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Implementing modern pervasive and distributed systems is a hard problem and a highly ambitious goal. To be reliable, pervasive systems must guarantee seamless service in time and space, meet optimal performance indices to ensure prompt response times, be resilient to faults, self-adaptable to changes, and resistant to security attacks. To be effective, these systems must collect and process huge amounts of data on their users’ behavior and their environment, and extract the high-quality information content required to drive decision making and planning. To be socially acceptable, their infrastructure must ensure that sensitive data are not disclosed and that user privacy and anonymity are preserved as needed.

The ACADIA Center aims at contributing  effective answers to the scientific and technological issues underlying these challenges, with specific focus on:

  • the scientific principles and the engineering techniques to design dependable systems and build security into their structure;
  • the analytical methods to assess the systems’ performance in terms of indices such as  response time, throughput and energy consumption;
  • the techniques to protect the systems’ and networks’ resources and information from misuse, and shield its end-users from threats and attacks to the privacy of their sensible data;
  • the statistical methods and models to extract information and trends from huge, often noisy and incomplete data collections in support of decision making and planning;
  • the engineering techniques for the development of citizen-centric services, environmental monitoring systems, and participatory systems for e-government.

Recent seminars

The ACADIA Center targets the timely dissemination and discussion of research problems and solutions in its areas of interest. Please find below a list of the most recent seminars:

  • 04/02/2020 – Talk by Vasileios Drakopoulos

    Title: BIVARIATE FRACTAL INTERPOLATION SURFACES: THEORY AND APPLICATIONS
    Time: 14:15
    Location: Meeting Room B, Building Zeta
    Speaker: Vasileios Drakopoulos
    Abstract: Fractal interpolation offers an alternative to traditional interpolation techniques, aiming primarily at data which present detail at different scales or some degree of self-similarity. These characteristics, often intrinsic in natural objects, imply an ...

  • 27/11/2019 – Talk by Carey Lee Williamson

    Title: An Empirical Study of Campus-Level Instagram Traffic
    Time: 13:00
    Location: Meeting Room B, Building Zeta
    Speaker: Carey Lee Williamson
    Abstract: Instagram is a popular network application for photo sharing, video streaming, and online social media interaction. This talk presents results from an empirical study of Instagram network traffic, as viewed from a ...

  • 18/11/2019 – Talk by Benjamin Krumnow

    Title: mashing OpenWPM for fun and profit
    Time: 10:00
    Location: Acadia Lab, Building Zeta
    Type: Research talk
    Speaker:  Hugo Jonker
    Abstract:
    Web bots are a widely recognized tool to conduct empirical studies in the World Wide Web. OpenWPM is a framework that uses a web bot framework to facilitates web measurements. It is used in at least ...

  • 18/11/2019 – Talk by Hugo Jonker

    Title: Shepherd – an automatic and large-scale study of website login security
    Time: 9:30
    Location: Acadia Lab, Building Zeta
    Type: Research talk
    Speaker:  Hugo Jonker
    Abstract:
    Logging in on websites is common. However, it wasn’t always secure – as FireSheep showed dramatically in 2010. A malicious agent could simply eavesdrop on WiFi traffic and steal credentials of ...

  • 28/10/2019 – Talk by Silvia Crafa

    Title: Smart contracts programming: formal methods in action
    Time: 9:30
    Location: Meeting Room B, Building Zeta
    Type: Research talk
    Speaker:  Silvia Crafa
    Abstract:
    In this talk I’ll focus on smart contracts in the Ethereum blockchain, discussing their motivations and  presenting their programming model. I’ll show how the theory of programming languages can be used in this new ...