STEER: Exploring the dynamic relationship between social information and networked media through experimentation

With the growing popularity of social networks, online video services and smart phones, the traditional content consumers are becoming the editors and broadcasters of their own stories. Within the EU FP7 project STEER, project partners have developed a novel system of new algorithms and toolsets that extract and analyse social informatics generated by social networks. Combined with advanced networking technologies, the platform creates services that offer more personalized and accurate content discovery and retrieval services. The STEER system has been deployed in multiple geographical locations during live social events such as the 2014 Winter Olympics. Our use case experiments demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the underlying technologies

Discovery and Push Notification Mechanisms for Mobile Cloud Services

Viimase viie aasta jooksul on mobiilsed seadmed nagu sülearvutid, pihuarvutid, nutitelefonid jmt. tunginud peaaegu kõigisse inimeste igapäevaelu tegevustesse. Samuti on põhjalik teadus- ja arendustegevus mobiilsete tehnoloogiate vallas viinud märkimisväärsete täiustusteni riistvara, tarkvara ja andmeedastuse alal. Tänapäeval on mobiilsed seadmed varustatud sisseehitatud sensorite, kaamera, puutetundliku ekraani, suurema hulga mäluga, kuid ka tõhusamate energiatarbemehhanismidega. Lisaks on iOS ja Android operatsioonisüsteemide väljalaske tõttu suurenenud nii mobiilirakenduste arv kui keerukus, pakkudes arvukamalt kõrgetasemelisi rakendusi. Sarnaselt on toimunud olulised arengud ja standardiseerimisele suunatud jõupingutused veebiteenusete valdkonnas ja elementaarsetele veebiteenuste ligipääsu kasutatakse laialdaselt nutitelefonidest. See on viinud loogilise järgmise sammuna veebiteenuste pakkumiseni nutitelefonidest. Telefonidest veebiteenuste pakkumise kontseptsioon ei ole uus ning seda on põhjalikult uurinud Srirama, kes pakkus välja Mobile Host (Mobiilne Veebiteenuse Pakkuja) kontseptsiooni. Algne realisatsioon kasutas aga aegunud tehnoloogiaid nagu JMEE, PersonalJava, SOAP arhitektuur jne. See töö uuendab Mobile Host'i kasutades uusimaid tehnoloogiad, nagu Android OS ja REST arhitektuur, ning pakub välja teenusemootori, mis põhineb Apache Felix'il - OSGi platvormi realisatsioonil piiratud ressurssidega seadmetele. Hämmastava kiirusega toimunud arengud mobiilsete arvutuste vallas võimaldavad uue põlvkonna veebirakenduste loomist valdkondades nagu keskkonnateadlikkus, sotsiaalvõrgustikud, koostöövahendid, asukohapõhised teenused jne. Sellised rakendused saavad ära kasutada Mobile Host'i võimalusi. Selle tulemusena on klientidel ligipääs väga suurele hulgale teenustele, mistõttu tekib vajadus efektiivse teenuste avastamise mehhanismi järele. See töö pakub välja kataloogipõhise avastusmehhanismi võrgu ülekatte toega suurtele, kõrge liikuvusega võrgustikele. See mehhanism toetub OWL-S'le, mis on ontoloogia veebiteenuseid pakkuvate ressursside avastamiseks, väljakutseks, koostamiseks ja jälgimiseks. Töö kirjeldab ka Srirama välja pakutud algupärast teenuste avastamise mehhanismi, mis toetub peer-to-peer võrkudele ja Apache Lucene võtmesõna otsingumootorile. Uurimuse käigus uuendatakse teenuseotsing kasutama Apache Solr'i, Apache Lucene'i viimast versiooni. Teenuste avastust testiti põhjalikult ja tulemused on töös kokkuvõtvalt välja toodud. Mobiilsete tehnoloogiate vallas uuritakse ka võimalust kasutada pilvetehnolologiat laiendamaks mobiilseadmete salvestusmahtu ja töökoormust edastades pilve andme- ja arvutusmahukad ülesanded. See soodustab keerulisemate ja võimalusrohkemate mobiilirakenduste arendust. Pilve delegeeritavate toimingute aeganõudva iseloomu tõttu aga on vajalik asünkroonne mehhanism teavitamaks kasutajat, millal töömahukad tegevused on lõpetatud. Mobiilsete pilveteenuste pakkujad ja vahevara lahendused võivad kasu saada Mobile Host'ist ja selle asünkroonsete teavituste võimekusest. Uurimus esitleb nelja teavitusmehhanismi: AC2DM, APNS, IBM MQTT ja Mobile Host'i põhine teavitus. Töö võtab kokku kvantitatiivse analüüsi tulemused ja toob välja nelja teavitamise lähenemise tugevused ja nõrkused. Lisaks kirjeldatakse CroudSTag rakenduse realisatsiooni - CroudSTag on mobiilirakendus, mille eesmärgiks on sotsiaalsete gruppide moodustamine kasutades näotuvastustehnoloogiat. CroudSTag-i realisatsioon kasutab mobiilseid pilveteenuseid ja Mobile Host'i, et pakkuda oma funktsionaalsust kasutajale.In the last lustrum the mobile devices such as laptops, PDAs, smart phones, tablets, etc. have pervaded almost all the environments where people perform their day-to-day activities. Further, the extensive Research and Development in mobile technologies has led to significant improvements in hardware, software and transmission. Similarly, there are significant developments and standardization efforts in web services domain and basic web services have been widely accessed from smart phones. This has lead to the logical next step of providing web services from the smart phones. The concept of the web service provisioning from smart phones is not new and has been extensively explored by Srirama who proposed the concept of Mobile Host. However, the original implementation considered aged technologies such as JMEE, PersonalJava, SOAP architecture among others. This work updates the Mobile Host to the latest technologies like Android OS and REST architecture and proposes a service engine based on Apache Felix, and OSGI implementation for resource constraint devices. Moreover, the astonishing speed in developments in mobile computing enable the new generation of applications from domains such as context-awareness, social network, collaborative tools, location based services, etc., which benefit from the Mobile Host service provisioning capabilities. As a result the clients have access to a huge number of services available; therefore, an efficient and effective service discovery mechanism is required. The thesis proposes a directory-based with network overlay support discovery mechanism for large networks with high mobility. The proposed discovery mechanism relies in OWL-S, an ontology for service discovery, invocation, composition, and monitoring of web resources. The work also considers the original service discovery mechanism proposed by Srirama relying in peer-to-peer networks and Apache Lucene, a keyword search engine. The study updates the service search to Apache Solr, the latest development for Apache Lucene. The service discovery was extensively tested and the results are summarized in this work. Mobile technologies are looking into the clouds for extending their capabilities in storage and processing by offloading data and process intensive tasks. This fosters the development of more complex and rich mobile applications. However, due to the time-consuming nature of the tasks delegated to the clouds, an asynchronous mechanism is necessary for notifying the user when the intensive tasks are completed. Mobile cloud service providers and Middleware solutions might benefit from Mobile Host and its asynchronous notification capabilities. The study presents four push notification mechanisms being AC2DM, APNS, IBM MQTT and Mobile Host based push notification. The work summarizes the results of a quantitative analysis and highlights the strengths and weakness of the four notifications approaches. In addition, it explains CroudSTag realization, a mobile application that aims the social group formation by means of facial recognition that relies in mobile cloud services and Mobile Host to provide its functionality to the user

Trust Management for Mobile Media Distribution

Multimedia content delivery to capable smart phones with high-speed next-generation Internet connectivity is becoming commonplace. However, the openness of delivery demands adaptive and robust management of intellectual property rights. The purpose of this article is to describe a framework to address the central issues in content delivery: a scalable peer-to-peer-based content delivery model. Our method pairs the delivery with a secure access control model that enables data providers to secure a return from making their original content available. Our work resulted in a prototype implementation written in Java that includes a client for the Android mobile platform. Adding robust trust management to scalable peer-to-peer content delivery is the major significance of our work

A lightweight distributed super peer election algorithm for unstructured dynamic P2P systems

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresNowadays with the current growth of information exchange, and the increasing mobility of devices, it becomes essential to use technology to monitor this development. For that P2P networks are used, the exchange of information between agencies is facilitated, these now being applied in mobile networks, including MANETs, where they have special features such as the fact that they are semi-centralized, where it takes peers more ability to make a greater role in the network. But those peer with more capacity, which are used in the optimization of various parameters of these systems, such as optimization\to research, are difficult to identify due to the fact that the network does not have a fixed topology, be constantly changing, (we like to go online and offline, to change position, etc.) and not to allow the exchange of large messages. To this end, this thesis proposes a distributed election algorithm of us greater capacity among several possible goals, enhance research in the network. This includes distinguishing characteristics, such as election without global knowledge network, minimal exchange of messages, distributed decision made without dependence on us and the possibility of influencing the election outcome as the special needs of the network

Integrating information and knowledge for enterprise innovation

It has widely been accepted that enterprise integration, can be a source of socio-technical and cultural problems within organisations wishing to provide a focussed end-to-end business service. This can cause possible “straitjacketing” of business process architectures, thus suppressing responsive business re-engineering and competitive advantage for some companies. Accordingly, the current typology and emergent forms of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies are set in the context of understanding information and knowledge integration philosophies. As such, key influences and trends in emerging IS integration choices, for end-to-end, cost-effective and flexible knowledge integration, are examined. As touch points across and outside organisations proliferate, via work-flow and relationship management-driven value innovation, aspects of knowledge refinement and knowledge integration pose challenges to maximising the potential of innovation and sustainable success, within enterprises. This is in terms of the increasing propensity for data fragmentation and the lack of effective information management, in the light of information overload. Furthermore, the nature of IS mediation which is inherent within decision making and workflow-based business processes, provides the basis for evaluation of the effects of information and knowledge integration. Hence, the authors propose a conceptual, holistic evaluation framework which encompasses these ideas. It is thus argued that such trends, and their implications regarding enterprise IS integration to engender sustainable competitive advantage, require fundamental re-thinking

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges