Projects in which Francesco Longo holds, or has held, a formal position of scientific responsibility.
Ongoing
A wearable instrument that reads the nutritional state of a plant in the field, without a network. A modified RGB camera feeds an edge processor where compact neural models, quantized to fit the device, turn leaf images into an estimate, shown on smart glasses as a real-time overlay in under a second.
Main research partners: CNR-IMM (work package leader), SmartMe.IO, Federico II of Naples, Bari, Catania, Palermo, Pavia, Scuola Normale Superiore.
Smart grids are becoming federations of independent operators, none of whom has reason to trust the others with the data that keeps it running. The work builds the infrastructure that collects and analyses that data without a central authority, with cryptography chosen to survive quantum attack.
Main research partners: CNR Institute for Advanced Energy Technologies "Nicola Giordano".
A student team that designs and builds a fully electric single-seater for Formula Student, and races it in the driverless categories. More than a hundred undergraduate and graduate students have passed through it, across mechanical, electronic, software and commercial divisions.
Concluded
Vehicle control units are real-time and closed; the cloud is elastic and shared. The project joins them, extending the Stack4Things middleware and the I/Ocloud paradigm to the OT subsystems on board, so that misbehaviour can be detected and analysed off the vehicle. Hardware encryption and trusted execution environments protect what runs on the car, and distributed ledgers keep an auditable record of what data leaves it.
The first phase of the collaboration with CNR: a blockchain-based platform for authenticating users and granting secure access to smart grid systems, with hydrogen production as its proving ground.
Main research partners: CNR Institute for Advanced Energy Technologies "Nicola Giordano".
Estimating the nutrients a crop needs from a spectrum captured by an ordinary smartphone, with the models served from the cloud and the results released as open data. The work continues in AES-PLANT, which moves the same inference onto the device itself.
Main research partners: University of Pisa, CNR Institute of Information Science and Technologies "Alessandro Faedo".
A factory with no centre: production distributed across a network of 3D printers, coordinated through blockchain so that orders, provenance and quality records hold without a single operator vouching for them.
Taking #SmartME, the sensor network built across Messina, and handing it to four other Italian cities — the difficult half of a smart city project being not the first deployment but the second.
Main research partners: City of Turin (lead), City of Messina, Padua, Lecce and Syracuse.
A monitoring framework that observes a cloud platform at every level at once, and feeds what it sees back into statistical and analytical models that decide how the platform should adapt.
Main research partners: IBM Haifa Research Lab, University of Duisburg-Essen, SAP, Intel.
Establishing what quality of service a distributed storage platform can actually guarantee, by attacking the question three ways at once: analytical modelling, simulation and measurement on the running system.
Main research partners: IBM Haifa Research Lab, Siemens, RAI.