2018-annual-report

NEXTLEAP
NEXt Generation Technosocial and Legal Encryption
Access and Privacy
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Funding: European Union – H2020 Framework Program
Duration: 2016-2018
Principal Investigators: Asst. Res. Prof. Dario Fiore – Res.
Carmela Troncoso
annual report
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The objective of the NEXTLEAP project is to build the fundamental
interdisciplinary internet science necessary to
create decentralized, secure, and rights-preserving protocols
for the next generation of collective awareness platforms.
The long term goal of NEXTLEAP is to have Europe
take the “next leap ahead” of the rest of the world by solving the fundamental challenge of determining both
how to scientifically build and help citizens and institutions adopt open-source, decentralized and privacypreserving
digital social platforms. This paradigm is in contrast to proprietary, centralized, cloud-based services
and pervasive surveillance that function at the expense of rights and technological sovereignty.
TRACES
Technologies and tools for Resource-Aware, Correct, Efficient
Software
Funding: Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness
Duration: 2016-2019
Principal Investigators: Assoc. Res. Prof. Manuel Carro – Res. Prof. Manuel Hermenegildo
The TRACES project revolves around the need of change in the fundamental tools and approaches which
underlie the software engineering techniques to be applied in the very near future. For this purpose TRACES
includes three main research lines: 1) Resource-aware computing: being able to determine safe (and maybe
approximate) bounds for the resource consumption of software in a given hardware, and optimize it as much
as possible, is necessary to ensure the correctness of embedded devices in terms which are more general
than just functional correctness; 2) Advanced techniques to ensure functional correctness: these include not
only infinite-state verification, but also debugging, synthesis of concurrent software, probabilistic / heuristic
methods, and lean methods, such as testing and runtime / dynamic verification. These are necessary when,
for example, the boundaries of a computer system are not well-known in advance, or the interactions with the
outside world can only be probabilistically modeled; 3) New language technologies: new environments, tasks,
and missions make it necessary to adapt existing languages to them or to create languages anew. Contrary to
widespread belief, new languages and programming models are constantly created not only in academia but
also in industry with the aim of either taking advantage of new devices or of performing tasks (e.g., knowledgerelated)
which would be too complex to write (and to ensure correct!) in traditional languages.