5,160 research outputs found
Mobile Computing in Digital Ecosystems: Design Issues and Challenges
In this paper we argue that the set of wireless, mobile devices (e.g.,
portable telephones, tablet PCs, GPS navigators, media players) commonly used
by human users enables the construction of what we term a digital ecosystem,
i.e., an ecosystem constructed out of so-called digital organisms (see below),
that can foster the development of novel distributed services. In this context,
a human user equipped with his/her own mobile devices, can be though of as a
digital organism (DO), a subsystem characterized by a set of peculiar features
and resources it can offer to the rest of the ecosystem for use from its peer
DOs. The internal organization of the DO must address issues of management of
its own resources, including power consumption. Inside the DO and among DOs,
peer-to-peer interaction mechanisms can be conveniently deployed to favor
resource sharing and data dissemination. Throughout this paper, we show that
most of the solutions and technologies needed to construct a digital ecosystem
are already available. What is still missing is a framework (i.e., mechanisms,
protocols, services) that can support effectively the integration and
cooperation of these technologies. In addition, in the following we show that
that framework can be implemented as a middleware subsystem that enables novel
and ubiquitous forms of computation and communication. Finally, in order to
illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce some experimental
results we have obtained from preliminary implementations of (parts of) that
subsystem.Comment: Proceedings of the 7th International wireless Communications and
Mobile Computing conference (IWCMC-2011), Emergency Management: Communication
and Computing Platforms Worksho
Proceedings of International Workshop "Global Computing: Programming Environments, Languages, Security and Analysis of Systems"
According to the IST/ FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING, the goal is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient.
The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself.
Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively. The research should concentrate on systems having the following characteristics: • The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners.
• The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another.
• The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion.
The behaviour of the entities may vary over time.
• The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment.
For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered.
The ultimate goal of the research action is to provide a solid scientific foundation for the design of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving effective principles for building and analysing such systems.
This workshop covers the aspects related to languages and programming environments as well as analysis of systems and resources involving 9 projects (AGILE , DART, DEGAS , MIKADO, MRG, MYTHS, PEPITO, PROFUNDIS, SECURE) out of the 13 founded under the initiative. After an year from the start of the projects, the goal of the workshop is to fix the state of the art on the topics covered by the two clusters related to programming environments and analysis of systems as well as to devise strategies and new ideas to profitably continue the research effort towards the overall objective of the initiative.
We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica and Tlc of the University of Trento, the Comune di Rovereto, the project DEGAS for partially funding the event and the Events and Meetings Office of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration
CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap
After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in
multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year.
In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio-
economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown
of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on
requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the
community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our
Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as
National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core
technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research
challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal
challenges
Enabling Social Applications via Decentralized Social Data Management
An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks,
further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across
different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the
social world and enable novel socially-aware applications. We present
Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service that collects social
information from multiple sources into a multigraph managed in a decentralized
fashion on user-contributed nodes, and exposes it through an interface
implementing non-trivial social inferences while complying with user-defined
access policies. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab with emulated
application workloads show the system exhibits good end-to-end response time,
low communication overhead and resilience to malicious attacks.Comment: 27 pages, single ACM column, 9 figures, accepted in Special Issue of
Foundations of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technolog
Interpreting infrastructure: Defining user value for digital financial intermediaries.
The 3DaRoC project is exploring digital connectivity and peer-to-peer relationships in financial
services. In the light of the near collapse of the UK and world financial sector, understanding and
innovating new and more sustainable approaches to financial services is now a critical topic. At the
same time, the increasing penetration and take-up of robust high-speed networks, dependable peerto-
peer architectures and mobile multimedia technologies offer novel platforms for offering financial
services over the Internet. These new forms of digital connectivity give rise to opportunities in doing
financial transactions in different ways and with radically different business models that offer the
possibility of transforming the marketplace. One area in the digital economy that has had such an
effect is in the ways that users access and use digital banking and payment services.
The impact of the new economic models presented by these digital financial services is yet to be fully
determined, but they have huge potential as disruptive innovations, with a potentially transformative
effect on the way that services are offered to users. Little is understood about how technical
infrastructures impact on the ways that people make sense of the financial services that they use, or
on how these might be designed more effectively. 3DaRoC is exploring this space working with our
partners and end users to prototype and evaluate new online, mobile, ubiquitous and tangible
technologies, exploring how these services might be extended.Executive Summary: Drawing from Studies of Use - the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users. The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This document reports on the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users, describing analysis of contextual field studies carried out in two retail digital financial intermediary organisations: Zopa Limited and the Bristol Pound. It forms the second milestone document in the 3DaRoC project, developing patterns of use that have arisen on the back of the technical infrastructures in the two organisations that form cases for examination. Its purpose is to examine how the two different technical infrastructures that underpin the transactions that they support–composed of the back-office hardware and software, data structures, the networking and communications technologies used, supported consumer devices, and the user interfaces and interaction design–have provided opportunities for users to realise their financial and other needs. While we orient towards the issues of service use (and its problems), we also examine the activities and expectations of their various users. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report comprises of three key sections: descriptions of the user demographics for Zopa and the Bristol Pound, a discussion about the user experience and its role in community, and an examination of the role of usage data in the development of these a products. We conclude with final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.The 3DaRoC project is funded by the RCUK Digital Economy ‘Research in the Wild’ theme (grant no.
EP/K012304/1)
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