A serious application is used for serious business, such as tele-treatment or local government issues. In this respect, the processed data must only be shared with authorized parties. However, recent research has shown that end-users encounter difficulties to manage their security and privacy risks and are often unable to make well-informed decisions about what to share with whom. Most permission systems are predominantly system-oriented and difficult to understand for end-users. The aim of this project is to support and empower end-users in managing security and privacy risks of serious apps by means of a software.

Towards 6G, millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies are used for high-speed communication, focusing beams towards users in nanocells spreading tens of meters. Advancement in mmWave communication devices also results in accurate sensing of environment. Sensing while communication is crucial to prevent the communication performance degradation caused by dynamic blockages (e.g., humans, vehicles). In 3D-ComS, we exploit a unique set of expertise to advance joint communication and sensing. We will design a 3D mmWave array system with a minimal number of active, highly integrated antennas to enable digital beamforming at lower power consumption, and seek meaningful trade-offs between data rates and sensing performances.

Dutch public telecom providers are required by law to register availability incidents with their regulator Agentschap Telecom (AT). Yearly summaries are submitted to ENISA, which compiles annual reports of telecom availability incidents in Europe. The incident database could be a lot more useful if it could be shared among telecom providers to help them improve the resilience of their infrastructure. However, the information in it is often incomplete, and extremely confidential. The goal of the LINC project is to develop techniques to extract reusable lessons learned about causes and resolutions of availability incidents from the database, that preserve confidentiality.

Currently the electricity grid is operated by two separate control mechanisms. Firstly, demand and supply are balanced by electricity markets. On these (liberalized) markets suppliers and large consumers trade electricity based on forecasts, which results in capacity allocation for the next day. This planning is very coarse in time (15 minutes intervals) and no geographical information or network constraints are taken into account inside the market zone. Secondly, (regulated) grid operators (TSO and DSOs) control the grid by keeping the system within secure bounds (voltage, current, frequency) on a much finer time scale (milliseconds to minutes) while taking care of the physical location of injections and withdrawals from the grid. The massive integration of renewable energy sources and new demand technologies, e.g. electric vehicles and heat pumps, challenges the power system because of more uncertainty on all time scales. This makes it increasingly difficult to control the power flows in real-time, and especially to balance supply and demand to guarantee stability and reliability at all times and all places, without involvement of the market and deploying its flexibility. In the DISPATCH project a decentralised implicit interaction between both control mechanisms is proposed to overcome the above-mentioned uncertainty challenges. It combines the 15-minute schedules of the energy markets with the much shorter time schedules of grid operators. The framework to be developed requires a multi-disciplinary approach: not only electrical power engineering, but also advanced control theory and the use of novel ICT concepts as well as appropriate legal and organisational instruments.

Classical gravity can be formulated in terms of a theory, called Shape Dynamics (SD), of dynamic locally scale-invariant geometry. SD, discovered by myself and two other collaborators, can be proven to be equivalent to General Relativity (GR), despite having a different fundamental symmetry, because local foliation invariance is traded for local scale (or conformal) invariance. Broadly, the purpose of my proposed research is to try to understand the structure and implications, both classical and quantum, of SD. Towards this end, I have identified three distinct, but related, research directions. The first is an attempt to formulate SD, in the presence of a cosmological constant, in terms of conformally invariant connection variables. The hope is to generalize work done in 2+1 dimension to the physical case, which presents important new difficulties. Discovering such a formulation would: i) help to understand the mechanism behind the symmetry trading, and ii) allow for Loop Quantum Gravity-like methods of quantization to be utilized. The second direction would be to explore the effect of the unimodular condition (i.e., the condition that sets the local volume to a fixed density) on the quantization of SD. The unimodular condition is known not to modify the classical theory; but, because it excludes degenerate spacetime metrics that would otherwise be integrated over, the quantum theory could be very different. The last project is to understand the Hamiltonian of SD from knowledge only of conformal spatial geometry. Currently, the Hamiltonian is chosen uniquely to reproduce GR evolution. However, Machs principles suggest that physics should only depend upon scale-invariant information. Thus, we propose to search for a holographic definition of SD where Hamiltonian evolution is reproduced by the Renormalization Group flow in a Conformal Field Theory in one less dimension.