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Adaptive, Trustworthy, Manageable, Orchestrated, Secure, Privacy-assuring, Hybrid Ecosystem for REsilient Cloud Computing

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ATMOSPHERE (Adaptive, Trustworthy, Manageable, Orchestrated, Secure, Privacy-assuring, Hybrid Ecosystem for REsilient Cloud Computing)

Période du rapport: 2018-11-01 au 2019-10-31

Adaptive, Trustworthy, Manageable, Orchestrated, Secure, Privacy-assuring, Hybrid Ecosystem for REsilient Cloud Computing (ATMOSPHERE, GA 777154) is a 24-month RIA funded by the European Commission under the H2020 Programme (topic EUB-1-2017 Cloud computing, including security aspects) and the Secretary of Politics of Informatics (SEPIN) of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology (MCTI) under the corresponding matching Brazilian Call for proposals: 4ª Chamada Coordenada Programa de Cooperação Brasil-União Europeia em Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação – TIC.
ATMOSPHERE aims at designing and developing a framework and a platform to implement trustworthy cloud services on a federated intercontinental hybrid and resource pool. Trust in a cloud environment is considered as the reliance of a customer on a cloud service and, consequently, on its provider. ATMOSPHERE focuses on a broad spectrum of trustworthiness properties and their measures such as Security, Privacy, Coherence, Isolation, Stability, Fairness, Transparency and Dependability. Based on the given definition of trust in cloud computing, trustworthiness can be defined as the worthiness of a service and its provider for being trusted.
ATMOSPHERE will support the development, build, deployment, measurement and adaptation of trustworthy cloud resources, data management services and data processing services, demonstrated on a sensitive scenario of distributed telemedicine.
Leveraging on the legacy of EUBrazilCloudConnect, EUBra-BIGSEA, EUBrasilCloudForum and SECURECLOUD, ATMOSPHERE plans to achieve the following four results:
- A Hybrid federated VM and container platform.
- A development framework with three sets of services:
+ Trustworthy evaluation and monitoring framework;
+ Trustworthy Distributed Data Management services; Trustworthy Distributed Data Processing services.
- A pilot use case on Medical Imaging Processing.
- The organisation of two CLOUDSCAPE-Brazil events.
The ATMOSPHERE Platform comprise four layers:
- A Trustworthy Monitoring Assesment (TMA) with 9 Quality models and 25 probes that collect information from the ATMOSPHERE platform services.
- A Trustworthy Data Processing service (TPDS), which provides an environment for data analytics application building (LEMONADE), developed in a previous collaborative project (EUBra-BIGSEA) that has been extended including trustworthiness metrics, extended Machine Learning support and a module (PAF) for creating the legal ground according to the European GPDR and the Brazilian LGPD.
- A Trustworthy Data Management Services (TDMS), which provides a set of services for the secure management of sensitive data (Vallum and ASTREA) using Trusted Execution Environments for the processing of critically private data.
- An Infrastructure Management Service Layer (IMS), which provides an environment to federate cloud resources across multiple sites (Fogbow) together with services for cloud orchestration and horizontal elasticity with a priori performance guarantees for end-user applications.

All these developments are available in open source, mostly in Github (https://github.com/eubr-atmosphere) and have been deployed on a trans-continental Federated cloud infrastructure, which enables applications running on the infrastructure to execute different parts of the processing in different sites, fulfilling for example legal regulations or fitting the processing to the rightmost resource.

All these services will be demonstrated through a pilot case focused on the assisted diagnosis of the Rheumatic Heart Disease. During the period work has concentrated on the analysis of the data from the PROVAR study and the definition of the application architecture for the intensive processing, following two approaches: the extraction of features key for the classification of the subjects and the direct classification of the images, both using CNNs.

With respect to the international cooperation between Europe and Brazil, the project continued with the organization of two joint Europe-Brazil events of CLOUDSCAPE and WCN in the frame of the main event of the Brazilian computing society. ATMOSPHERE reached 20 joint publications, participation in 46 events, a contact list of around 3.600 members, 1.025 tweets and the actual registration of three ATMOSPHERE components in the European Open Science Cloud Marketplace.
The expected impact of the project can be considered at different scopes:
- The development of cloud-enabled trustworthy applications.
- The development of technologies to manage hybrid resources in the cloud.
- International cooperation at the level of EU and Brazil.

First, ATMOSPHERE has defined, characterized, extended and implemented a concept of Trustworthiness for cloud services and applications expressed in eight dimensions, which include the traditional dimensions of privacy and security as well as innovative dimensions such as isolation, coherence, dependability, fairness and explanation. ATMOSPHERE implemented 25 probes to measure the trustworthiness, a Trustworthy Monitoring and Assessment (TMA) system to register them and a set of quality models that define multiple action criteria at different aggregation levels.

Second, components of the ATMOSPHERE platform has been transferred to different initiatives (European projects such as PRIMAGE and EOSC-SYNERGY), Industry (TalkDesk and DELL-EMC) and research initiatives (such as RNP's Nasnuvens). Three services are registered in the EOSC marketplace.

With respect to the international cooperation between Europe and Brazil, the project produced 20 joint publications. Finally, it is important to mention that in the frame of the project a special interest group on cloud was created in the Brazilian Society of Computing with members from Europe and Brazil.

The project also expects to achieve a high social impact through the development of a pilot case, focused on the development of a trustworthy service for the prediction of the risk of developing a Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD). RHD has a significant impact on children in developing countries, and early detection and appropriate treatment minimise the effects that it can produce on adults, which can even lead to death.
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