An international team of researchers, led by IMDEA Networks and Northeastern University in collaboration with NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, IMDEA Software, University of Calgary, and the International Computer Science Institute, has unveiled groundbreaking findings on the security and privacy challenges posed by the ever-growing prevalence of opaque and technically complex Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart homes.

IMDEA Networks and the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) have presented SLICES-ES, a European infrastructure for experimenting with future information and communications technologies that will be based in Madrid, most likely at the Madrid university’s facilities. This scientific instrument, which will become operational during 2024 and with some initial services already underway since October 2023, will be made available to the research community to carry out complex experiments in the area of digital sciences.

New research conducted by IMDEA Networks Institute in collaboration with the University of Surrey, UPV, and King’s College London has shown that there is a general downward trend in the popular artificial intelligence (AI) platform ChatGPT to take direct stances on controversial topics. Whether providing agreement or disagreement, or an affirmative or negative response. Now, although the study results show a moderation on the part of ChatGPT when it comes to addressing controversial issues, they warn that in the socio-political arena, it maintains a certain libertarian bias. However, in economic matters, it doesn’t present a clear left or right-leaning bias.

Researchers Vahid Ghafouri and Guillermo Suárez de Tangil from IMDEA Networks Institute have collaborated on a research led by Waleed Iqbal, Gareth Tyson, and Ignacio Castro from Queen Mary University of London that analyzes how real-world inequalities manifest themselves in social networks. In the paper “Lady and the Tramp Nextdoor: Online Manifestations of Real-World Inequalities in the Nextdoor Social Network,” presented at the ICWSM 2023 conference, it has been revealed that a person’s income level influences the type of content they share online.

Technological innovations such as cloud computing, the internet of things, big data and WiFi networks have led to applications that were unimaginable a few decades ago and to an increase in the quality of life, an improvement in business decisions thanks to data analysis, etc. This has meant new computational paradigms, such as fog computing (‘fog computing’), edge computing (‘edge computing’), cloud computing and blockchain.

Data-driven decision-making driven by Machine Learning (ML) algorithms is changing the way society and the economy work, with a profound positive impact on our daily lives. For these solutions to be effective, data often has to be processed close to the end user and such data can be private and confidential.

IMDEA Software and IMDEA Networks Institutes participate together with six other partners (Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial, Centro Español de Metrología, Fundación Vithas, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Universidad Complutense de Madrid) in the MADQuantum-CM project, funded by the Community of Madrid, the Spanish State through the Plan for Recovery, Transformation and Resilience, and the European Union through the NextGeneration EU funds. The objective of the project is the expansion of MadQCI, the new quantum communications network of the Community of Madrid and the largest quantum network in Europe.

An IMDEA Networks research team has won first prize in the food category of the competitive European EIT Jumpstarter program for its business idea LiFi4Food, which seeks to provide solutions for digital and precision agriculture. The prize valued at €10,000 is earmarked for the creation of this revolutionary startup. The grand final took place in Krakow (Poland) on November 29, where PhD students Javier Talavante and Dayrene Frómeta attended on behalf of the group.

We are in a fascinating era where even low-resource devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, can use deep learning algorithms to tackle complex problems such as image classification or natural language processing (the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with giving computers the ability to understand spoken and written language in the same way as humans). However, deep learning in IoT sensors may not be able to guarantee quality of service (QoS) requirements such as inference accuracy and latency. With the exponential growth of data collected by billions of IoT devices, the need has arisen to shift to a distributed model in which some of the computing occurs at the edge of the network (edge computing), closer to where the data is created, rather than sending it to the cloud for processing and storage.

Researchers Margarita Capretto, Martin Ceresa (IMDEA Software), Antonio Fernández Anta (IMDEA Networks), Antonio Russo (IMDEA Networks) and César Sánchez (IMDEA Software) present Setchain, a new data structure that improves the scalability of blockchains, allowing a greater number of transactions per block, which leads to a reduction in risk and costs for users, at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain.

IMDEA Networks researchers have taken a new step in their studies on the incidence of the ‘digital divide’, after the work published in January, together with the University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) and Orange Innovation, on the so-called “usage gap”, which refers to how individuals belonging to different social classes, due to diverse digital skills, have contrasting capability to benefit from novel technologies and, therefore, from the services that those technologies enable. This is an emerging cause of social inequality, in the face of which research is striving to provide better understanding and to provide directions for solutions.

IMDEA Networks has recently been awarded the coordinated project ENABLE-6G of the national call UNICO 5G. The project consists of two sub-projects, RISC-6G and MAP-6G, and it will be developed by a group of researchers led by Dr. Domenico Giustiniano and Dr. Joerg Widmer. This grant will allow the Institute to continue to do pioneering research in the field of networks and contribute to the development of the next generation of 6G technology.

The Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) has awarded the “Emilio Aced Research and Personal Data Protection Award” for the third consecutive time to a study conducted by IMDEA Networks’ Internet Analytics Group (IAG) led by Dr. Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez.