INESC TEC improves Internet user experience
On 31 May, INESC TEC will be concluding the CONVERGENCE, a project that gathered 12 partners from six European countries.
30th May 2013
European Commission highlights the commercial potential of project
With the participation of INESC TEC’s Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM), the purpose of this project – with a budget of over two million euros – was to develop an innovative approach for the Internet based on contents, which could complement and improve the current Internet architecture. After the CONVERGENCE was demonstrated between 8 and 10 May in the Irish city of Dublin, the European Commission highlighted the project’s commercial potential.
A better browsing experience
On 31 May, INESC TEC will be concluding a project with the participation of the Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM), which integrates a set of 12 European partners, namely the CNIT - Consorzio Nazionale per le Interuniversity Telecomunicazioni (coordinator), Alinari, Xiwrite Srl and CEDEO.net (all from Italy), Wipro (Portugal), Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Saphran Morpho (France), Institute of Communication and Computer Systems and SingularLogic (Greece), Ludwig-Maximilians University (Germany ) and UTI Systems (Romania). With a budget of over two million euros, the aim with the CONVERGENCE was to develop a new Internet approach based on content that makes it possible to improve the browsing experience of Internet users.
The Internet as we know it is based on the physical locations of the servers that store information, although the average user is not aware of that. Whenever we search information on the Web, our browser gives us a list of contents found on multiple servers available. If by chance the same content exists in two or more servers, this list of results will contain two or more entries for the same content. By clicking on one of these entries, we are actually telling the browser to get that content from a particular location. This means that, ultimately, it is the user who decides the location where the content will be obtained, although this goes unnoticed for most users. If by chance the content we want is available in a server in Porto and another in Japan, clicking on the entry corresponding to the server in Japan is not the best choice because the content will have to go through a series of networks to reach us.
This is what the project CONVERGENCE tries to change, creating a new paradigm for the Internet where the location of the content is no longer relevant. To access the content, the user only has to submit a request to the system on a particular topic, obtaining a list of results with unique entries. After that, the system is in charge of providing the content, and by choosing the best location it promotes an optimal use of network resources and improves the user’s experience. Another aspect that the CONVERGENCE proposes to improve is related to the “publish-subscribe” concept where the moment when the user performs a search is separated from the moment that the contents are effectively consumed. According to Teresa Andrade, a researcher at UTM and the person representing INESC TEC in this project, “this means that the user does not have to be constantly searching for the information, but simply submit an interest to the system once about a particular topic.” The system will then try to look for matches and send them to the user, and each time there is new content on the Internet with those features, the user is notified.
Practical results with INESC TEC’s participation
This new Internet architecture is made of levels and the CONVERGENCE worked on the network layer and the layer above that, called middleware, which interfaces with the applications. This middleware layer is a more intelligent level that understands, for example, user subscriptions, comparing them with publications, and extracts metadata from publications to make those comparisons. It was on this component that INESC TEC was involved, developing several software modules to manipulate the data. Other than Teresa Andrade, INESC TEC was also represented by Fernando Almeida and Hélder Castro, also researchers at UTM.
Always in the middleware component, INESC TEC also played an important role in developing a mechanism called Digital Forgetting, which is used to eliminate all copies of certain content on the Internet. “Suppose that you publish photos with a boyfriend and after a while that relationship ends and you do not want that content to be visible. This is a complicated process because the photos have been available and there are copies that may have been shared”, explains Teresa Andrade. “The mechanism that we developed could detect all copies and order the system - which must have a CONVERGENCE-compliant software – to delete the content”, she added.
Another important contribution of INESC TEC highlighted by the researcher has to do with the MPEG international standards used by the project, which were created to set the standards to compress and transmit audio and video content and to manipulate multimedia information. “One of the use cases of the project was a classroom context in which a teacher published information on the classes. Later, the students posed questions and other colleagues responded to those same questions, and the teacher could confirm the answers or add more information. All these contents are interconnected and so far there was no way to tell which were the relationships between them”, stated Teresa Andrade. INESC TEC developed a mechanism to establish these relationships, based on ontologies, which was submitted to the MPEG, and included in the MPEG-21 standard, thus extending it. Therefore, those who submit an interest on this subject will have access to all interrelated contents, even though they were created at different times.
Demonstration in Dublin with promising results
The final review of the project took place in Dublin, between 8 and 10 May and the European Commission highlighted the project’s potential for commercial exploitation. Some of the companies involved in the consortium have shown interest in using the technology to safely make their content available, including Wipro. This company is interested in installing the system in its warehouse line management in order to control what enters and exits, and in having a digital representation of the products that the company transacts.
“One of the field trials presented in Dublin was with cameras. Suppose that a manufacturer of cameras detects a malfunction in their product. Having this digital representation of the product on the Internet, it is possible to quickly update the metadata on that model and automatically notify customers who have expressed their interest in receiving information about that camera”, explains the researcher. And she adds: “let us say that a user wants to receive information about a camera model with certain features that does not exist. The only thing to do is to submit a request to the system and when a similar model becomes available, the user is warned.”
The digital representation of any real world object – including people and services – that can be shared and manipulated on the Internet comes from the paradigm of the Internet of Things (Internet of Things), integrated in the new Internet inaugurated by the CONVERGENCE. This is the first time INESC TEC participates in a project on the Internet of Things. The invitation to join the consortium came from Leonardo Chiariglione, member of INESC TEC’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and co-founder of the MPEG, and it acknowledges INESC TEC’s experience with these international standards. After the project is concluded, Teresa Andrade highlights as main result the book about the project “that we will publish and has already been submitted to Springer”, and even “the gratification of being able to apply what we had learned previously”. For the researcher, the CONVERGENCE represented an additional challenge "because it was trying to change the Internet as we know it, and working on a new paradigm is something totally new”, she concludes.