BIOGRAPHY
Telecommunications engineer (UPC, 1988) and PhD (award "best telecommunication engineering PhD thesis UPC, 1992"). Visitor at University of Arizona (1992-93), University of California at Berkeley (2008), and University of New York (2018). During 2014, 2015 and 2016 visiting lecturer at ISIMA (Institut Supérieur d’Informatique, de Modélisation et de leurs Applications), Université Blaise-Pascal, France.
Since 2003, full professor at the Computer Architecture department of UPC, where he is head of the Statistical Analysis of Networks and Systems (SANS) research group. Since 2012, responsible for the smart cities initiative at BSC-CNS.
From 2008 to 2013, co-founder and CTO at Miraveo Inc (Barcelona, Palo Alto). He holds four USPTO patents in the field of peer-to-peer communications of mobile devices.
Recently he has been coordinator of the projects H2020 CAPTOR (European Commission), and responsible of BSC-CNS participation in the project H2020 ASGARD. He is coordinator of IMAQ project (Spanish ministry of science and technology) which explores advanced data analysis techniques for improving the accuracy of the data acquired by low-cost sensors for air monitoring.
Currently, he also coordinated the activities of BSC-CNS on technical support to the Spanish ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation on digital proximity tracing for mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is a member of ETSI ISG E4P.
Main current research interest in problems related with the capture, processing and statistical analysis of data from mobile devices and networks of sensors. Lectures courses on Computer Networks, Mobile Internet, Internet of Things, and Probabilistic Modelling of Systems at the Informatics School of Barcelona (FIB, UPC).
Website: http://sans.ac.upc.edu/
ABSTRACT: Interoperability between European digital contact tracing applications
In the context of the current COVID-19 pandemics, several countries have developed digital contact tracing applications, which can tell whether a person was in the near past, within a short distance of people who were later found to have the virus. The pace at which progress has been made has been dizzying, so that very few months have passed from the first proposals for protocols to their deployment at the national level. Although there is no unanimity on the true usefulness of such applications in its current version, we believe that when used correctly, these technologies will be a very promising way to control the spread of COVID-19 pandemics or others that can appear in the future with similar transmission mechanisms.
The objective of the talk is to discuss three aspects of these applications, both for current and future scenarios.-
Technological platform: Current technologies have been mainly deployed as smartphone apps and are based on Bluetooth Low Energy. However, other potential technological platforms, which for instance can provide more accurate range measurements or can detect other transmission scenarios other than distance between persons, could be more adequate.
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Privacy and security: There has also been much public debate about data privacy for these applications. Some proposals have been designed from the outset to maintain privacy at the highest standards, but two approaches, centralized and distributed, have been adopted and have generated considerable debate regarding their effectiveness and privacy properties. However, a second generation of protocols (called "third way" protocols) has been developed that promises to have better properties from the privacy point of view.
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Interoperability: One of the important aspects is the problem of interoperability between protocols deployed by different countries, which may be based on different architectures. In this field we have carried out several studies and proposals to achieve interoperability between countries in the European Union. I would describe some of the challenges for this interoperability and the solutions that has been proposed.
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