Cloud Thinking

This project aims to address a new field of research, which we named “Cloud Thinking”. Cloud Thinking sits on the intersection of the new computational techniques developed in the last years with the rich and dynamic information environment that constitute our current society. The scenarios of Ambient Intelligence, Ambient Assisted Living, Personalized Information Retrieval, Personalized Medicine, Cooperative Robotic behaviour, and Real-Time Clinical Test Monitoring are all well-known in multiple fields. However the high level of information retrieval, management and the amount of computational processing required for these scenarios have always impaired their realization. Although many of the concepts to realize these scenarios are known, the way to realize them require tools and infrastructures that are not easily attainable. The projects’ ambition is the creation of a new set of solutions based in novel ICT technologies, developing a concept that encompasses the synergistic usage of cloud computing, with large database access and information retrieval, associated with advanced methods for reasoning and data mining (and with the basic scalable algorithms to support the dimensions of the data sets targeted). This concept, which we named “cloud thinking” in order to highlight the notion of complex information processing in high dynamic, multi-input, large data, environments, has the potential to be applied to several areas. The project is targeting the fields of Health and Robotics as two application areas over which to realize the global concepts which are the focus of the project, and to provide real feedback on the process of application of the developed concepts to concrete areas. The Cloud Thinking project aims to create internal synergies inside the University of Aveiro, bringing together expertises distributed through different research units. The project is centered in some of the strategic development areas of the University, both technically (covering both telecommunications and health), in terms of increased quality on the research (including the incorporation of novel researchers), and in terms of increased impact in the society. For the realization of the project, key researchers in the fields of Information and Communication Technologies and in Computational Mathematics, will join efforts in a cross disciplinary approach. For the application areas, the involvement of key researchers in eHealth and in Robotics has been assured, creating optimal conditions for the effective realization of the Cloud Thinking objectives. Furthermore, Cloud Thinking has the potential of being exploited in multiple areas, both scientific and in economic terms, and the project is geared to realize this potential, with a set of activities developed to the relationship with external bodies. In fact, the project aims to tentatively explore more application areas than the reference fields of Health and Robotics, in order to reach a self-sustainable research area after the end of the project.