Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Research lines:

• Smart Environments
• Overlay-based Systems
• Resource Sharing Systems
• Event-based Systems
• Distributed Systems Interoperability

Members:
Roberto Beraldi, Roberto Baldoni (leader), Bruno Ciciani, Francesco Quaglia, Leonardo Querzoni.

PhD Students:
Silvia  Bonomi, Adriano Cerocchi, Luca Montanari, Marco Platania, Hani Qusa.

Post Docs:
Giorgia Lodi, Sirio Scipioni.The Distributed Systems group has developed, in the last ten years, a solid worldwide reputation in the context of theory and practice of distributed, pervasive and p2p computing, middleware platforms, and information systems infrastructures. On these topics, the group has created strong relationships with the most influential research groups in the world. In the last ten years the group has developed several theories and practical experiences that are fully referenced by the research community, including checkpointing, causal ordering theory, distributed replication systems, interceptors, group toolkits, and publish subscribe systems.

The distributed systems group has participated and successfully coordinated several important EU projects in the context of e-government, security and dependability of large scale systems, and protection of the financial infrastructure. It has developed remarkable connections with the major Italian ICT industries and Public Administrations for creating innovative solutions and prototypes transferring the latest results from research area into practice. Our activities are centered in two laboratories: MidLab  and the Joint-Lab of Security research.

MIDLAB is focussed in research, its primary goal is to support leading-edge research and development on middleware bridging the gap between the latest research results and the current technologies. In particular main MIDLAB targets are the study, the design and analysis of novel middleware platforms able to increase the robustness of information exchanging with respect to reliability, consistency, predictability and security.

The Joint-Lab on Security research, focused on innovation, has the mission to create a critical mass of system researchers at Sapienza Università di Roma with expertise in the development of secure and reliable systems for such domains. The team includes experts in HW design, networking, system and software security, applications and services development.

In addition to the further development of on-going research projects, our future activities will include three important new branches of research: (i) creating solid foundational theory on dynamic aspects of distributed

Systems, (ii) methodologies and techniques for massive distributed event processing (iii) middleware for smart spaces (including energy savings in public buildings and intelligent houses). All these topics are indeed rapidly evolving, and the advent of new classes of applications and technologies, such as federation of clouds, airborne networks, smart environments, broad area supercomputing, and distributed resource sharing services, is boosting their importance. The theoretical effort is also accompanied by several practical projects in the area of smart environments, namely Sofia, SM4ALL and GreenerBuildings, and in collaborative security, namely CoMiFin, that motivate the foundational research.

The Distributed System group will participate to the Shangai 2010 with two prototypes developed jointly with the MultiAgent and Multi Robot systems group and the Data Management and Service-Oriented Computing. The group is also organizer of DISC 2011 and of the Master in Interoperability of complex systems for Organizations and Public Administrations.

The Distributed System group will organize DISC 2011 in Rome and will participate to the Shangai World expo 
2010 with two prototypes developed jointly with the MultiAgent and Multi Robot systems group and the Data Management and Service-Oriented Computing.

Projects:

RESIST    Resilience for Survivability 
January 2006 - April 2009  EU  -   NoE

SEMANTICGOV   Providing Integrated Public Services to Citizens at the National and Pan-European level with the use of Emerging SemanticWeb Technologies
January 2006 - April 2009  EU   -   Strep

SM4ALL  Middleware Platform for Pervasive and Immersive Environments For-ALL 
September 2008 - August 2011  EU   -   Strep                          

SOFIA  Smart Objects For Intelligent Applications
January 2009     December 2011   EU  -  IP-ARTEMIS

COMIFIN  Communication Middleware for monitoring  financial critical infrastructure EU STREP 
September 2009 - March 2011  -  EU STREP  

EG4M   eGovernment for Mediterranean Countries
January 2006 - May 2009 MIUR  - FIRB

Progetto FIRB Italia Israele, Sapienza- Technion Haifa
July 2006 - July 2009 - MIUR  - FIRB    

DOTS-LCCI - Reliable Middleware systems for Critical Infrastructures based on off-the-shelf components
March 2010 - March 2012  - PRIN MIUR

BLEND: Blending Technologies for Ubiquitous Real-Time Data Access
June 2010 - June 2012  -  EUREKA Project

ring p2p -- Peer to Peer Telephony
January 2009 - January 2010  -   Telecom Italia Spa TiLab

GreenerBuilding - An Ubiquitous Embedded Systems Framework for Energyaware Buildings using Activity and Context knowledge
September 2010 - August 2013 - EU Strep

DOMUS NOVA - An advaned domotic environment for monitoring the healt of elderly and/or risky people 
September 2010 - August 2013 - Regional project
 

Project managed by CINI:
(Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale di Informatica)

Iniziativa Software (i) -- Data Distribution in dynamic distributed Systems
January 2007 - December 2009 - CINI-FINMECCANICA

Iniziativa Software (ii) -- Identification of critical pattern for failure detection in complex distributed systems
January 2010 - December 2012 - CINI-FINMECCANICA