BUILDING RELIABLE AND ROBUST SERVICE-BASED SYSTEMS FOR AUTOMATED BUSINESS PROCESSES

An exciting trend in enterprise computing lies in the integration of applications across an organisation and even between organisations. This allows the provision of services by automated business processes that coordinate business activity among several collaborating organisations. The best successes in this type of integrated distributed system come through use of Web Services and Service-based Architecture, which allow interoperation between applications through open standards based on XML and SOAP. But still, there are unresolved issues when developers seek to build a reliable and robust system. An important goal for the designers of a loosely coupled distributed system is to maintain consistency for each long running business process in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. Our approach to assist the developers in this domain is to guide the developers with the key principles they must consider, and to provide programming models and protocols, which make it easier to detect and avoid consistency faults in service-based system. We start by defining a realistic e-procurement scenario to illustrate the common problems faced by the developers which prevent them from building a reliable and robust system. These problems make it hard to maintain the consistency of the data and state during the execution of a business process in the occurrence of failures and interference from concurrent activities. Through the analysis of the common problems, we identify key principles the developers must consider to avoid producing the common problems. Then based on the key principles, we provide a framework called GAT in the orchestration infrastructure. GAT allows developers to express all the necessary processing to handle deviations including those due to failures and concurrent activities. We discuss the GAT framework in detail with its structure and key features. Using an example taken from part of the e-procurement case study, we illustrate how developers can use the framework to design their business requirements. We also discuss how key features of the new framework help the developers to avoid producing consistency faults. We illustrate how systems based on our framework can be built using today’s proven technology. Finally, we provide a unified isolation mechanism called Promises that is not only applicable to our GAT framework, but also to any applications that run in the service-based world. We discuss the concept, how it works, and how it defines a protocol. We also provide a list of potential implementation techniques. Using some of the implementation techniques we mention, we provide a proof-of-concept prototype system

Establishing a framework for an African Genome Archive

>Magister Scientiae - MScThe generation of biomedical research data on the African continent is growing, with numerous studies realizing the importance of African genetic diversity in discoveries of human origins and disease susceptibility. The decrease in costs to purchase and utilize such tools has enabled research groups to produce datasets of significant scientific value. However, this success story has resulted in a new challenge for African Researchers and institutions. An increase in data scale and complexity has led to an imbalance of infrastructure and skills to manage, store and analyse this dat

Semantic web system for differential diagnosis recommendations

There is a growing realization that healthcare is a knowledge-intensive field. The ability to capture and leverage semantics via inference or query processing is crucial for supporting the various required processes in both primary (e.g. disease diagnosis) and long term care (e.g. predictive and preventive diagnosis). Given the wide canvas and the relatively frequent knowledge changes that occur in this area, we need to take advantage of the new trends in Semantic Web technologies. In particular, the power of ontologies allows us to share medical research and provide suitable support to physician's practices. There is also a need to integrate these technologies within the currently used healthcare practices. In particular the use of semantic web technologies is highly demanded within the clinicians' differential diagnosis process and the clinical pathways disease management procedures as well as to aid the predictive/preventative measures used by healthcare professionals

Workflow technology for complex socio-technical systems

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Beyond problem identification: valuing methods in a ‘system usability practice’

Historically, usability evaluation methods (UEMs) have been evaluated on their capability for problem identification. However, the relevance of this approach has been questioned for applied usability work. To investigate alternative explanations of what is important for method use a grounded theory of usability practitioners was developed (9 interviews from the website domain and 13 in the safety-critical domain). The analysis proceeded in bottom-up and top-down stages. The bottom-up stages produced insight from the data in an exploratory and inductive manner. This highlighted the importance of contextual factors and the need for system descriptions: UEM adoption and adaptation cannot be fully understood devoid of context. The top-down stages used Distributed Cognition and Resilience Engineering conceptual frameworks as leverage for exploring the data in a deductive manner. These were chosen for their functional descriptions of systems. To illustrate the importance of context we describe three models: 1) where previous research has highlighted the downstream utility of UEMs we expand the metaphor to consider the landscape through which the stream flows, where the landscape represents the project’s context; 2) where information propagation and transformation in a project is influenced by social, information flow, artefact, physical and evolutionary factors; and 3) where the functional couplings between parts of the system of usability practice can be monitored and managed to positively resonate with each other, thereby improving the performance of the system overall. The concept of ‘Positive Resonance’ is introduced to describe how practitioners adapt to the context to maximise their impact under constrained resources. The functional couplings are described in a functional resonance model of HCI practice. This model is validated by interviewees and other practitioners outside of the study. This research shows that problem identification is limited for valuing UEMs. Instead, functional couplings of UEMs should be considered to improve system performance, which influence UEM adoption and adaptation in practice

Networked Playscapes : redefining the playground

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-219).In recent years the world became mostly urban, communication untethered and objects surpassed humans connected to the Internet. We are being shaped by the intersection of urbanization and ubiquitous computing. "Smart Cities" offer an efficiency-driven solution by "programming" the city, but this centralized approach forgets that it is the people that make the city and that playing is central to being human. Digital or physical, play is an act of creation and appropriation, a respite in a world geared towards consumption, efficiency and technological determinism. Simultaneously, playgrounds are suffering abandonment. Poorly designed, they are deemed childish and boring, the streets insecure and parents too busy. Portable computing devices have taken over most of the playtime and confined it to human-screen interaction. With less time spent outdoors, social networks and video games have become important hubs where we converge to play-mediated, across distance, with people we might never meet. This dissertation proposes that the advantages of connected play need not be exclusive to the indoors, and that playgrounds today need no real estate. Additionally, it hypothesizes that connected play in the public space enhances the social integration function that playgrounds as architectural constructs have previously served. Drawing from research in play, cognitive development, ubiquitous computing, architecture, telepresence and urban planning, this dissertation posits the redesign of playgrounds into Networked Playscapes. Grounded in the public space, they take existing urban affordances and add largely invisible technological underpinnings so as to support connected play. Deployed in Mexico City, Networked Playscapes is illustrated through three experiments: Triciclo, Andamio and ListenTree. Placed at highly marginalized areas and designed with a broad definition of play, they provide infrastructure for connection at different scales while centering on ludic interaction as the purpose to come together across social and geographic divisions. Space informs play as much as play can inform space. This thesis will discuss design guidelines driven by local idiosyncrasies and physical affordances for grounding and place making, and proposes taking the telepresent quality of imaginative play as the parameter to make congruous use of physical computing embedded in architectural constructs and nature itself.by Edwina Portocarrero Navarro.Ph. D

Towards the reliability prediction of mechanical components for nuclear safety cases

The thesis presents a modelling method to increase accuracy in reliability predictions of mechanical components. Such predictions are used in nuclear safety case documentation that is required for a nuclear site license to be granted. The methodology proposed is the use of front-end Finite Element fatigue analysis using the ANSYS software to effectively evaluate the mechanical reliability of nuclear safety systems/mechanisms, to evaluate the Mean Cycles To Failure of any steel three dimensional component. No inference is attempted with reference to the validity of the reliability values calculated, though they are shown to be reasonable when a simplistic constant hazard rate reliability model is employed. Some rudimentary evidence is provided showing that reductions of the fatigue safety factor by just less than a quarter may increase the design life of the component four-fold, ergo significantly reducing the on-site expected failure rates. The methodologies explored herein therefore effectively show that the ANSYS-Workbench software can be used to predict the life, ergo the reliability of mechanical components in-situ

Automated managed cloud-platforms based on energy policies

Delivering environmentally friendly services has become an important issue in Cloud Computing due to awareness provided by governments and environmental conservation organisations about the impact of electricity usage on carbon footprints. Cloud providers and cloud consumers (organisations/ enterprises) have their own defined $green$ $policies$ to control energy consumption at their data centers. At service management level, $green$ $policies$ can be mapped as $energy$ $management$ $policies$ or $management$ $policies$. Focusing at cloud consumer's side, $management$ $policies$ are described by business managers which can change regularly. The continuous changing is based on the nature of the technical environment, changes in regulation; and business requirements. Therefore, there is a gap between the level of describing and implementing $management$ $policies$ in the cloud environment. This thesis provides a method to bridge that gap by (a) defining a specification for formulating $management$ $policies$ into executable form for an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud model; (b) designing a framework to execute the described $management$ $policies$ automatically; (c) proposing a modelling and analysis method to identify the potential $energy$ $management$ $policy$ that would save energy-cost. Each aspect covered in the thesis is evaluated with a help of an Energy Management Case Study for a private cloud scenario

A child's movement performance using Labanotation and referenced to the Laban framework : a case study

The purpose of this study was to examine, in detail, the observable movement behavior in the performance of a child attempting to perform a complex movement task from a visual model. A secondary focus concerned the usefulness of Labanotation as a method for data recording in the study of complex manipulative movement. This was a single case study of a 10-year-old boy as he attempted to perform a complex manipulative movement task from a nonverbal, visual, video-taped movement performance. The movement task was unfamiliar to the child prior to his participation in the study. The investigator asked the child to view the movement task. The specific task involved throwing, and catching, and striking a 7-inch plastic ball with different body parts. The use of all spaces around the body, varing the amount of effort and moving in relation to the ball were considered parts of the task. Video-taping of the movement performances of this 10-year-old boy proceeded on 6 separate days during a 2-week period. Approximately 10 minutes of movement activity were recorded on each of the 6 days. The movement performances were Labanotated from the video tapes then transcribed and analyzed. There were three categories of data: the first included the number of times the child viewed the visual model during each data collection session, as well as any specific segments of the visual model he viewed. The second data category consisted of the child's verbal behavior in viewing the model tape and during the debriefing discussion. The third and primary data category consisted of the video tapes of the movement performances. These data were presented in the form of frequency counts for movement components and medians and ranges for movement sequence variables