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.