Designing Human-Centered Collective Intelligence

Human-Centered Collective Intelligence (HCCI) is an emergent research area that seeks to bring together major research areas like machine learning, statistical modeling, information retrieval, market research, and software engineering to address challenges pertaining to deriving intelligent insights and solutions through the collaboration of several intelligent sensors, devices and data sources. An archetypal contextual CI scenario might be concerned with deriving affect-driven intelligence through multimodal emotion detection sources in a bid to determine the likability of one movie trailer over another. On the other hand, the key tenets to designing robust and evolutionary software and infrastructure architecture models to address cross-cutting quality concerns is of keen interest in the “Cloud” age of today. Some of the key quality concerns of interest in CI scenarios span the gamut of security and privacy, scalability, performance, fault-tolerance, and reliability. I present recent advances in CI system design with a focus on highlighting optimal solutions for the aforementioned cross-cutting concerns. I also describe a number of design challenges and a framework that I have determined to be critical to designing CI systems. With inspiration from machine learning, computational advertising, ubiquitous computing, and sociable robotics, this literature incorporates theories and concepts from various viewpoints to empower the collective intelligence engine, ZOEI, to discover affective state and emotional intent across multiple mediums. The discerned affective state is used in recommender systems among others to support content personalization. I dive into the design of optimal architectures that allow humans and intelligent systems to work collectively to solve complex problems. I present an evaluation of various studies that leverage the ZOEI framework to design collective intelligence

Intelligent Management of Virtualised Computer Based Workloads and Systems

Managing the complexity within virtualised IT infrastructure platforms is a common problem for many organisations today. Computer systems are often highly consolidated into a relatively small physical footprint compared with previous decades prior to late 2000s, so much thought, planning and control is necessary to effectively operate such systems within the enterprise computing space. With the development of private, hybrid and public cloud utility computing this has become even more relevant; this work examines how such cloud systems are using virtualisation technology and embedded software to leverage advantages, and it uses a fresh approach of developing and creating an Intelligent decision engine (expert system). Its aim is to help reduce the complexity of managing virtualised computer-based platforms, through tight integration, high-levels of automation to minimise human inputs, errors, and enforce standards and consistency, in order to achieve better management and control. The thesis investigates whether an expert system known as the Intelligent Decision Engine (IDE) could aid the management of virtualised computer-based platforms. Through conducting a series of mixed quantitative and qualitative experiments in the areas of research, the initial findings and evaluation are presented in detail, using repeatable and observable processes and provide detailed analysis on the recorded outputs. The results of the investigation establish the advantages of using the IDE (expert system) to achieve the goal of reducing the complexity of managing virtualised computer-based platforms. In each detailed area examined, it is demonstrated how using a global management approach in combination with VM provisioning, migration, failover, and system resource controls can create a powerful autonomous system

Cloud Computing For Iraqi Ministry Of Finance

Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about over provisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or under provisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT. Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS) [2]. The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud. When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the general public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization, not made available to the general public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not include Private Clouds. People can be users or providers of SaaS, or users or providers of Utility Computing. We focus on SaaS Providers (Cloud Users) and Cloud Providers, which have received less attention than SaaS Users. From a hardware point of view, three aspects are new in Cloud Computing [3]

Pattern-based multi-cloud architecture migration

Many organizations migrate on-premise software applications to the cloud. However, current coarse-grained cloud migration solutions have made such migrations a non transparent task, an endeavor based on trial-anderror. This paper presents Variability-based, Pattern-driven Architecture Migration .V-PAM), a migration method based on (i) a catalogue of fine-grained service-based cloud architecture migration patterns that target multi-cloud, (ii) a situational migration process framework to guide pattern selection and composition, and (iii) a variability model to structure system migration into a coherent framework. The proposed migration patterns are based on empirical evidence from several migration projects, best practice for cloud architectures and a systematic literature review of existing research. Variability-based, Pattern-driven Architecture Migration allows an organization to (i) select appropriate migration patterns, (ii) compose them to define a migration plan, and (iii) extend them based on the identification of new patterns in new contexts. The patterns are at the core of our solution, embedded into a process model, with their selection governed by a variability model

Network Function Virtualization over Cloud-Cloud Computing as Business Continuity Solution

Cloud computing provides resources by using virtualization technology and a pay-as-you-go cost model. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a concept, which promises to grant network operators the required flexibility to quickly develop and provision new network functions and services, which can be hosted in the cloud. However, cloud computing is subject to failures which emphasizes the need to address user’s availability requirements. Availability refers to the cloud uptime and the cloud capability to operate continuously. Providing highly available services in cloud computing is essential for maintaining customer confidence and satisfaction and preventing revenue losses. Different techniques can be implemented to increase the system’s availability and assure business continuity. This chapter covers cloud computing as business continuity solution and cloud service availability. This chapter also covers the causes of service unavailability and the impact due to service unavailability. Further, this chapter covers various ways to achieve the required cloud service availability

Availability in mobile application in IaaS cloud

Deploying software system into IaaS cloud takes infrastructure out of user's control, which diminishes visibility and changes system administration. Service outages of infrastructure services and other risks to availability have caused concern for early users of cloud. In this thesis existing web application, which is deployed in IaaS cloud, was evaluated for availability. Whole spectrum of different cloud related incidents that compromises provided service was examined. General view from availability point of view of the case Internet service was formed based on interviews. Big cloud service providers have service level agreements effective and long cloud outages are rare events. Cloud service providers build mutually independent domains or zones into infrastructure. Internet availability is largely determinative of users' perceived performance of site. Using multiple cloud service providers is a solution to cloud service unavailability. Case company had discovered requirements for availability and sufficiently prevented threats. Case company was satisfied in cloud services and there is no need to withdraw from cloud. User is a significant threat to the dependability of system, but there are no definite means to prevent user from damaging system. Taking routinely and regularly backups of data outside the cloud is the core activity in IT crisis preparedness. Application architecture was evaluated and found satisfactory. Software system contains managed database service and load balancer as an advanced feature from IaaS provider. Both services give crucial support for the availability of the system. Examined system has conceptually simple stateless recovery.Ohjelmiston käyttö IaaS -pilvessä saattaa infrastruktuurin käyttäjän kontrollin ulottumattomiin, mikä heikentää näkyvyyttä ja muuttaa järjestelmän hallintaa. Palvelukatkot infrastruktuuripalveluissa ja muut riskit saatavuudelle ovat aiheuttaneet varovaisuutta pilvipalveluiden varhaisissa käyttäjissä. Tässä diplomityössä evaluoitiin olemassa olevan ja IaaS -pilvessä käytettävän web-sovelluksen saatavuutta. Kokonainen kirjo erilaisia pilveen liittyviä tapahtumia, jotka keskeyttävät tarjotun palvelun, tutkittiin. Yleiskuva saatavuuden näkökulmasta katsottuna muodostettiin haastattelujen pohjalta. Suurilla pilvipalveluiden tarjoajilla on voimassa olevat palvelutasosopimukset ja pitkät palvelukatkot ovat harvinaisia tapahtumia. Pilvipalveluiden tarjoajat rakentavat infrastruktuuriin toisistaan riippumattomasti toimivia alueita. Suurelta osalta määräävä tekijä käyttäjien kokeman sivuston suorituskyvyn kannalta on Internetin kautta palveluun liittymisen saatavuus. Useamman pilvipalvelun tarjoajan käyttäminen on ratkaisu pilvipalvelun saatavuuteen. Case-yritys oli löytänyt vaatimukset saatavuudelle ja riittävällä tavalla estänyt riskien toteutumisen. Case-yritys oli tyytyväinen pilvipalveluihin ja pilvestä pois vetäytymiselle ei ole tarvetta. Käyttäjä on merkittävä riski järjestelmän luotettavuudelle, mutta ei ole varmoja tapoja estää käyttäjää vahingoittamasta järjestelmää. Keskeinen toiminto tietotekniseen kriisiin varautumisessa on rutiininomainen ja säännöllinen varmuuskopioiden teko. Sovelluksen arkkitehtuuria evaluoitiin ja se havaittiin tarpeita vastaavaksi. Ohjelmistojärjestelmä sisältää palveluntarjoajan ylläpitämän tietokantapalvelun ja web-palvelimien tietoliikenteen kuorman tasaajan IaaS -palvelun edistyneinä ominaisuuksina. Molemmat palvelut tukevat ratkaisevasti järjestelmän saatavuutta. Tarkastellussa järjestelmässä on käsitteellisesti yksinkertainen tilaton järjestelmän palautuminen

Cloud service data collection for cloud service selection

Data collection for cloud DSS tools is a huge challenge not only because of the lack of integration of quality of experience with existing cloud data but also by not having a holistic view of security characteristics in cloud. We solve it by using crowdsourcing techniques&providing a security V too