Patterns of Participation and Motivation in Folding@home: The Contribution of Hardware Enthusiasts and Overclockers

Folding@home is a distributed computing project in which participants run protein folding simulations on their computers. Participants complete work units and are awarded points for their contribution. An investigation into motivations to participate and patterns of participation revealed the significant contribution of a sub-community composed of individuals who custom-build computers to maximise their processing power. These individuals, known as “overclockers” or “hardware enthusiasts,” use distributed computing projects such as Folding@home to benchmark their modified computers and to compete with one another to see who can process the greatest number of project work units. Many are initially drawn to the project to learn about computer hardware from other overclockers and to compete for points. However, once they learn more about the scientific outputs of Folding@home, some participants become more motivated by the desire to contribute to scientific research. Overclockers form numerous online communities where members collaborate and help each other maximise their computing output. They invest heavily in their computers and process the majority of Folding@home’s simulations, thus providing an invaluable (and free) resource

Proceedings of the Workshop on Membrane Computing, WMC 2016.

yesThis Workshop on Membrane Computing, at the Conference of Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC), 12th July 2016, Manchester, UK, is the second event of this type after the Workshop at UCNC 2015 in Auckland, New Zealand*. Following the tradition of the 2015 Workshop the Proceedings are published as technical report. The Workshop consisted of one invited talk and six contributed presentations (three full papers and three extended abstracts) covering a broad spectrum of topics in Membrane Computing, from computational and complexity theory to formal verification, simulation and applications in robotics. All these papers – see below, but the last extended abstract, are included in this volume. The invited talk given by Rudolf Freund, “P SystemsWorking in Set Modes”, presented a general overview on basic topics in the theory of Membrane Computing as well as new developments and future research directions in this area. Radu Nicolescu in “Distributed and Parallel Dynamic Programming Algorithms Modelled on cP Systems” presented an interesting dynamic programming algorithm in a distributed and parallel setting based on P systems enriched with adequate data structure and programming concepts representation. Omar Belingheri, Antonio E. Porreca and Claudio Zandron showed in “P Systems with Hybrid Sets” that P systems with negative multiplicities of objects are less powerful than Turing machines. Artiom Alhazov, Rudolf Freund and Sergiu Ivanov presented in “Extended Spiking Neural P Systems with States” new results regading the newly introduced topic of spiking neural P systems where states are considered. “Selection Criteria for Statistical Model Checker”, by Mehmet E. Bakir and Mike Stannett, presented some early experiments in selecting adequate statistical model checkers for biological systems modelled with P systems. In “Towards Agent-Based Simulation of Kernel P Systems using FLAME and FLAME GPU”, Raluca Lefticaru, Luis F. Macías-Ramos, Ionuţ M. Niculescu, Laurenţiu Mierlă presented some of the advatages of implementing kernel P systems simulations in FLAME. Andrei G. Florea and Cătălin Buiu, in “An Efficient Implementation and Integration of a P Colony Simulator for Swarm Robotics Applications" presented an interesting and efficient implementation based on P colonies for swarms of Kilobot robots. *http://ucnc15.wordpress.fos.auckland.ac.nz/workshop-on-membrane-computingwmc- at-the-conference-on-unconventional-computation-natural-computation

Report on the Second Workshop on Distributed AI

On June 24, 1981 twenty-five participants from organizations around the country gathered in MIT's Endicott House for the Second Annual Workshop on Distributed AI. The three-day workshop was designed as an informal meeting, centered mainly around brief research reports presented by each group, along with an invited talk. In keeping with the spirit of the meeting, this report was prepared as a distributed document, with each speaker contributing a summary of his remarks.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Cooperation Patterns and Adaptation Patterns for Service-Based Inter-Organizational Workflows

International audienceModernization is an effective approach to making existing mainframe and distributed systems more responsive to business needs. SOA (service-oriented architecture) is an adequate paradigm that allows companies to tap into the business value in their current systems and position IT for rapid future changes to the business model. In our research works, we focus on the use of SOA to implement Inter- Organizational WorkFlows (IOWF). The goal is to take benefits from the advantages offered by the SOA paradigm like interoperability, reusability and flexibility in order to deal with workflow models easily adaptable, evolvable and reusable. This paper focuses on two specific architectures of IOWF which are the "chained execution" and the "subcontracting"; the first issue of this work is to define Service-Based Cooperation Patterns (SBCP) suitable to the two architectures considered. A SBCP is based on SOA; it is defined through three main dimensions: the distribution of services among the partner's sites, the control of instance execution and the structure of interaction between the workflows involved in the cooperation. The second issue of the paper consists of adaptation and evolution of IOWF process models obeying to the defined SBCP. Then, we state the main operations of adaptation that can be applied on these models; we focus on adaptation at process and interactional levels. Conformably to the three dimensions of SBCP, we define three classes of adaptation patterns: "service adaptation", "control flow adaptation" and "interaction adaptation" patterns. Also, we particularly distinguish some operations of adaptation called evolution of process models based on two perspectives: the expansion of the global functionality of the process and the expansion of the cooperation; we show that some evolutions are realized by reuse of existing IOWF models. For implementation, we consider IOWF process models specified with BPEL

TalkFutures: Supporting Qualitative Practices in Distributed Community Engagements

Community engagements are qualitative processes that make use of participants local knowledge for democratic decision-making, but often exclude participants from data analysis and dissemination. This can mean that they are left feeling that their voice is not properly represented in the final output. This paper presents a digital community engagement process, TalkFutures, that actively involves participants in the production, distributed analysis and summarization of qualitative data. The design of TalkFutures was explored through a five-week deployment with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) as part of a consultation designed to inform future strategy. Our analysis of deployment metrics and post-deployment interviews outline how TalkFutures: (i) increased modes of participation across the qualitative workflow; (ii) reduced barriers to participation; and (iii) improved representation in the engagement processes

Report of the user requirements and web based access for eResearch workshops

The User Requirements and Web Based Access for eResearch Workshop, organized jointly by NeSC and NCeSS, was held on 19 May 2006. The aim was to identify lessons learned from e-Science projects that would contribute to our capacity to make Grid infrastructures and tools usable and accessible for diverse user communities. Its focus was on providing an opportunity for a pragmatic discussion between e-Science end users and tool builders in order to understand usability challenges, technological options, community-specific content and needs, and methodologies for design and development. We invited members of six UK e-Science projects and one US project, trying as far as possible to pair a user and developer from each project in order to discuss their contrasting perspectives and experiences. Three breakout group sessions covered the topics of user-developer relations, commodification, and functionality. There was also extensive post-meeting discussion, summarized here. Additional information on the workshop, including the agenda, participant list, and talk slides, can be found online at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/685/ Reference: NeSC report UKeS-2006-07 available from http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2006-07.pd

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse