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Aalto University Department of Computer Science, one of the leading research units in Finnish ICT, has become the first academic member of the consortium in Northern Europe. The OpenFog Consortium is a public-private nonprofit organization with the mission to drive industry and academic leadership in fog computing, with emphasis on architectural aspects and testbed deployments for IoT scenarios. Member companies include ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, AT&T and General Electric.

"Our goal is to have an impact on the activities of the OpenFog Consortium and to share a common infrastructure", tells Mario Di Francesco, assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science. "Our involvement has started through a fruitful collaboration with Princeton University, one of the founding members of the consortium. We seek to further extend our cooperation to more OpenFog members."

Fog computing is a new paradigm based on a pervasive distributed system that leverages computation, communication and storage resources deployed close to the users, namely, at the edge of networks. This approach enables novel applications and use cases, including real-time processing and control, by lowering the network delay and reducing the traffic load on the core network infrastructure.

"Fog computing enables new research opportunities addressing scalability, reliability and security challenges in the IoT" continues Di Francesco, who is the principal investigator of an Academy project on the IoT that has just started. "We are convinced that our participation in the OpenFog Consortium will extend the impact of our research on the IoT."

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