Pattern-driven security, privacy, dependability and interoperability management of iot environments

Achieving Security, Privacy, Dependability and Interoperability (SPDI) is of paramount importance for the ubiquitous deployment and impact maximization of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Nevertheless, said requirements are not only difficult to achieve at system initialization, but also hard to prove and maintain at run-time. This paper highlights an approach to tackling the above challenges, through the definition of pattern language and a framework that can guarantee SPDI in IoT orchestrations. By integrating pattern reasoning engines at the various layers of the IoT infrastructure, and a machine-processable representation of said pattern through Drools rules, the proposed framework can provide ways to fulfill SPDI requirements at design time, and also provide the means to guarantee those SPDI properties and manage the orchestrations accordingly. Moreover, an application example of the framework is presented in an Industrial IoT monitoring environment

Service-oriented system engineering

Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE) is one of the emerging research areas that involves a number of research challenges in engineering service-oriented systems, the architecture and computing paradigm as well as the development and management of service-oriented systems. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) exploits services as the fundamental elements for developing computer-based systems. It has been applied to various areas and promotes fundamental changes to system architecture, especially changing the way software systems are being analyzed, architected, designed, implemented, tested, evaluated, delivered, consumed, maintained and evolved. The innovations of SOC also offer many interesting avenues of research for scientific and industrial communities. In this paper, we present the concepts of the SOSE from the related work. The motivation, opportunities and challenges of the SOSE is highlighted thereafter. In addition to this, a brief overview of accepted papers in our Special Issue on SOSE is presented. Finally we highlight and summarize this paper.N/

Readability index of essays as an alternative to the scoring procedure in L2 academic writing

Samples of participants’ writing were scored by two raters using TOEFL writing scoring rubric. The readability index of each text was calculated through the use of six readability formulae and graphs, i.e., Flesch-Kincaid index, Reading Ease index, FOG index, SMOG formula, Fry’s graph, and Dale-Chall readability index. The scores given to each essay were later compared to the obtained readability indices through the use of Spearman rho correlation coefficient formula. The correlation coefficients obtained ranged from .05 to .15, none of which significant. This indicates that readability index of a text and the writing assessment procedure through holistic rubrics are dealing with two different constructs and have very little in common. This also calls into question the reliability and validity of some computerized assessment programs such as PEG, LSA, or E-rater, which take into account factors very similar to those examined in readability formulae.