In order to cope with the fast growing societal impacts of Cyber-Physical Systems, the IPACS project aims at developing and demonstrating the foundations of intelligent privacy-aware cloud-based services (IPACS). IPACS will comprehensively, securely, and privacy-aware integrate sensor- and cloud-based solutions in home-, car-bound, and portable devices. This will be realized through a rigorously user-driven, socio-technical development perspective with a strong focus on privacy aspects while being open for wider application areas.
The aim of IPACS is to conduct central research in enabling such scenarios. The user appreciates the neatly integration of home-, car-bound and portable devices in her daily life in ways that are similarly useful and rewarding to familiar human terms. Including a number of invisible and unobtrusive sensors, these devices engage in social interaction and further support and foster deeper personalization to the user. Cloud solutions simplify storage and processing of collected data, usage of same data within several services, as well as combining data of several users and supporting user mobility without information fragmentation over several databases. While necessary sensors and cloud solutions already exist today, user acceptance of such a comprehensive solution is still a critical factor. A user’s privacy could be subject to threats because of the system’s wide application area. The task of the Chair of Communication and Distributed Systems in the project is to ensure privacy and especially the users’ control over data. Thereby, the handling of emergency situations is especially challenging, as a user might rate health higher than privacy in such situations. Thus, the system has to constantly monitor the trade-off between these two and adapt to the current situation. This is only possible by anchoring privacy aspects deep within the system itself, specifically oriented at users’ demands. Therefore, IPACS will lay out foundations to enable scenarios as depicted above by considering a user-driven approach for privacy-enabled service provisioning in a cloud-based system through user control.
IPACS, funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments within the HumTec Project House at RWTH Aachen University, is a joined project with the Chair of Sociology of Technology and Organization and the Chair of Software Engineering (both RWTH Aachen University) and runs from 2013 to 2016. More information on this project and our project partners can be found on www.humtec.rwth-aachen.de.