SUNFISH final conference
The SUNFISH project held its final conference in Rome on Nov 8, 2017, at the presence of the top government and industry leaders, and in particular the Minister of Economy and Finance, the Rt Hon Professor Pier Carlo Padoan.
SUNFISH is an H2020 international project focussing on next generation cloud federation, which contributed advances to applications to the Public Sector, including public payroll systems, tax & revenue, and law enforcement.
Minister Padoan took part in panel and a Q&A session, showing vision and a deep understanding of the technologies delivered by SUNFISH and their actual and potential impact. (He also boasted an impressive mastery of English language!). Among the speakers, I was impressed by Prefetto Franco Gabrielli — the overall head of the Italian Police Forces. Mr Gabrielli took part in a panel session with Mr Philip Parker, the cyber lead for the UK South East Regional Organised Crime Unit, SEROCU, focussing on the opportunities and challenges of information sharing and coordination of law enforcement agencies through federated clouds.
Beyond the benefits to specific applications, from my scientific/technical point of view, SUNFISH has pioneered the usage of distributed ledgers in generic distributed computation, providing innovation and advances on some of the main challenges therein. In Rome, I was particularly pleased and proud to see the intellectual and engineering work of my Southampton research group recognised so publicly and positively. We started less than two years ago — at mid project cycle — by conceiving the innovative idea to build a full cloud federation platform on blockchain, to reap the benefits of decentralisation, data assurance and democratic governance.
In the space of 18 exciting months we refined, implemented and delivered the notion of a “service ledger,” which is going to be the focus on a research book to be published by Springer (more on this in a future post), and the subject of further forthcoming collaborative research (more on this in a future post).
Of course this could not happen in a vacuum, it was not a one-man job, and I have been blessed by the intellect, support, collaboration, criticism and friendship of many exceptional people. Above all, I bear a special debt to Andrea Margheri and Luca Nicoletti. Without them, I have no doubts that my ideas would have remain just such, and that the “service ledger” never have seen the light of day.
Here my interview after the event
and by Francisco Medeiros, Senior Policy Coordinator Cloud & SW DG CONNECT for the European Commission
-vsassonePS. After the conference we feasted at the wonderful BAJA on the river Tiber. Great choice Director Schiavo!
Professor Vladimiro Sassone is a Roke/RAEng research chair in cyber security, and the University’s Cyber Security Research Director. The Academy is actively seeking new members from a range of industrial sectors.
For further information: www.southampton.ac.uk/csa
