Grid simulation services for the medical community

The first part of this paper presents a selection of medical simulation applications, including image reconstruction, near real-time registration for neuro-surgery, enhanced dose distribution calculation for radio-therapy, inhaled drug delivery prediction, plastic surgery planning and cardio-vascular system simulation. The latter two topics are discussed in some detail. In the second part, we show how such services can be made available to the clinical practitioner using Grid technology. We discuss the developments and experience made during the EU project GEMSS, which provides reliable, efficient, secure and lawful medical Grid services

An agent-based architecture for managing the provision of community care - the INCA (Intelligent Community Alarm) experience

Community Care is an area that requires extensive cooperation between independent agencies, each of which needs to meet its own objectives and targets. None are engaged solely in the delivery of community care, and need to integrate the service with their other responsibilities in a coherent and efficient manner. Agent technology provides the means by which effective cooperation can take place without compromising the essential security of both the client and the agencies involved as the appropriate set of responses can be generated through negotiation between the parties without the need for access to the main information repositories that would be necessary with conventional collaboration models. The autonomous nature of agents also means that a variety of agents can cooperate together with various local capabilities, so long as they conform to the relevant messaging requirements. This allows a variety of agents, with capabilities tailored to the carers to which they are attached to be developed so that cost-effective solutions can be provided. </p

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape

A design recording framework to facilitate knowledge sharing in collaborative software engineering

This paper describes an environment that allows a development team to share knowledge about software artefacts by recording decisions and rationales as well as supporting the team in formulating and maintaining design constraints. It explores the use of multi-dimensional design spaces for capturing various issues arising during development and presenting this meta-information using a network of views. It describes a framework to underlie the collaborative environment and shows the supporting architecture and its implementation. It addresses how the artefacts and their meta-information are captured in a non-invasive way and shows how an artefact repository is embedded to store and manage the artefacts

A service broker for Intercloud computing

This thesis aims at assisting users in finding the most suitable Cloud resources taking into account their functional and non-functional SLA requirements. A key feature of the work is a Cloud service broker acting as mediator between consumers and Clouds. The research involves the implementation and evaluation of two SLA-aware match-making algorithms by use of a simulation environment. The work investigates also the optimal deployment of Multi-Cloud workflows on Intercloud environments

Hofstede’s cultured negotiating agents

Tese de mestrado, Ciência Cognitiva, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Psicologia, Faculdade de Ciências, Faculdade de Letras, Faculdade de Medicina, 2011Hofstede and colleagues cultured negotiating agents simulation produced realistic behavior by incorporating Hofstede's dimensional model of culture in the agent's negotiation protocol and overall behavior. Given such a promising model to generate actual human-like behavior in artificial agents, and the lack of sound and well accepted replication methodologies, we tried to remake the original simulation and highlight the roadblocks encountered during the process. Along the way, we present the Hofstede‟s dimensional model of culture and its integration in the cultured agents social simulation. Some suggestions are made in order to avoid such obstacles. New results showed a relational equivalence.A simulação de Hofstede e colegas de agents culturais que negoceiam entre si produziu comportamentos realistas através da incorporação do modelo dimensional da cultura de Hofstede no protocolo de negociação dos agentes, e no seu comportamento em geral. Dado o potencial que tal modelo apresenta para gerar comportamentos humanos verdadeiros em agentes artificiais, assim como a falta de metodologias de replicação padrão e sólidas, tentámos replicar a simulação original e ilustrámos as dificuldades com que nos deparámos durante o processo. Apresentamos também o modelo dimensional da cultura de Hofstede e a sua integração numa simulação social de agentes culturais. Hofstede e colaboradores (2010a) definem cultura como um fenómeno que é específico de um grupo e não de um indivíduo; sistemas partilhados de valores, transmitidos desde tenra idade através da educação e do exemplo; estável ao longo de várias gerações apesar de alterações substantivas no ambiente e na tecnologia. Este modelo dimensional da cultura tem-se revelado fiável a nível de replicações e validações ao longo do tempo. Fazemos também algumas sugestões no sentido de evitar tais dificuldades na re-engenharia necessária à replicação do trabalho de Hostede, tais como usar práticas de Engenharia de Software e publicar resultados das simulações detalhados e de fácil acesso. Os novos resultados, da replicação, mostram uma equivalência relacional (qualitativa) em relação aos resultados originais e fornecem um bom pronúncio quanto ao potencial deste modelo cultural ser aplicado em vários cenários que não apenas o de comércio