STRATEGIC PLAN
Our Targets / Strategic Plan
The VALab aims to continue to improve upon the existing topics and technologies we already focus on, while also expanding our research activities to tackle the future challenges with applications in the industry, health, security, smart cities and environment and many more such as:
- Strengthen excellence in cutting-edge research fields such as Human Activity Recognition, and its application in indoor environments (work, home).
- Contribute to a next generation of user interfaces that seamlessly merge with the physical world and the human body but also touchless support. This opens up a wide range of applications in various fields, including mobile and wearable computing, smart indoor environments, healthcare, etc.
- Expansion of Lab activities into 5G and beyond 5G domain is considered as a major challenge. As such, 5G+ testbed/ 6G testbed (using sub-terahertz wave spectrum) for allowing research and experimentation in a variety of scenarios regarding smart homes, connected autonomous vehicles, smart Health and advanced machine automation, security and digitization.
- Strengthen excellence based on Electromagnetics Fields (EMF) monitoring infrastructure, to facilitate measurements, health assessment and optimum planning of 5G deployment leveraging the Visual Analytic Lab’s environmental and spectrum monitoring capabilities.
- Strengthen excellence in Virtual Physiological Human envisions the formulation of the human body functions in the form of a digital twin involving integrated computer models of the electromagnetic, mechanical, physical and biochemical functions of a living human body, through AI-enhanced quantum-based simulation framework enabling health monitoring and personalized medicine.
- An expansion of cybersecurity infrastructure to address the increasing needs for reliable defense mechanisms, as well as automated penetration assessment tools. The scope of this expansion is to promote AI and quantum encryption as key technologies for enabling such complex procedures and allow experimentation in large infrastructures.
- A focus on civil protection applications, including the detection and localisation of flying threat objects, through the adoption of an Anti-Drone testbed infrastructure. Alognside, an expansion of the In Cabin Monitoring System (ICMS) testbed will be required within CERTH premises to enhance emulation capabilities of autonomous shuttle environment.
- An expansion of the Blockchain, Big Data and HPC infrastructure is envisioned to address the increasing needs for hosting HyperLedger technology in various applications that the Visual Analytics Lab is developing.
- Intelligent materials will be another future application domain. Thus, software-defined materials, nanomaterials, metamaterials, and 2D materials (e.g. Graphene) will pave the way for real-time multi-sensing systems, energy harvesting, wireless power, cyber-physical matter, photonic and quantum computing.
- Extension of the SDN infrastructure in larger areas within CERTH premises and adjacent regions using additional equipment: ONOS controller, and SDN switches deployed on raspberry pi boards running the Open vSwitch software.
- Upgrade of the Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity testbed but also upgrade of the Cyber Range Infrastructure (CITEF agent), connected to ECHO's Federated Cyber Range and utilised as a testbed for cybersecurity training, certification and R&D purposes in terms of integration of AI capabilities.
- Development of Digital Twin infrastructure for cyber-physical systems focused on industrial environments (e.g. Power Grid) and infrastructures combining IoT devices (e.g., Healthcare). This will allow training, testing, and calibration of cybersecurity tools in near to operational environment, achieving higher TRL outcomes.