The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed

Applying constraint solving to the management of distributed applications

Submitted to DOA08We present our approach for deploying and managing distributed component-based applications. A Desired State Description (DSD), written in a high-level declarative language, specifies requirements for a distributed application. Our infrastructure accepts a DSD as input, and from it automatically configures and deploys the distributed application. Subsequent violations of the original requirements are detected and, where possible, automatically rectified by reconfiguration and redeployment of the necessary application components. A constraint solving tool is used to plan deployments that meet the application requirements.Postprin

Obvious: a meta-toolkit to encapsulate information visualization toolkits. One toolkit to bind them all

This article describes “Obvious”: a meta-toolkit that abstracts and encapsulates information visualization toolkits implemented in the Java language. It intends to unify their use and postpone the choice of which concrete toolkit(s) to use later-on in the development of visual analytics applications. We also report on the lessons we have learned when wrapping popular toolkits with Obvious, namely Prefuse, the InfoVis Toolkit, partly Improvise, JUNG and other data management libraries. We show several examples on the uses of Obvious, how the different toolkits can be combined, for instance sharing their data models. We also show how Weka and RapidMiner, two popular machine-learning toolkits, have been wrapped with Obvious and can be used directly with all the other wrapped toolkits. We expect Obvious to start a co-evolution process: Obvious is meant to evolve when more components of Information Visualization systems will become consensual. It is also designed to help information visualization systems adhere to the best practices to provide a higher level of interoperability and leverage the domain of visual analytics

A simple approach to distributed objects in prolog

We present the design of a distributed object system for Prolog, based on adding remote execution and distribution capabilities to a previously existing object system. Remote execution brings RPC into a Prolog system, and its semantics is easy to express in terms of well-known Prolog builtins. The final distributed object design features state mobility and user-transparent network behavior. We sketch an implementation which provides distributed garbage collection and some degree of tolerance to network failures. We provide a preliminary study of the overhead of the communication mechanism for some test cases

Aspect-oriented interaction in multi-organisational web-based systems

Separation of concerns has been presented as a promising tool to tackle the design of complex systems in which cross-cutting properties that do not fit into the scope of a class must be satisfied. Unfortunately, current proposals assume that objects interact by means of object-oriented method calls, which implies that they embed interactions with others into their functional code. This makes them dependent on this interaction model, and makes it difficult to reuse them in a context in which another interaction model is more suited, e.g., tuple spaces, multiparty meetings, ports, and so forth. In this paper, we show that functionality can be described separately from the interaction model used, which helps enhance reusability of functional code and coordination patterns. Our proposal is innovative in that it is the first that achieves a clear separation between functionality and interaction in an aspect-oriented manner. In order to show that it is feasible, we adapted the multiparty interaction model to the context of multiorganisational web-based systems and developed a class framework to build business objects whose performance rates comparably to handmade implementations; the development time, however, decreases significantly.Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2000-1106-C02-0

Fast Recompilation of Object Oriented Modules

Once a program file is modified, the recompilation time should be minimized, without sacrificing execution speed or high level object oriented features. The recompilation time is often a problem for the large graphical interactive distributed applications tackled by modern OO languages. A compilation server and fast code generator were developed and integrated with the SRC Modula-3 compiler and Linux ELF dynamic linker. The resulting compilation and recompilation speedups are impressive. The impact of different language features, processor speed, and application size are discussed

The SATIN component system - a metamodel for engineering adaptable mobile systems

Mobile computing devices, such as personal digital assistants and mobile phones, are becoming increasingly popular, smaller, and more capable. We argue that mobile systems should be able to adapt to changing requirements and execution environments. Adaptation requires the ability-to reconfigure the deployed code base on a mobile device. Such reconfiguration is considerably simplified if mobile applications are component-oriented rather than monolithic blocks of code. We present the SATIN (system adaptation targeting integrated networks) component metamodel, a lightweight local component metamodel that offers the flexible use of logical mobility primitives to reconfigure the software system by dynamically transferring code. The metamodel is implemented in the SATIN middleware system, a component-based mobile computing middleware that uses the mobility primitives defined in the metamodel to reconfigure both itself and applications that it hosts. We demonstrate the suitability of SATIN in terms of lightweightedness, flexibility, and reusability for the creation of adaptable mobile systems by using it to implement, port, and evaluate a number of existing and new applications, including an active network platform developed for satellite communication at the European space agency. These applications exhibit different aspects of adaptation and demonstrate the flexibility of the approach and the advantages gaine

Chemical applications of escience to interfacial spectroscopy

This report is a summary of works carried out by the author between October 2003 and September 2004, in the first year of his PhD studie