energy energy sources, perform the environmental monitoring of the project. EMEurope – ElectricTravelling (Platform to support the implementation of electromobility in Smart Cities based on ICT applications) – ID 6. UDEUSTO is developing a set of tools to estimate the environmental and social impact of the electrification of the transport sector.

The proposal clearly fits in the core objectives of the Interdisciplinary Research Platform “B-Creative advanced research on creative industries and cities” in particular, it will mix knowledge of the following fields: * Civil Engineering and Architects: urban planning have been traditionally understood by civil engineers and architects. The objective is to introduce this knowledge in a tool that will help other stakeholders to understand the urban planning. * Computer Science and Telecommunications: standardization and interoperability issues will need to have some skills about computer science and telecommunications. GIS-based systems and mapping will also be used. * Sociology and Psychology: demand patterns need to be understood and some sociology and psychology will be needed to be able to foster new habits. The combination of these disciplines will make possible the assessment of the tools and the multicriteria evaluation of the results.

The candidate will work on a highly interdisciplinary group where all the previous knowledge will be worked on. In particular, the candidate will collaborate with researchers of different background (mathematicians, engineers, experts in behaviour change, interface designers, Internet of Things, and social scientists) in order to achieve the objectives of the project. Moreover, the candidate can collaborate in international research projects like ATELIER.

The topic is a cross-sectional topic covered in several of the calls in H2020. See for example: * Secure, clean and efficient energy. * Smart, green and integrated transport. * Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials. * Cross cutting priorities. Moreover, if a usable prototype have been built at the end of the research period, the SME instrument or the FTI call can be used to bring to market the product. Several of the SDG are related to cities and urban planning. The main one is the 11th but it also has strong links with the 6th, 7th, 9th and 13th. Finally, there is a long list of european policies related to energy, water, transport and waste distribution networks.

The Smart Specialisation Strategy from the Euskadi Region has as one transversal priorities the research on the smartization of the territory. On this topic, DeustoTech maintains good relationship with several public entities that manage critical infrastructure. In particular: * Local and regional public authorities. * DSO, water utility company and waste collection utility. * Engineering firms and sustainability consultants.

The results of the project will be directly incorporated in GeoWorldSim, the multi agent simulation platform developed by the hosting institution. The platform is currently used by different stakeholders (research institutions, SMEs and large enterprises and public authorities) in several projects that covers all stages of the research spectrum (in a pure research context until in commercial environment). The results of this projects will be added to the portfolio of features that GeoWorldSim has and will be advertised in conjunction with the rest of the solution. Moreover, the results will be presented to other stakeholders in order to be incorporated in other points of the value chain. For example, the results will be presented to: the regional agency for energy and other public agencies in order to assess potential up-scale actions or the definition of new policies / grants. the local and regional governments to improve the urban planning. DSOs and other utilities in order to assess to incorporate to their planning department.

This research will be the first step in the development of products that will ease the impact assessment of different policies over the different distribution networks. Different use cases have already been deployed, but the improvement to be carried out would allow the tool to perform holistics assessment taking into consideration all distribution networks at the same time and also to cover more territory.

One of the University of Deusto’s key duties is to be fully aware of problems within the institution itself and the society we live in. For this reason, it should take specific steps to boost integration and real equality of opportunity for people with specific support needs. Timely specific action is required to enable them to enter higher education in equal conditions and ensure their full integration in the university community. DeustoTech, as one of its institutions, is included into this service of social action and inclusion. The main aims consist of achieving full normalisation, equal opportunities and gradually adopting the steps needed to ensure that the University of Deusto is an inclusive educational institution. Furthermore, the University of Deusto provides them with guidance and support on the transition to the labour market jointly with special job centres and companies at large. In this project this policy will be fully taken into account. In fact, agents will be created in an inclusive way including factors like the gender, the socio-economic status, the functional diversity, the cultural background, etc. User models for every profile should have to be created and conclusions for every group should be made. Finally, an holistic assessment have to be made not only contrasting the results but also assessing interventions that works in an inclusive way.

Modelling and simulation of circular economy practices

Dr. Ainhoa Alonso Vicario https://energia.deusto.es/people/members/ainhoa-alonso-vicario/

DeustoTech (www.deustotech.eu) is a private non-profit institution of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto for applied research in new technologies. Since 2005 DeustoTech mission is to support the ICT activity in business and society through research, the development of technologies, innovation and knowledge transfer. We focus our activity around TRLs 2-7 and articulate it into four applied fields: Industry, Mobility, Energy and Society, having a fifth, the Chair of Applied Mathematics, as a transversal activity and support for the previous four. We are characterized for working with data of heterogeneous nature, throughout its life cycle and in compliance with ethical principles and humanists who define the University of Deusto. The Host Research Unit counts with a consolidated team leading research in environmental sector, including sustainability, resource efficiency and circular economy.

We are looking for a candidate with a PhD in Science bachelor or engineering related to Life Cycle Assessment methodologies or modelling techniques based on the use of artificial intelligence Master degree at Environmental Science, Environmental Engineering, or similar would be valuable. We would also appreciate recognisable experience in research tasks (collaborations with scientific groups, participation in international conferences, publication of research articles, etc.).

• Information Sciences and Engineering (ENG)
• Environmental Sciences and Geology (ENV)

According to the World Health Organization the urban population accounted for 54% of the overall population in the world. Cities are becoming as the main consumers of resources and, consequently, where great amounts of waste are generated. Hence, when talking about urban waste, it can represent an opportunity if we are able to convert it into a new resource and face the challenges this brings to policy makers, companies and citizens. In this context, the concept of circular economy is born as a proposal to face this challenge from a global and systemic approach. In fact, it is increasingly common to find manufacturing and service solutions based on it to optimize the use of resources and minimize their environmental impact. To this end, decision support tools which connect all the activities and actors involved can play an important role to take informed and cost-effective decisions. However, due to the massiveness and complexity of the information needed, new approaches and methodologies for its management are required. The aim of this research line is to contribute to the development of new holistic methodologies to assess the environmental impact and the replication potential of the new and emerging solutions around the circular economy principles to move towards more efficient and sustainable urban areas. For this purpose the combination of different techniques such as Life Cycle Assessment and the optimization using artificial intelligence algorithms will be explored.

1. H Barco, I Oribe-Garcia, V Vargas-Viedma, C Borges, C Martin, A Alonso-Vicario. New methodology for facilitating food wastage quantification. Identifying gaps and data inconsistencies. Journal of Environmental Management (2019), 234, pp. 512-524. 2. A Pijoan, O Kamara-Esteban, A Alonso-Vicario, C Borges. Transport Choice Modeling for the Evaluation of New Transport Policies (2018), Sustainability. vol. 10. 3. A Alonso-Vicario, I Oribe-Garcia, CE Borges, M Vila, G Nohales, M Giavini. Key factors to meet prevention and recycling targets for municipal solid waste: collection systems, environmental education programmes and taxation, Universidad de Deusto. 2 (2018) 231-263. 4. I Oribe-Garcia, O Kamara-Esteban, C Martin, AM Macarulla-Arenaza, A Alonso-Vicario. Identification of influencing municipal characteristics regarding household waste generation and their forecasting ability in Biscay, Waste Manage. 39 (2015) 26-34. 5. A Pijoan, CE Borges, I Oribe-Garcia, C Martin, A Alonso-Vicario. Agent Based Simulations for the Estimation of Sustainability Indicators, Procedia Computer Science. 51 (2015) 2943-2947.

1. H2020 – WASTE WASTE4THINK (Moving towards Life Cycle Thinking by Integrating Advanced Waste Management Systems) – GA 688995. UDEUSTO coordinates this project with the main objective of moving forward the current waste management practices into a circular economy motto, demonstrating the value of integrating and validating several eco-innovative solutions that cover all the waste value chain. 2. SAVINGFOOD: Pilot activity against food wastage in Gipuzkoa. UDEUSTO designs the protocols for safe and secure edible food donation including cooked food in collaboration with main actors in the donation chain. 3. W2.0E-Tools to design management strategies for waste-to-energy in the Basque Country (Saiotek program, Basque Government): Deusto developed different tools to design waste management strategies in the Basque Country. 4. H2020 – GREENSOUL (Persuasive Eco-awareness for User Engagement through Networked Data Devices). H2020 – EE – GA 696129: UDEUSTO develops and tests a set of persuasion mechanism to reduce the energy consumption in public buildings. 5. H2020 – ATELIER (AmsTErdam BiLbao cItizen drivEn smaRt cities) – GA 864374. UDEUSTO will, apart of on carry on several actions to foster energy efficiency and the deployment of renewable energy energy sources, perform the environmental monitoring of the project.

The proposal clearly fits in the core objectives of the Interdisciplinary Research Platform “B-Creative advanced research on creative industries and cities” of the UDEUSTO. In particular, it will mix knowledge of the following fields: ● Civil Engineering and Chemical Engineering: waste treatment technologies have been traditionally understood by civil and chemical engineers able to get to know the details of the technologies and the biochemical processes involved. ● Computer Science and Telecommunications: standardization and interoperability issues will need to have some skills about computer science and telecommunications. GIS-based systems and mapping will also be used ● Sociology and Psychology: consumption and production patterns need to be understood and some sociology and psychology will be needed to be able to foster new habits ● Education: It is vital to create new innovative and attractive educational mechanisms to involve all the stakeholders (citizens, companies, public authorities). To this end, it is necessary to create methodologies to measure the circularity of the cities.

The candidate will work on a highly interdisciplinary group where all the previous knowledge will be worked on. The candidate will collaborate with researchers of different background (mathematicians, engineers, chemists, and social scientists) and be in touch with a wide network of institutions from industry sector as well as public utilities and administrations in order to achieve the objectives of the project.

The topic is a cross-sectional topic covered in calls of the Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials work programme as well as the Leadership in Enabling and Industrial Technologies – Space programme and Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry… and the bioeconomy programme. See for example: ● CE-SC5-07-2020: Raw materials innovation for the circular economy ● CE-SC5-25-2020: Understanding the transition to circular economy and its implications ● LC-CLA-11-2020 Innovative nature-based solutions for carbon neutral cities and improved air quality ● FNR-07-2020: FOOD 2030 – Empowering cities as agents of food system transformation ● RUR-05-2020 – Connecting consumers and producers in innovative supply chains Other European programs: ● Bio-based Industries for Development and Growth in Europe according to the Strategic Innovation and Research Agenda ● LIFE Programme Environment and Resource Efficiency Several SDG are highly related to this research area: ● GOAL 2: ZERO HUNGER ● GOAL 11: SUSTAINABLE CITIES & COMMUNITIES ● GOAL 12:RESPONSABLE PRODUCTION & CONSUMPTION ● GOAL 13: CLIMATE ACTION There is a long list of circular economy policies related to this project as: • EU COMMUNICATION: Close the cycle: an EU action plan for the circular economy. • DIRECTIVE (EU) 2018/851 and DIRECTIVE 2008/98 / EC on waste • DIRECTIVE 1999/31 on the dumping of waste • DIRECTIVE 2015/720 with regard to the reduction of consumption of light plastic bags

Circular economy must be considered as and intersectorial issue and consequently it has to be taken into account involving stakeholders from different sectors: Education, Waste management & Technology, Economy and Policy. So, in this project the candidate will be in direct relationship with institutions as: ● Social: AUNAR (NGO that redistributes food surpluses in Euskadi) ● Technological: DORLET and Engineering (large IT companies), Contenur (waste containers), ARS (Engineering)… ● Private and public services: Ferrovial, Enviser, Garbiker ● Standardization: ETSI ● Policy makers and public administrations: contribution to new regulations ● Education: Schools and Universities ● Associations: ATEGRUS, IPWCA, ACR + ● Networks, Clusters and International Organizations (ISWA, Aclima, etc.) The research program defined in this proposal has a strong link with the RIS3 strategy for the Basque Country. In particular, the project is clearly linked with the territorial priority, more specifically with the circular economy topic. It also have links the energy priority as during the proposal energy related problem like waste incineration, fuel consumption, etc. will also be covered. The project is also perfectly aligned with the Basque Energy Strategy 2030 and the Basque Strategy for Climate Change (KLIMA2050).

The proposal will contribute to move towards circular economy concept by: ● Methodologies for the holistic evaluation of the circularity of the cities and regiosnt involving active engagement of local authorities and citizens ● Protocols for monitoring consumption habits and fostering new sustainable trends ● Citizen participation, environmental education, and learning ● Promotion and dissemination of Innovative, sustainable and inclusive governance models ● Promotion and dissemination of innovative and more sustainable production and consumption models ● Standardization of the management of data The results will be presented to relevant stakeholders as: ● water governance bodies ● civil associations ● research community ● firms, engineerings and consultancy companies

Citizens, authorities, civil society organisations, industry and other stakeholders need methods and tools to share visions and collaborate together to move forward more sustainable cities based on the circular economy principles. First, the definition of appropriate indicators are needed to evaluate holistically the concept of circularity considering the interrelationship among the different flows of resources based on technical, environmental and social criteria. And secondly, decision making tools to assess new opportunities and business models around circular economy. This project will cover both aspects combining environmental sciences with the use of ICT techniques as artificial intelligence and geographic information systems.

One of the University of Deusto key duties is to be fully aware of problems within the institution itself and the society we belong to. For this reason, the project will include specific steps to boost integration and real equality of opportunity for men and women with specific support needs. Timely specific action is required to enable them to enter higher education in equal conditions and ensure their full integration in the university community. DeustoTech, as one of its institutions, is included into this service of social action and inclusion. The main aims consist of achieving full normalisation, equal opportunities and gradually adopting the steps needed to ensure that the University of Deusto is an inclusive educational institution. Furthermore, the University of Deusto provides them with guidance and support on the transition to the labour market jointly with special job centres and companies at large.

Comprehensive Study and Protection of Web Threats

Igor Santos http://paginaspersonales.deusto.es/isantos/

DeustoTech (www.deustotech.eu) is a private non-profit institution of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto for applied research in new technologies. Since 2005 DeustoTech mission is to support the ICT activity in business and society through research, the development of technologies, innovation and knowledge transfer. We focus our activity around TRLs 2-7 and articulate it into four applied fields: Industry, Mobility, Energy and Society, having a fifth, the Chair of Applied Mathematics, as a transversal activity and support for the previous four. We are characterized for working with data of heterogeneous nature, throughout its life cycle and in compliance with ethical principles and humanists who define the University of Deusto. The research group which will host the IF candidate devotes to Cybersecurity as well. In particular, we have been working actively in two different areas: web security and code security. In the first one, we have devoted to the analysis of web privacy with works in web tracking with works in dark web privacy or browser attributes finger printability. In the area of code security, we have worked in malware detection and we are now working on vulnerability detection and sanitization.

The applicant should hold a PhD and have not stayed in the hosting institution country (Spain) for, at least, more than 12 months in the last 3 years previously to the MCSA-IF call deadline. The applicant needs to be proficient in CyberSecurity with a desirable background on Web Security, with a strong record of early publications in these topics. The applicant should also be willing to join a team that looks forward into major contributions in the field, to be published in top-tier venues (Oakland, Usenix Security, ACM CCS, ISOC NDDS).

• Information Sciences and Engineering (ENG)

he applicant is going to work in the Web Security topic. In particular, the applicant is supposed to pursue a research in Web Attacks and Web Privacy. The concrete issue that will be researched is the generalization of different web attacks. To this end, the applicant will explore different web ecosystems that are prone to misuse in order to find new threats and attack vectors. Afterwards, these new attacks and techniques will be generalized in order to build prevention methods able to detect these attacks. The major challenge of this research is that despite the fact that several studies has been performed in the area they are environment or technique specific. With this research, we will provide a comprehensive view to the whole web ecosystem, protecting users.

Iskander Sanchez-Rola, Matteo Dell’Amico, Platon Kotzias, Davide Balzarotti, Leyla Bilge, Pierre-Antoine Vervier, Igor Santos. Can I Opt Out Yet? GDPR and the Global Illusion of Cookie Control. Proceedings of the ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), Auckland, New Zealand, 2019 (acceptance rate: 17.0%) Iskander Sanchez-Rola, Igor Santos, Davide Balzarotti. Clock Around the Clock: Time-Based Device Fingerprinting. Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Toronto, Canada, 2018 (acceptance rate: 16.6%) [Media coverage: New Scientist | Metro | TechNews | …] Iskander Sanchez-Rola, Igor Santos, Davide Balzarotti. Extension Breakdown: Security Analysis of Browsers Extension Resources Control Policies. Proceedings of the 26th Usenix Security Symposium (Sec), Vancouver, Canada, 2017 (acceptance rate: 16.28%) [Media coverage: SecurityWeek | BleepingComputer | Ghacks (1) | Ghacks (2) | FayerMayer |…] Iskander Sanchez-Rola, Davide Balzarotti, Igor Santos. The Onions Have Eyes: A Comprehensive Structure and Privacy Analysis of Tor Hidden Services. Proceedings of the 26th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Perth, Australia, 2017 (acceptance rate: 17.0%) [Media coverage: New Scientist | Daily Mail | DeepDotWeb | Jornal Ciência |…] Tiago A. Almeida, Tiago P. Silva, Igor Santos, José María Gomez-Hidalgo- Text Normalization and Semantic Indexing to Enhance Instant Messaging and SMS Spam Filtering. Knowledge-Based Systems vol 108, pp. 25-32. 2016. ISSN (online): 1368-9894, ISSN (print): 1367-0751. DOI: 10.1016/j.knosys.2016.05.001

VESSEDIA: VERIFICATION ENGINEERING OF SAFETY AND SECURITY CRITICAL INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS. Funded by: H2020. 2016-DS-01 Ref: N/A. PI (University of Deusto): Igor Santos Budget (University of Deusto): 352125 Euros SOCIAL SPAM: SEGUIMIENTO Y FILTRADO DE SPAM PERSONALIZADO EN MEDIOS SOCIALES MEDIANTE MODELOS DE DIFUSIÓN Y ANÁLISIS DE CONTENIDO. Funded by: Gobierno Vasco Research Ref: N/A. PI: Igor Santos Budget: 48300 Euros VEMAS: SISTEMA INSTALADO “EN LA NUBE” PARA LA VERIFICACIÓN FORMAL DEL SOFTWARE Y LA MEDIDA DE SU CALIDAD, DESDE LOS COMPILADORES E INTÉRPRETES QUE EJECUTAN EL CÓDIGO HASTA LAS APLICACIONES. Funded by: Consultoría Tecnológica para el comercio, SL (CONSULTEC), Avangroup Bussiness Solutions S.L. Research Contract. Ref: N/A. PI: Borja Sanz Urquijo. Budget: 44161 Euros ACSAS – ANÁLISIS DE CAMPAÑAS Y SENSIBILIDAD A LA AMBIGÜEDAD LINGÜÍSTICA PARA LA MEJORA DEL FILTRADO DE SPAM. Funded by: AVANGROUP BUSINESS SOLUTIONS S.L. Research Contract. Ref: N/A. PI: Igor Santos. Budget: 8,000 Euros

The project is within the security scope. However, the results will help commodity users to protect themselves against these web attacks.

Therefore, interdisciplinary collaboration with social studies is not discarded in order to present information to the users properly so they can understand the threats.

The applicant will join this MSCA action and it is possible that derived results can be used in other H2020 projects in the area of cybersecurity.

Our group has a important network of collaborators around the world that can provide additional insight to this project (e.g., CISCO, UCSB, CMU, Eurecom, Symantec Research Labs, amongst others).

The results of the research can be exploited in several ways: (i) developing a tool for users to know the current threats of their browsing, (ii) devising a web service so developers and/or security analysts can measure the “danger” of a particular website. Regarding dissemination, we plan to publish our results as scientific publications in top venues but also by performing several dissemination actions for the general public and also people in the field.

The problem with web security research is that it has been biased by the particular problem or ecosystem they analyze and there is no holistic view of the attacks and threats. In particular, we identify the following gaps that this offer will cope with: (i)There does not exist any research connecting the multiple web security issues. (ii) Existing crawlers are biased by the particular type of web or technique they study, potentially missing content in the retrieval. (iii) There is no full identification of all the problems or threats within a website. (iv) (v)The web threat landscape has not been explored because the lack of comprehensive techniques. The possibility of relations among different types of webs, techniques is an actual problem and there is no method to measure or prevent it.

One of the University of Deusto’s key duties is to be fully aware of problems within the institution itself and the society we live in. For this reason, it should take specific steps to boost integration and real equality of opportunity for people with specific support needs. Timely specific action is required to enable them to enter higher education in equal conditions and ensure their full integration in the university community. DeustoTech, as one of its institutions, is included into this service of social action and inclusion. The main aims consist of achieving full normalisation, equal opportunities and gradually adopting the steps needed to ensure that the University of Deusto is an inclusive educational institution. Furthermore, the University of Deusto provides them with guidance and support on the transition to the labour market jointly with special job centres and companies at large.

New Methods for Vulnerability Detection and Sanitization

Igor Santos http://paginaspersonales.deusto.es/isantos/

DeustoTech (www.deustotech.eu) is a private non-profit institution of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto for applied research in new technologies. Since 2005 DeustoTech mission is to support the ICT activity in business and society through research, the development of technologies, innovation and knowledge transfer. We focus our activity around TRLs 2-7 and articulate it into four applied fields: Industry, Mobility, Energy and Society, having a fifth, the Chair of Applied Mathematics, as a transversal activity and support for the previous four. We are characterized for working with data of heterogeneous nature, throughout its life cycle and in compliance with ethical principles and humanists who define the University of Deusto. The research group which will host the IF candidate devotes to Cybersecurity as well. In particular, we have been working actively in two different areas: web security and code security. In the first one, we have devoted to the analysis of web privacy with works in web tracking with works in dark web privacy or browser attributes finger printability. In the area of code security, we have worked in malware detection and we are now working on vulnerability detection and sanitization.

The applicant should hold a PhD and have not stayed in the hosting institution country (Spain) for, at least, more than 12 months in the last 3 years previously to the MCSA-IF call deadline. The applicant needs to be proficient in CyberSecurity with a desirable background on Code Analysis and reversing, with a strong record of early publications in these topics. The applicant should also be willing to join a team that looks forward into major contributions in the field, to be published in top-tier venues (Oakland, Usenix Security, ACM CCS, ISOC NDDS).

• Information Sciences and Engineering (ENG)

Memory corruption appears as a consequence of the lack of memory and type safety in low-level languages such as C and C++, and it covers every form of involuntary access or alteration in the contents of one or more memory addresses. In order to mitigate these attacks, proactive defenses such as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP) have been the standard the last years. However, as they have been proven to not be enough, more advanced methods that, for example, enforce control and data flow integrity have been developed. In top of that, other error classes exist that may lead to exploitation and to which little attention has been paid. One of the most worrying examples are the so-called concurrency errors. They arise as a result of concurrent accesses to a shared resource without proper synchronization, such as shared memory accesses among threads inside a single process, or resource accesses among different processes. In this research, we will focus in the later type of errors.

Xabier Ugarte-Pedrero, Davide Balzarotti, Igor Santos, Pablo G. Bringas. RAMBO: Run-time packer Analysis with Multiple Branch Observation. Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA). San Sebastián, Spain. 2016. (acceptance rate: 31.8%) [SoK] Deep Packer Inspection: A Longitudinal Study of the Complexity of Run-Time Packers Xabier Ugarte-Pedrero, Davide Balzarotti, Igor Santos, Pablo G. Bringas Proceedings of the 36th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland). San Jose, CA. 2015. (acceptance rate: 13.8%) Iskander Sanchez-Rola, Igor Santos, Davide Balzarotti. Clock Around the Clock: Time-Based Device Fingerprinting. Proceedings of the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Toronto, Canada, 2018 (acceptance rate: 16.6%) [Media coverage: New Scientist | Metro | TechNews | …] Iskander Sanchez-Rola, Igor Santos, Davide Balzarotti. Extension Breakdown: Security Analysis of Browsers Extension Resources Control Policies. Proceedings of the 26th Usenix Security Symposium (Sec), Vancouver, Canada, 2017 (acceptance rate: 16.28%) [Media coverage: SecurityWeek | BleepingComputer | Ghacks (1) | Ghacks (2) | FayerMayer |…] Igor Santos, Félix Brezo, Xabier Ugarte-Pedrero, Pablo G Bringas. Opcode Sequences as Representation of Executables for Data-mining-based Unknown Malware Detection Information Sciences. vol. 231, pp. 64-82. 2013

VESSEDIA: VERIFICATION ENGINEERING OF SAFETY AND SECURITY CRITICAL INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS. Funded by: H2020. 2016-DS-01 Ref: N/A. PI (University of Deusto): Igor Santos Budget (University of Deusto): 352125 Euros SOCIAL SPAM: SEGUIMIENTO Y FILTRADO DE SPAM PERSONALIZADO EN MEDIOS SOCIALES MEDIANTE MODELOS DE DIFUSIÓN Y ANÁLISIS DE CONTENIDO. Funded by: Gobierno Vasco Research Ref: N/A. PI: Igor Santos Budget: 48300 Euros VEMAS: SISTEMA INSTALADO “EN LA NUBE” PARA LA VERIFICACIÓN FORMAL DEL SOFTWARE Y LA MEDIDA DE SU CALIDAD, DESDE LOS COMPILADORES E INTÉRPRETES QUE EJECUTAN EL CÓDIGO HASTA LAS APLICACIONES. Funded by: Consultoría Tecnológica para el comercio, SL (CONSULTEC), Avangroup Bussiness Solutions S.L. Research Contract. Ref: N/A. PI: Borja Sanz Urquijo. Budget: 44161 Euros ACSAS – ANÁLISIS DE CAMPAÑAS Y SENSIBILIDAD A LA AMBIGÜEDAD LINGÜÍSTICA PARA LA MEJORA DEL FILTRADO DE SPAM. Funded by: AVANGROUP BUSINESS SOLUTIONS S.L. Research Contract. Ref: N/A. PI: Igor Santos. Budget: 8,000 Euros

The project is within the security scope. However, the results will help developers and users.

We will like to motivate the developers’ awareness of this corruption errors and the consequences of their exploitation.

The applicant will join this MSCA action and it is possible that derived results can be used in other H2020 projects in the area of cybersecurity.

Our group has a important network of collaborators around the world that can provide additional insight to this project (e.g., CISCO, UCSB, CMU, Eurecom, Symantec Research Labs, amongst others).

The results of the research can be exploited in several ways: (i) developing several vulnerability discovery tools for developers, (ii) devising new sanitization methods to make the vulnerability patching more transparent for commodity users. Regarding dissemination, we plan to publish our results as scientific publications in top venues but also by performing several dissemination actions for the general public and also people in the field.

Harmful concurrency errors lead to unintended program behavior that may result, for instance, in wrong outputs and program crashes. However, explicitly exploring their consequences reveals that they usually lead to memory corruption, which suggests that some memory error detection approaches may fail detecting these specific cases since they depend on thread scheduling. Consequently, recent studies have verified that the corrupted memory as a result of previously known data races can be leveraged to carry out attacks and that they can be often triggered with high probability. In the case of atomicity violation errors, Time Of Check To Time Of Use (TOCTTOU) vulnerabilities are the most distinctive example, which allow to build attacks that modify a resource between the checking and use operations. The file system has been the main target of these attacks and the focus of the research community in the past years, however, TOCTTOU vulnerabilities apply to several resources and scenarios such as shared memory in multithreaded programs [20], or when a kernel fetches a value from the same user-space memory location twice, known as double-fetch vulnerabilities. These problems derived from concurrency errors and its combination with memory corruption have been tackled to a small extent, which renders in possible new attack opportunities against which it is essential to develop countermeasures.

One of the University of Deusto’s key duties is to be fully aware of problems within the institution itself and the society we live in. For this reason, it should take specific steps to boost integration and real equality of opportunity for people with specific support needs. Timely specific action is required to enable them to enter higher education in equal conditions and ensure their full integration in the university community. DeustoTech, as one of its institutions, is included into this service of social action and inclusion. The main aims consist of achieving full normalisation, equal opportunities and gradually adopting the steps needed to ensure that the University of Deusto is an inclusive educational institution. Furthermore, the University of Deusto provides them with guidance and support on the transition to the labour market jointly with special job centres and companies at large.

Fairness In Machine-Learning Algorithms

Borja Sanz

DeustoTech

Candidates should have a Ph.D. in a related subject, and preferably have published high-impact journals and at the top computer architecture and/or machine learning conferences. Basic knowledge of: Scientific computing (Python/C++/Matlab)

• Information Sciences and Engineering (ENG)

DeustoTech (www.deustotech.eu) is a private non-profit institution of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto for applied research in new technologies. Since 2005 DeustoTech mission is to support the ICT activity in business and society through research, the development of technologies, innovation and knowledge transfer. We focus our activity around TRLs 2-7 and articulate it into four applied fields: Industry, Mobility, Energy and Society, having a fifth, the Chair of Applied Mathematics, as a transversal activity and support for the previous four. We are characterized for working with data of heterogeneous nature, throughout its life cycle and in compliance with ethical principles and humanists who define the University of Deusto. Applied Machine Learning and Data Analytics research area is focused in the improve of the machine and deep learning technique, with the focus in sentiment analysis detection in text, data pre-processing, data gathering and clustering. We have also expertise in artificial vision.

● Laorden, C., Galán-García, P., Santos, I., Sanz, B., Nieves, J., Bringas, P. G., & Gómez Hidalgo, J. M. (2014). Negobot: Detecting paedophile activity with a conversational agent based on game theory. Logic Journal of IGPL, 23(1), 17-30. ● Laorden, C., Ugarte-Pedrero, X., Santos, I., Sanz, B., Nieves, J., & Bringas, P. G. (2014). Study on the effectiveness of anomaly detection for spam filtering. Information Sciences, 277, 421-444. ● Sanz, B., Nieves, J., Laorden, C., Santos, I., & Bringas, P. G. (2013). ONLINE SEARCHES: from information recovery to knowledge generation. DYNA 88 (4), 392-394 ● Lorido-Botran, T., Huerta, S., Tomás, L., Tordsson, J., & Sanz, B. (2017). An unsupervised approach to online noisy-neighbor detection in cloud data centers. Expert Systems with Applications, 89, 188-204. ● Bilbao-Jayo, A., & Almeida, A. (2018). Automatic political discourse analysis with multi-scale convolutional neural networks and contextual data. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 14(11), 1550147718811827.

● Electronic Regional Manifestos Project. Analysis of the political discourse in social networks using convolutional neural networks. ● Aztarnet: Analysis of the online footprint of the companies using opinion mining, emotion classification and social network analysis. ● Toleraction (under evaluation): Text classification to detect hate-speech in social networks to create suitable counter-narratives. ● StandByMe (in preparation): Sexual harassment prevention and awareness by changing attitudes and behavior of young adults. Analysis of the social networks to detect harassment online.

The hosting team is a group integrated by research staff that has expertise with collaborating with other research areas. For example, several proposals are under evaluation with the Deusto Social Values Team, which has obtained on two consecutive occasions the recognition as the team of excellence in the calls of the Department of Education of the Basque Government. The central aim of the group is the analysis of social values, which is focused on two main lines of research: ● Breakdown of society and democracy through the study of political fact and ● Welfare and Social Policy through the study of social inclusion-exclusion processes and intervention systems. On the other hand, there are under evaluation projects with the Center of Applied Ethics of the university, that approaches the problem of trust in a straightforward and precise sequence of steps looking at a variety of actual trust problems, collecting citizens answers, locating biases in public media discourse and suggesting solutions.

With a growing understanding the social determinants of the bias in this type of systems, and the complexity of inter-relationships between the processed data, means that the control and identification of these biases cannot be tackled by the computer sciences sector alone—many factors lie within other research fields’ responsibilities. Aligned with the Europe 2020 Strategy and the Basque Country Smart Specialisation Strategy, DEUSTO research blends competitiveness, innovation and technology to tackle challenges for communities, companies and public bodies in the region. Ageing and Well-being, Creative Industries and Cities, Gender dimension, Social Justice and Inclusion and Strengthening Participation are the focus of the 5 Interdisciplinary Research Platforms. Besides, advanced research units contribute to generating knowledge and innovative solutions in the fields of efficient and clean Energy, Industry 4.0 (for example, advanced manufacturing or data analytics), Health and Territory. Collaboration with stakeholders is crucial for Deusto researchers to define research questions promoting social impact, sustainable development, innovative smart city solutions, efficient use of Big Data and well-being.

Europe in a changing world – inclusive, innovative and reflective societies. Still, it is essential to find ways to make equality real in daily life. Our societies undergo socio-cultural changes connected to migration, globalization, democracy crisis that we can either study and act upon or neglect and remain unprepared. Diversity should be seen as a potential rather than a drawback. Moreover, there is potential to improve the implementation of existing policies that tackle these changes on national and European level. There is a need to develop new models and innovative approaches for social inclusion. In this line, the use of machine learning could help to improve all these situations or could make the differences even more significant. This project aims to contribute to reducing all these differences. On the other hand, the Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint for achieving a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate, environmental degradation, prosperity, and peace and justice. In particular, this project is aligned with SDG 5: Gender equality. By identifying and correcting for gender bias, further automat­ing/augmenting tasks, AI is empowering women for growth and new opportunities.

Artificial intelligence is not merely a new technology but a key driver of economic transformation. Thus, it is necessary to include all stakeholders to ensure that the evolution of the AI system is being done in the right way. To achieve this goal, it is also essential an intense collaboration with the industry and social actors. Deusto includes a lot of collaboration with several key actors in the industry (for example, Mercedes, Sidenor, Vidrala or Progenika (a Griffols company)) but also in the humanitarian sector (for example, Cruz Roja) or other academic leaders (for example University of Granada or Centre of Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH)).

Technological instruments govern society. The Information Society is based on access to information and characterized by speed and instantaneity. Thus, the information society is categorically conditioned by electronic devices or ICT (information and communication technologies). One of the hardest problems that we have found in the last years is the vast amount of data that is necessary to train the system. We are working in several hybrid approaches to reduce the needs of this amount of data. The main goal is to integrate prior knowledge to the models, also reducing the biases of the system. And finally, we want all these technologies to be in real life. In particular, we have been working closely with human sciences researches, using machine learning as a help tool to mitigate some problems of society. We have been working with different social agents using these techniques to improve the research (e.g., terrorist activity in social networks, human trafficking, etc.).

The ethics of artificial intelligence are of growing importance. Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing societies and economies around the world. Principles like privacy protection, the fairness, transparency, accountability and explainability (among other aspects, like legal and regulatory compliance) will be critical elements that will define the way that these systems will impact in the society. Artificial intelligence holds enormous potential to improve the community. While we are building a “general AI” that replicates human knowledge, there are numerous “specific AI” technologies which are already incredibly sophisticated at handling specific tasks (for example, Medical AI technologies and autonomous vehicles). But all these benefits come with risks. All these systems can limit issues associated with human bias. To mitigate these problems, we have to use the existing ethics in context, not reinvented, and it is necessary to create systems that ensure that fit with all the principles beforementioned. To ensure these new principles is essential to understand how all these systems work, how they make their predictions, but also understand what the social and ethical implications of the outputs of these systems are. It will be necessary to develop countermeasures to remove (or at least mitigate) the problems.

One of the University of Deusto’s key duties is to be fully aware of problems within the institution itself and the society we live in. For this reason, it should take specific steps to boost integration and real equality of opportunity for people with specific support needs. Timely specific action is required to enable them to enter higher education in equal conditions and ensure their full integration in the university community. DeustoTech, as one of its institutions, is included into this service of social action and inclusion. The main aims consist of achieving full normalisation, equal opportunities and gradually adopting the steps needed to ensure that the University of Deusto is an inclusive educational institution. Furthermore, the University of Deusto provides them with guidance and support on the transition to the labour market jointly with special job centres and companies at large.