Autonomous and context-aware scheduling for public displays using place-based tag clouds

Public displays are an increasingly ubiquitous element of our socio-digital landscape with a strong potential to become key building blocks for AmI. For that purpose, they should have the ability to dynamically and autonomously select content from web sources according to the relevance of their content to the Continuous flow of social settings around the display. In this paper, we explore the creation of a public display system that evaluates the relevance of content from web sources and selects the most relevant content according to a dynamic tag cloud that incorporates static place definitions, but is also sensitive to the people around the display. We have developed and evaluate a dynamic content selection system based on those principles.. The results show that place visitors recognize the sensitivity of the system to their demands and that a place tag cloud can provide an important element for the interpretation of place and for the combination of the interests expressed by the place owner and the multiple place visitors.The first author was supported by a Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology scholarship (SFRH/BD/31292/2006)

Tag clouds for situated interaction and place profiling

Tag clouds have become very popular as visual representations of the main topics in document sets or as navigation tools that can provide quick access to resources related with specific topics. However, their ability to represent the information environment associated with any meaningful reality in a way that is collectively visible, actionable and easily understood may also be very relevant, even when the reality being represented is no longer a set of documents or resources, but a stream of interactions occurring within a particular ubiquitous computing environment. In this paper, we explore the use of tag clouds within the context of situated displays and services. We hypothesise that such tag clouds may have a role as dynamic representations of place and also as interaction controls, supporting the same comprehension and navigation functions of classical tag clouds. We describe two case studies in which this concept of situated tag cloud has been experimented in real-world settings. The case studies demonstrate two different applications of the tag cloud concept as the basis for place description and situated interaction. The results obtained from the case studies suggest that situated tag clouds can indeed provide valuable representations of place and situations and can also support simple interaction models, allowing people to reason about the system behaviour and how it is being influenced by new interactions.Fernando Ribeiro was supported by a Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology scholarship (SFRH/BD/31292/2006). The research leading to these results has received funding from FCT under the Carnegie Mellon - Portugal agreement: Wesp (Web Security and Privacy (Grant CMU-PT/SE/028/2008)

Internet of Things Strategic Research Roadmap

Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated part of Future Internet including existing and evolving Internet and network developments and could be conceptually defined as a dynamic global network infrastructure with self configuring capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual “things” have identities, physical attributes, and virtual personalities, use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network

Dependability where the mobile world meets the enterprise world

As we move toward increasingly larger scales of computing, complexity of systems and networks has increased manifold leading to massive failures of cloud providers (Amazon Cloudfront, November 2014) and geographically localized outages of cellular services (T-Mobile, June 2014). In this dissertation, we investigate the dependability aspects of two of the most prevalent computing platforms today, namely, smartphones and cloud computing. These two seemingly disparate platforms are part of a cohesive story—they interact to provide end-to-end services which are increasingly being delivered over mobile platforms, examples being iCloud, Google Drive and their smartphone counterparts iPhone and Android. ^ In one of the early work on characterizing failures in dominant mobile OSes, we analyzed bug repositories of Android and Symbian and found similarities in their failure modes [ISSRE2010]. We also presented a classification of root causes and quantified the impact of ease of customizing the smartphones on system reliability. Our evaluation of Inter-Component Communication in Android [DSN2012] show an alarming number of exception handling errors where a phone may be crashed by passing it malformed component invocation messages, even from unprivileged applications. In this work, we also suggest language extensions that can mitigate these problems. ^ Mobile applications today are increasingly being used to interact with enterprise-class web services commonly hosted in virtualized environments. Virutalization suffers from the problem of imperfect performance isolation where contention for low-level hardware resources can impact application performance. Through a set of rigorous experiments in a private cloud testbed and in EC2, we show that interference induced performance degradation is a reality. Our experiments have also shown that optimal configuration settings for web servers change during such phases of interference. Based on this observation, we design and implement the IC 2engine which can mitigate effects of interference by reconfiguring web server parameters [MW2014]. We further improve IC 2 by incorporating it into a two-level configuration engine, named ICE, for managing web server clusters [ICAC2015]. Our evaluations show that, compared to an interference agnostic configuration, IC 2 can improve response time of web servers by upto 40%, while ICE can improve response time by up to 94% during phases of interference

Enabling the Development and Implementation of Digital Twins : Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality

Welcome to the 20th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality (CONVR 2020). This year we are meeting on-line due to the current Coronavirus pandemic. The overarching theme for CONVR2020 is "Enabling the development and implementation of Digital Twins". CONVR is one of the world-leading conferences in the areas of virtual reality, augmented reality and building information modelling. Each year, more than 100 participants from all around the globe meet to discuss and exchange the latest developments and applications of virtual technologies in the architectural, engineering, construction and operation industry (AECO). The conference is also known for having a unique blend of participants from both academia and industry. This year, with all the difficulties of replicating a real face to face meetings, we are carefully planning the conference to ensure that all participants have a perfect experience. We have a group of leading keynote speakers from industry and academia who are covering up to date hot topics and are enthusiastic and keen to share their knowledge with you. CONVR participants are very loyal to the conference and have attended most of the editions over the last eighteen editions. This year we are welcoming numerous first timers and we aim to help them make the most of the conference by introducing them to other participants

Utilizing distributed web resources for enhanced knowledge representation

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Proceedings of the 1st Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (DC-ECAI 2020)

1st Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (DC-ECAI 2020), 29-30 August, 2020 Santiago de Compostela, SpainThe DC-ECAI 2020 provides a unique opportunity for PhD students, who are close to finishing their doctorate research, to interact with experienced researchers in the field. Senior members of the community are assigned as mentors for each group of students based on the student’s research or similarity of research interests. The DC-ECAI 2020, which is held virtually this year, allows students from all over the world to present their research and discuss their ongoing research and career plans with their mentor, to do networking with other participants, and to receive training and mentoring about career planning and career option

Big Data and Large-scale Data Analytics: Efficiency of Sustainable Scalability and Security of Centralized Clouds and Edge Deployment Architectures

One of the significant shifts of the next-generation computing technologies will certainly be in the development of Big Data (BD) deployment architectures. Apache Hadoop, the BD landmark, evolved as a widely deployed BD operating system. Its new features include federation structure and many associated frameworks, which provide Hadoop 3.x with the maturity to serve different markets. This dissertation addresses two leading issues involved in exploiting BD and large-scale data analytics realm using the Hadoop platform. Namely, (i)Scalability that directly affects the system performance and overall throughput using portable Docker containers. (ii) Security that spread the adoption of data protection practices among practitioners using access controls. An Enhanced Mapreduce Environment (EME), OPportunistic and Elastic Resource Allocation (OPERA) scheduler, BD Federation Access Broker (BDFAB), and a Secure Intelligent Transportation System (SITS) of multi-tiers architecture for data streaming to the cloud computing are the main contribution of this thesis study