Final report on dissemination, regulation, standardization, exploitation & training : D6.3

In D6.1 deliverable project dissemination, exploitation and training plans, as well as standardization & regulatory approach strategy was presented. The D6.2 reported on the necessary updates of these strategies and the actions taken by the partners in line with them, as well as the obtained results. In this D6.3 deliverable, a full set of project dissemination activities, standardization & regulatory contributions as well as an operator’s “cook book” outlining steps necessary for full deployment of ON functionality and services, are presented.Deliverable D6.3 del projecte OneFITPostprint (author’s final draft

An adaptive trust based service quality monitoring mechanism for cloud computing

Cloud computing is the newest paradigm in distributed computing that delivers computing resources over the Internet as services. Due to the attractiveness of cloud computing, the market is currently flooded with many service providers. This has necessitated the customers to identify the right one meeting their requirements in terms of service quality. The existing monitoring of service quality has been limited only to quantification in cloud computing. On the other hand, the continuous improvement and distribution of service quality scores have been implemented in other distributed computing paradigms but not specifically for cloud computing. This research investigates the methods and proposes mechanisms for quantifying and ranking the service quality of service providers. The solution proposed in this thesis consists of three mechanisms, namely service quality modeling mechanism, adaptive trust computing mechanism and trust distribution mechanism for cloud computing. The Design Research Methodology (DRM) has been modified by adding phases, means and methods, and probable outcomes. This modified DRM is used throughout this study. The mechanisms were developed and tested gradually until the expected outcome has been achieved. A comprehensive set of experiments were carried out in a simulated environment to validate their effectiveness. The evaluation has been carried out by comparing their performance against the combined trust model and QoS trust model for cloud computing along with the adapted fuzzy theory based trust computing mechanism and super-agent based trust distribution mechanism, which were developed for other distributed systems. The results show that the mechanisms are faster and more stable than the existing solutions in terms of reaching the final trust scores on all three parameters tested. The results presented in this thesis are significant in terms of making cloud computing acceptable to users in verifying the performance of the service providers before making the selection

Proxcache: A new cache deployment strategy in information-centric network for mitigating path and content redundancy

One of the promising paradigms for resource sharing with maintaining the basic Internet semantics is the Information-Centric Networking (ICN). ICN distinction with the current Internet is its ability to refer contents by names with partly dissociating the host-to-host practice of Internet Protocol addresses. Moreover, content caching in ICN is the major action of achieving content networking to reduce the amount of server access. The current caching practice in ICN using the Leave Copy Everywhere (LCE) progenerate problems of over deposition of contents known as content redundancy, path redundancy, lesser cache-hit rates in heterogeneous networks and lower content diversity. This study proposes a new cache deployment strategy referred to as ProXcache to acquire node relationships using hyperedge concept of hypergraph for cache positioning. The study formulates the relationships through the path and distance approximation to mitigate content and path redundancy. The study adopted the Design Research Methodology approach to achieve the slated research objectives. ProXcache was investigated using simulation on the Abilene, GEANT and the DTelekom network topologies for LCE and ProbCache caching strategies with the Zipf distribution to differ content categorization. The results show the overall content and path redundancy are minimized with lesser caching operation of six depositions per request as compared to nine and nineteen for ProbCache and LCE respectively. ProXcache yields better content diversity ratio of 80% against 20% and 49% for LCE and ProbCache respectively as the cache sizes varied. ProXcache also improves the cache-hit ratio through proxy positions. These thus, have significant influence in the development of the ICN for better management of contents towards subscribing to the Future Internet

Annual Report on CHOReOS Dissemination - 1st year (D9.3.1)

This report summarizes achievement of the CHOReOS project in terms of disseminating project's goals and results during the first year. It further provides links to the concrete material that has been disseminated so far, hence enabling the interested reader to get access to the published material to know more about CHOReOS

Mediator-assisted multi-source routing in information-centric networks

Among the new communication paradigms recently proposed, information-centric networking (ICN) is able to natively support content awareness at the network layer shifting the focus from hosts (as in traditional IP networks) to information objects. In this paper, we exploit the intrinsic content-awareness ICN features to design a novel multi-source routing mechanism. It involves a new network entity, the ICN mediator, responsible for locating and delivering the requested information objects that are chunked and stored at different locations. Our approach imposes very limited signalling overhead, especially for large chunk size (MBytes). Simulations show significant latency reduction compared to traditional routing approaches

Diverse Approaches to Developing and Implementing Competency-based ICT Training for Teachers: A Case Study

In this highly connected and rapidly changing world, there is no doubt that teachers play a key role in successfully integrating ICT into education. Realizing the importance of teachers’ capacity to do this, governments, teacher education institutions, the private sector, and NGOs alike provide training opportunities – ranging from the skills needed to use a particular software, to integrating educational technologies, to innovating teaching to promote 21st century skills. However, more often than not, teachers’ actual use of ICT in the classroom is reported as incremental, merely reinforcing traditional teacher-centred approaches by using slides and drill-and-practice exercises. Teachers’ use of ICT to actually innovate teaching is an exception rather than the norm. From the policy perspective, facilitating ICT-pedagogy integration in school education takes more than sporadic professional development, requiring more systematic policy-level changes to create an enabling environment. Research also shows that an essential condition to foster innovative teaching and learning is a close alignment between what the policy envisions and what actually happens in the classrooms. Inadequate monitoring of teachers’ development and their integration practices of ICT have also been raised as reoccurring concerns. With the formal adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, Member States are asked to abide by the Education 2030 Framework for Action that underscores the central role of teachers in achieving the new set of education goals. In line with this Framework, all governments are enjoined to ensure that by 2030, all learners are taught by qualified, professionally trained, motivated, committed, and wellsupported teachers who use relevant pedagogical approaches. Accordingly, one of the major focus areas for the governments is equipping teachers with the competencies through quality teacher training and continuous professional development, alongside favourable working conditions and appropriate support. In response to this, UNESCO Bangkok has implemented the ‘Supporting Competency-Based Teacher Training Reforms to Facilitate ICT-Pedagogy Integration’ project. Supported by Korean Funds-inTrust, this project encourages governments to enact systematic policy-level changes. They include reforming teacher training and professional development programmes into competency-based ones, whereby teacher development is systematically guided, assessed, monitored and tracked at policy and institutional levels. As part of the project, UNESCO Bangkok gathered four exemplary cases which took diverse approaches to developing and implementing competency-based ICT training and development for teachers. This publication is to take stock of different frameworks, models, processes, and reference materials that are used in developing and implementing national ICT competency standards for teachers and to provide step-by-step references for countries or organisations that wish to develop and implement competency-based teacher training and development. We hope that this collection of case studies, with varying approaches, will provide policy-makers with sufficient background and models to develop and implement ICT competency standards for teachers within their respective contextsUNESCO, Korean Funds-in-Trus

Data centre optimisation enhanced by software defined networking

Contemporary Cloud Computing infrastructures are being challenged by an increasing demand for evolved cloud services characterised by heterogeneous performance requirements including real-time, data-intensive and highly dynamic workloads. The classical way to deal with dynamicity is to scale computing and network resources horizontally. However, these techniques must be coupled effectively with advanced routing and switching in a multi-path environment, mixed with a high degree of flexibility to support dynamic adaptation and live-migration of virtual machines (VMs). We propose a management strategy to jointly optimise computing and networking resources in cloud infrastructures, where Software Defined Networking (SDN) plays a key enabling role

Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination

This paper defines software fairness and discrimination and develops a testing-based method for measuring if and how much software discriminates, focusing on causality in discriminatory behavior. Evidence of software discrimination has been found in modern software systems that recommend criminal sentences, grant access to financial products, and determine who is allowed to participate in promotions. Our approach, Themis, generates efficient test suites to measure discrimination. Given a schema describing valid system inputs, Themis generates discrimination tests automatically and does not require an oracle. We evaluate Themis on 20 software systems, 12 of which come from prior work with explicit focus on avoiding discrimination. We find that (1) Themis is effective at discovering software discrimination, (2) state-of-the-art techniques for removing discrimination from algorithms fail in many situations, at times discriminating against as much as 98% of an input subdomain, (3) Themis optimizations are effective at producing efficient test suites for measuring discrimination, and (4) Themis is more efficient on systems that exhibit more discrimination. We thus demonstrate that fairness testing is a critical aspect of the software development cycle in domains with possible discrimination and provide initial tools for measuring software discrimination.Comment: Sainyam Galhotra, Yuriy Brun, and Alexandra Meliou. 2017. Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination. In Proceedings of 2017 11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Paderborn, Germany, September 4-8, 2017 (ESEC/FSE'17). https://doi.org/10.1145/3106237.3106277, ESEC/FSE, 201