PETRA: Process Evolution using a TRAce-based system on a maintenance platform

To meet increasing needs in the field of maintenance, we studied the dynamic aspect of process and services on a maintenance platform, a major challenge in process mining and knowledge engineering. Hence, we propose a dynamic experience feedback approach to exploit maintenance process behaviors in real execution of the maintenance platform. An active learning process exploiting event log is introduced by taking into account the dynamic aspect of knowledge using trace engineering. Our proposal makes explicit the underlying knowledge of platform users by means of a trace-based system called “PETRA”. The goal of this system is to extract new knowledge rules about transitions and activities in maintenance processes from previous platform executions as well as its user (i.e. maintenance operators) interactions. While following a Knowledge Traces Discovery process and handling the maintenance ontology IMAMO, “PETRA” is composed of three main subsystems: tracking, learning and knowledge capitalization. The capitalized rules are shared in the platform knowledge base in order to be reused in future process executions. The feasibility of this method is proven through concrete use cases involving four maintenance processes and their simulation

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Practical applications of multi-agent systems in electric power systems

The transformation of energy networks from passive to active systems requires the embedding of intelligence within the network. One suitable approach to integrating distributed intelligent systems is multi-agent systems technology, where components of functionality run as autonomous agents capable of interaction through messaging. This provides loose coupling between components that can benefit the complex systems envisioned for the smart grid. This paper reviews the key milestones of demonstrated agent systems in the power industry and considers which aspects of agent design must still be addressed for widespread application of agent technology to occur

Navigating the IoT landscape: Unraveling forensics, security issues, applications, research challenges, and future

Given the exponential expansion of the internet, the possibilities of security attacks and cybercrimes have increased accordingly. However, poorly implemented security mechanisms in the Internet of Things (IoT) devices make them susceptible to cyberattacks, which can directly affect users. IoT forensics is thus needed for investigating and mitigating such attacks. While many works have examined IoT applications and challenges, only a few have focused on both the forensic and security issues in IoT. Therefore, this paper reviews forensic and security issues associated with IoT in different fields. Future prospects and challenges in IoT research and development are also highlighted. As demonstrated in the literature, most IoT devices are vulnerable to attacks due to a lack of standardized security measures. Unauthorized users could get access, compromise data, and even benefit from control of critical infrastructure. To fulfil the security-conscious needs of consumers, IoT can be used to develop a smart home system by designing a FLIP-based system that is highly scalable and adaptable. Utilizing a blockchain-based authentication mechanism with a multi-chain structure can provide additional security protection between different trust domains. Deep learning can be utilized to develop a network forensics framework with a high-performing system for detecting and tracking cyberattack incidents. Moreover, researchers should consider limiting the amount of data created and delivered when using big data to develop IoT-based smart systems. The findings of this review will stimulate academics to seek potential solutions for the identified issues, thereby advancing the IoT field.Comment: 77 pages, 5 figures, 5 table

Individuation through infrastructure :Get Full Text Research, data extraction and the academic publishing oligopoly

This article explores the recent turn within academic publishing towards ‘seamless access’, an approach to content provision that ensures users do not have to continually authenticate in order to access journal content. Through a critical exploration of Get Full Text Research, a service developed collaboratively by five of the world's largest academic publishers to provide such seamless access to academic research, the article shows how publishers are seeking to control the ways in which readers access publications in order to trace, control and ultimately monetise user interactions on their platforms. Theorised as a process of individuation through infrastructure, the article reveals how publishers are attempting an ontological shift to position the individual, quantifiable researcher, rather than the published content, at the centre of the scholarly communication universe. The implications of the shift towards individuation are revealed as part of a broader trend in scholarly communication infrastructure towards data extraction, mirroring a trend within digital capitalism more generally

Giving by taking away: big tech, data colonialism and the reconfiguration of social good

Big Tech companies have recently led and financed projects that claim to use datafication for the “social good.” This article explores what kind of social good it is that this sort of datafication engenders. Drawing mostly on the analysis of corporate public communications and patent applications, it finds that these initiatives hinge on the reconfiguration of social good as datafied, probabilistic, and profitable. These features, the article argues, are better understood within the framework of data colonialism. Rethinking “doing good” as a facet of data colonialism illuminates the inherent harm to freedom these projects produce and why, to “give,” Big Tech must often take away

On web user tracking of browsing patterns for personalised advertising

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems on 19/02/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17445760.2017.1282480On today’s Web, users trade access to their private data for content and services. App and service providers want to know everything they can about their users, in order to improve their product experience. Also, advertising sustains the business model of many websites and applications. Efficient and successful advertising relies on predicting users’ actions and tastes to suggest a range of products to buy. Both service providers and advertisers try to track users’ behaviour across their product network. For application providers this means tracking users’ actions within their platform. For third-party services following users, means being able to track them across different websites and applications. It is well known how, while surfing the Web, users leave traces regarding their identity in the form of activity patterns and unstructured data. These data constitute what is called the user’s online footprint. We analyse how advertising networks build and collect users footprints and how the suggested advertising reacts to changes in the user behaviour.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft