Microdrones are small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) carrying payloads such as cameras and sensors. Such microdrones enable us to obtain a bird's eye view of the environment which is helpful in many applications such as environmental monitoring, surveillance or disaster management. This position paper reports on our recently launched project "collaborative microdrones" where we are developing a system for aerial imaging based on cooperating, wireless networked microdrones that can be used in disaster management applications. Several microdrones will fly in formation over the area of interest and deliver sensor data which is fused, analyzed and delivered to the user in real-time. In this paper we briefly discuss applications for UAVs, present related projects, introduce our research focus and report on preliminary results.

Digital Home Services Management is becoming one of the main challenges for telecommunications operators as the heterogeneity and complexity of end users devices grows dramatically. Moreover, home network topology and composition can be changed by end users without any control from the service provider side. In addition to these complexity problems, the number of customers that a traditional telco operator manages adds a scalability problem to the equation. Traditional centralized management paradigms lacks from the flexibility and dynamicity needed to deal with these highly personalized scenarios. The adaptability and evolvability of Autonomic Systems is envisioned as the key technology in order to overcome this difficult situation. This talk explains how Telefonica I+D is trying to apply Autonomic Communications principles to manage Digital Home Environments.

With the advent of cloud computing there is a need to revisit our approach to data. When an application can be executing anywhere in the cloud it means that the data required by this application should be available to it wherever it's running. When we consider also the SLA of the application, requirements like latency, consistency and resiliency come into play. This calls for a new approach for handling data. An approach that will make the right data available wherever needed, whenever needed by autonomously caching, replicating, versioning, migrating, and persisting data in the cloud. In this talk we will discuss the requirements from such a service, and review some possible solutions and challenges.