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“M-Sec will open a marketplace where people can exchange data, services & IoT devices through virtual currencies”: Interview with Vanessa Clemente, M-Sec EU coordinator

“M-Sec will open a marketplace where people can exchange data, services & IoT devices through virtual currencies”: Interview with Vanessa Clemente, M-Sec EU coordinator

Vanessa Clemente is from Worldline, the European coordinating partner behind the M-Sec project. In this short interview, we sat down with Vanessa to dive deeper into what are the goals of M-Sec project, how Worldline co-ordinates the 12 partner organisations that are behind the project, and to find out more about the development of the use cases which will be piloted in Spain and Japan.

 

Hello Vanessa, thank you for joining us. Firstly, would you be able to tell a little bit more about yourself, and how you became to be working at this role in Worldline. Then it would be great if you could give us a short background into Worldline, in order to better frame your role as European co-ordinator of the M-Sec project.

Hello! First of all, thank you very much for this initiative which I think it will help to spread awareness of the project within the M-Sec community. I will briefly introduce myself and the company for whom I work. I am from Barcelona (Spain), I held a Degree in Business Administration from the University of Barcelona and a specialization in International Commerce. I joined Worldline in 2018 as Project Manager. Worldline is highly recognized because it is the European leader in payments and transactional services. Worldline has a Center of Excellence with key competences to define, build and manage the life cycle of mobile projects. Furthermore, we are also specialized in customizable mobile solutions, mobile messaging solutions, E-Commerce solutions and we are continually working on the adoption of new emerging technologies such as Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence-Chatbots, Big Data, Machine Learning, etc.

Besides M-Sec, I am also coordinating at a local level two more R & D projects; Helios (within the Horizon 2020) which aims to create a decentralized social platform through the use of Blockchain technology and innovative concepts for the creation and management of social graphics, augmented & virtual reality and NextCare (co-financed by the European Union within the framework of the ERDF operational program) which is focused on integrated care services for chronic patients.

 

The main goal of M-Sec seems multi-faceted: the primary mission is to create an innovative and secure platform through technologies (like Blockchain, Cloud, Big Data, and IoT), which will in turn foster the creation of decentralised apps, finally allowing safe and secure interactions between objects and people in smart cities.

How do you see the development of each stage of the project over the next 3 years?

The project started last July 2018, for almost one year, partners have been focused on defining in detail each of the six use cases and the corresponding pilots associated which will be implemented over the top of the M-Sec platform. For that, some actions have been carried out to gather requirements from different stakeholders involved in order to better align use cases.

Now we are focused on the M-Sec platform in order to have an initial prototype by the end of the year. For that, the consortium will use not only some assets developed previous to the project ‘s start but also new assets will be generated within the project length and integrated all of them with the aim of providing an end to end multi secure layer solution to protect data generated by IoT objects in a smart city context.

In parallel and since the project started, dissemination and exploitation activities have been crucial for the success of the project’s progress and will continue on going until the finalization of the project.

In overall, the consortium is in a good shape to achieve the objectives set at the starting point of the project. Nevertheless, this year and part of the next year (until June 2020) is going to be crucial for the project’s development as it is when results will be materialized by having ready initial demonstrators.

 

Could you tell us more about the six uses cases?

Sure, as I mentioned before, there will be in total six use cases; two to be implemented in Santander (Spain), two to be piloted in Fujisawa (Japan) and two to be tested in both cities (crossborder use cases). Both cities are considered internationally as a relevant reference within the smart city context which makes it ideal to implement the M-Sec pilots.

Santander’s use cases consists of, on the one side, in deploying a series of environmental IoT devices with the aim of allowing citizens to access to real time environmental information combined with an itinerary or route that indicates useful information (i.e. iconic places information) and complemented with a series of IoT devices able to offer a precise figure related to the number of people present at a certain time in a specific spot. On the other side, the second use case will improve the quality of life of ageing people; first by monitoring users through data gathered by home sensors deployed at user’s home and second by monitoring wellbeing of users with activity bracelets while at the same time offering public activities in the city to fight social isolation.

Fujisawa’s use cases are mainly focused on environmental topics, on the one side, by providing citizens with real time environmental data (such as air quality, temperature, pressure) and on the other side, by implementing a garbage counting system able to count the amount of garbage generated per house-hold to raise awareness among citizens about the waste generated and therefore creating eventual better well-being in their daily lives.

Finally, for cross border use cases, one pursues the creation of a market place to exchange data in a secure way while the other one aims to allow citizens from both cities to report measurements collected by the sensors of their own mobile phones and events, good or bad, from the city. These events will be accordingly checked and attended (if necessary) later by municipal personnel.

In some of the use cases, rewarding systems and gamification will be implemented in order to engage a higher number of participants for pilots.

 

M-Sec is indeed a cross-border initiative, involving both European and Japanese partners, who are working on the simultaneous implementation of cross-border uses cases in Fujisawa and Spain. At this stage of the project (year 1), how do you see these developing?

When defining use cases and the corresponding pilots, we found some complexity on cross border use cases. First of all, because we had to find something that could work in both countries. Secondly, because of the current regulation of personal data protection between the two countries. Luckily and since February 2019 (when the European Commission adopted the adequacy decision on Japan), personal data can flow freely between the two economies on the basis of strong protection guarantees. This has eased the path into the design of both use cases. Nevertheless, the cross border use cases will need to be further analyzed in order to approach since the beginner all the barriers ad challenges that the consortium could face during the implementation between Europe & Japan.

 

M-Sec has, at its heart, the goal to improve the well-being of citizens in smart cities, however the process invites researchers, local governments, entrepreneurs, innovators and business to take part in the M-Sec Marketplace. Could you tell us what this Marketplace will look like and how people can get involved?

The idea of creating a marketplace is to provide stakeholders with an innovative business environment allowing real-time matching of “supply and demand” while at the same time applying the different multi secure layers provided by the M-Sec platform to guarantee an end-to-end secure exchange process and at the same tame increase trustiness through the M-Sec ecosystem. The consortium will start with a demonstrator focused on exchanging photos from one country to another country to prove the viability of the use case. However, in a later stage, the main goal of M-Sec is to open the platform as a market place of applications where different stakeholders can exchange data and services IoT devices and people through virtual currencies.

 

We encourage everybody, from developers, to citizens, to entrepreneurs, to be part of the M-Sec Community. Keep up to date with the latest news from the M-Sec Project along with other news from the field:

Twitter: @MSecProject

LinkedIn: MSecProject

If you are interested in other ways of collaborating, please don’t hesitate to contact us on [email protected].

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