The goal of PETRA (Photonic Environment moniToring & Risk Assessment) is the design and the IPR transfer of a radically new precommercial photonics based prototype for noninvasive continuous remote monitoring system for geo-technical risk assessment. PETRA will step from the ERC-funded project PHODIR that successfully carried out the realization and the field trial of the first photonic based radar prototype, and from the contacts that were made between CNIT and industrial partners during the PoC PREPaRE, that focused on the preindustrial design and IPR selling of an optics based radar for integrated traffic control in airports. The specific application on which PETRA will focus is the high precision real time analysis and mapping of potential risk areas for health protection, disaster prevention and for new civil engineering buildings (as bridges or power plants) where the advances of photonics will be of practical interest in a short-medium term, and it will: i) study the technical requirements and the current limitations of earth monitoring systems, to define the technical specifications for a commercial photonics based integrated radar system; ii) accordingly modify the radar structure and the data processing tools defined during the PHODIR project, allowing a short/medium-term industrial realization and commercialization with an attractive cost/performance ratio; iii) boost the IP transfer of each single subsystem preindustrial design to companies either through already filed patent selling or by encouraging companies to patent the presented design.

Smart city applications require pervasive and large-scale infrastructures, which include heterogeneous IoT devices and distributed information systems, thus posing interoperability and cost challenges. Interoperable solutions, exploiting fog/edge/cloud computing resources, are fundamental for fair competition, especially in public procurements, while costs savings are necessary to speed up the smart city innovation pace, by enabling more stakeholders to easily enter the market, especially SMEs. The Fed4IoT project faces the interoperability issue, focusing on large scale environments and addressing the problem at different and synergic levels: device, platform and information. The goal of the project is “Federating IoT and Cloud Infrastructures to Provide Scalable and Interoperable Smart Cities Applications by introducing novel IoT virtualization technologies” and will be pursued through the following steps: 1) select/integrate/improve existing IoT and cloud platforms, including oneM2M, FIWARE and 5G ETSI MEC, so as to establish a reference interoperability solution; 2) use such reference solution to build up a pool of federated IoT and fog/edge/cloud resources; 3) design novel device-level IoT virtualization technologies to create "IoT slices" formed by virtual IoT devices and computing resources, exploiting the federated resource pool; 4) support orchestration and programmability for optimal IoT virtual function deployment and Big Data processing; 5) integrate information coming from different IoT domains and other city sources; 6) integrate the system components. The project solutions will be technically validated by implementing four specific smart city applications, based on a federated EU/JP platform, deployed in real life systems in two EU and two JP cities. The Fed4IoT consortium will also actively support standardization activities (ETSI, oneM2M, ITU, ISO, etc.) and EU/JP initiatives (e.g., AIOTI and ITAC), where consortium members are already involved.

The proposed project aims at developing scalable quantum networks, based on photonic chip integration of novel 2D material quantum devices, with the main goal to demonstrate all-optical on-chip quantum processing. The recent demonstration of effortless integration of 2D materials onto photonics and CMOS platforms will result in a breakthrough in the development of on-chip quantum networks. 2D-SIPC will take full advantage of the huge variety of 2D materials and heterostructures and prototype novel quantum devices with revolutionary functionalities. In particular, we will develop electrically driven and entangled single photon emitters, broadband and high temperature single photon detectors, ultra-fast waveguide integrated optical modulators and non-linear gates. To pave the way to scalable networks, 2D-SIPC will develop large scale growth techniques of the most promising 2D materials. With this unique combination of features 2D-SIPC will allow the first demonstration of on-chip optical quantum processing, a key milestone for many quantum network concepts, such as extended secure quantum communication, scaling up of quantum computers and simulators, and novel quantum sensing applications with entangled photons. In particular, as these topics cover all four Quantum Technology pillars of the Quantum Flagship, our proposal makes a strong strategic link to each one of them. Beyond the 2D-SIPC platform, each developed component will be exploited in such distant fields as biological and medical imaging, radio-astronomy and environmental monitoring. The 2D-SIPC consortium includes four academic and one industrial partner with a high degree of complementarity that are at the forefronts of their fields, including single photon detection (ICFO), theory and fabrication of 2D materials and their heterostructures (UNIMAN), single photon emission (UCAM), chip based photonic circuits (CNIT) and commercial single photon detection, single photon emission and packaging (SQ).

High-speed digital signal processing (DSP) has seen tremendous performance increases over the last years, primarily driven by massive parallelization of logic operations in large-scale CMOS circuits. This has led to digital processors that would allow for real-time processing of ultra-broadband signals with analogue bandwidths of hundreds of GHz already today. Acquisition of such signals, however, is still impossible due to limited bandwidth scalability of conventional analogue-to-digital converters (ADC). Within TeraSlice, we will explore and demonstrate concepts that can overcome these limitations by photonically assisted spectral parallelization of ADC interfaces, thereby enabling conversion of waveforms with bandwidths in excess of 300 GHz with the potential for further scalability beyond 1 THz. The TeraSlice approach is disruptive both on a conceptual level and with respect to the underlying devices, comprising low-phase-noise Kerr comb generators and ultra-fast electro-optic modulators. The concept has the potential to disrupt a variety of highly relevant applications with substantial market potential, ranging from radar systems and wireless communications beyond 5G to electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy. TeraSlice builds upon an interdisciplinary effort of internationally leading academic and industrial partners with highly complementary expertise. The project covers the theoretical base and the associated quantitative system models, the design, implementation, and test of crucial components and subsystems, as well as application demonstrations of the envisaged ADC scheme, for which we will reach out to other scientific fields such as medical diagnostics. Special focus will be on technological concepts for chip-scale integration – a key aspect for any technical application of the scheme. Based on a successful demonstration of the TeraSlice concept, foundation of a start-up is envisaged as a realistic scenario for exploitation of the results.

BEBA challenges a very ambitious goal: can we deploy wire-speed-reactive control/processing tasks inside the network switches, while retaining i) centralized control of their specification/operation, ii) high performance and scalability, and - crucial for real world adoption - iii) platform independency, i.e., consistency with the vendors’ need for closed platforms? BEBA’s answer revolves around the identification of a programming abstraction in the form of eXtended Finite State Machines (XFSMs). Via platform-agnostic XFSM “programs”, operators and enterprises will deploy not only static packet forwarding/processing rules (as in current OpenFlow devices), but will be able to specify and wire-speed enforce how such rules shall dynamically adapt to the time-varying flow and traffic behavior, i.e. in reaction to packet-level events, internal statistics changes, link/queue conditions, etc. BEBA holds the promise for future-proof, efficient, and easy to administer network devices capable to be repurposed so as to meet emerging needs. Indeed, BEBA’s approach, extended with node-level processing primitives made usable through our programming abstraction, brings about key benefits in the ability to i) “software-define” middlebox-type network functions well beyond static packet forwarding, with specific project’s attention to the monitoring and network security applications’ domains, and in the possibility to ii) address the current shortcomings revolving around the high latency and large overhead of centralized network control tasks. Finally, BEBA commits to a concrete and pragmatic innovation strategy. Short-time impact and standardization will be attempted by i) casting (part of) the BEBA approach as OpenFlow’s extensions; ii) making its implementation feasible over merchant-silicon chipsets currently found in commodity switches, and iii) releasing an open source virtual BEBA switch for the benefits of the Network Functions Virtualization community.