Designing Software Architectures As a Composition of Specializations of Knowledge Domains

This paper summarizes our experimental research and software development activities in designing robust, adaptable and reusable software architectures. Several years ago, based on our previous experiences in object-oriented software development, we made the following assumption: ‘A software architecture should be a composition of specializations of knowledge domains’. To verify this assumption we carried out three pilot projects. In addition to the application of some popular domain analysis techniques such as use cases, we identified the invariant compositional structures of the software architectures and the related knowledge domains. Knowledge domains define the boundaries of the adaptability and reusability capabilities of software systems. Next, knowledge domains were mapped to object-oriented concepts. We experienced that some aspects of knowledge could not be directly modeled in terms of object-oriented concepts. In this paper we describe our approach, the pilot projects, the experienced problems and the adopted solutions for realizing the software architectures. We conclude the paper with the lessons that we learned from this experience

Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

Resilient seed systems for climate change adaptation and sustainable livelihoods in the East Africa sub-region: Report of training workshop, Addis Ababa Ethiopia, 17-21 September 2019

Bioversity International is implementing a Dutch-supported project entitled: Resilient seed systems for climate change adaptation and sustainable livelihoods in the East Africa sub-region. This work aims to boost timely and affordable access to good-quality seed for a portfolio of crops / varieties for millions of women and men farmers’ and their communities across east Africa. A first project training: i) contextualized farmer varietal selection, ii) provided practical demonstrations of tools for climate-change analysis, iii) introduced policy issues associated with managing crop diversity, iv) outlined characterization and evaluation of genetic resources, and v) articulated associated gender issues, and issues related to disseminating elite materials. The training concluded with a contextualizing field trip. In the workshop evaluation, 98% participants declared their overall satisfaction level to be high (74%) or medium (24%), indicating the training furnished them with good ideas for networking and using the tools and methods they learned about

Automated user modeling for personalized digital libraries

Digital libraries (DL) have become one of the most typical ways of accessing any kind of digitalized information. Due to this key role, users welcome any improvements on the services they receive from digital libraries. One trend used to improve digital services is through personalization. Up to now, the most common approach for personalization in digital libraries has been user-driven. Nevertheless, the design of efficient personalized services has to be done, at least in part, in an automatic way. In this context, machine learning techniques automate the process of constructing user models. This paper proposes a new approach to construct digital libraries that satisfy user’s necessity for information: Adaptive Digital Libraries, libraries that automatically learn user preferences and goals and personalize their interaction using this information

Towards Adaptable and Adaptive Policy-Free Middleware

We believe that to fully support adaptive distributed applications, middleware must itself be adaptable, adaptive and policy-free. In this paper we present a new language-independent adaptable and adaptive policy framework suitable for integration in a wide variety of middleware systems. This framework facilitates the construction of adaptive distributed applications. The framework addresses adaptability through its ability to represent a wide range of specific middleware policies. Adaptiveness is supported by a rich contextual model, through which an application programmer may control precisely how policies should be selected for any particular interaction with the middleware. A contextual pattern mechanism facilitates the succinct expression of both coarse- and fine-grain policy contexts. Policies may be specified and altered dynamically, and may themselves take account of dynamic conditions. The framework contains no hard-wired policies; instead, all policies can be configured.Comment: Submitted to Dependable and Adaptive Distributed Systems Track, ACM SAC 200

Intelligent multimedia communication for enhanced medical e-collaboration in back pain treatment

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 SAGE PublicationsRemote, multimedia-based, collaboration in back pain treatment is an option which only recently has come to the attention of clinicians and IT providers. The take-up of such applications will inevitably depend on their ability to produce an acceptable level of service over congested and unreliable public networks. However, although the problem of multimedia application-level performance is closely linked to both the user perspective of the experience as well as to the service provided by the underlying network, it is rarely studied from an integrated viewpoint. To alleviate this problem, we propose an intelligent mechanism that integrates user-related requirements with the more technical characterization of quality of service, obtaining a priority order of low-level quality of service parameters, which would ensure that user-centred quality of perception is maintained at an optimum level. We show how our framework is capable of suggesting appropriately tailored transmission protocols, by incorporating user requirements in the remote delivery of e-health solutions