Challenges for the comprehensive management of cloud services in a PaaS framework

The 4CaaSt project aims at developing a PaaS framework that enables flexible definition, marketing, deployment and management of Cloud-based services and applications. The major innovations proposed by 4CaaSt are the blueprint and its lifecycle management, a one stop shop for Cloud services and a PaaS level resource management featuring elasticity. 4CaaSt also provides a portfolio of ready to use Cloud native services and Cloud-aware immigrant technologies

User experiments with the Eurovision cross-language image retrieval system

In this paper we present Eurovision, a text-based system for cross-language (CL) image retrieval. The system is evaluated by multilingual users for two search tasks with the system configured in English and five other languages. To our knowledge this is the first published set of user experiments for CL image retrieval. We show that: (1) it is possible to create a usable multilingual search engine using little knowledge of any language other than English, (2) categorizing images assists the user's search, and (3) there are differences in the way users search between the proposed search tasks. Based on the two search tasks and user feedback, we describe important aspects of any CL image retrieval system

Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments

Customizing Data-plane Processing in Edge Routers

While OpenFlow enables the customization of the control plane of a router, currently no solutions are available for the customization of the data plane. This paper presents a prototype that offers to third parties (even end-users) the possibility to install their own applications on the data plane of a router, particularly the ones operating at the edge of the network. This paper presents the motivation of the idea, the reason why we use OpenFlow even if it does not seem appropriate for the data plane, the architecture and the implementation of our prototype, and a first characterization of the system running in our la

Configuration Tools: Working Together

Since the LISA conferences began, the character of a typical ‘‘large installation’ ’ has changed greatly. Most large sites tended to consist of a comparatively small number of handcrafted ‘‘servers’ ’ supporting a larger number of very similar ‘‘clients’ ’ (which would usually be configured with the aid of some automatic tool). A modern large site involves a more complex mesh of services, often with demanding requirements for completely automatic reconfiguration of entire services to provide fault-tolerance. As these changes have happened however, the tools available to provide configuration management for a site have not evolved to keep pace with these new challenges. This paper looks at some of the reasons why configuration tools have failed to move forward, and presents some suggestions for enabling the state of the art to advance. Background and Motivation Configuration Tools have been an important theme at LISA for many years, and most conferences include one or more papers in this area. Despite increasing recognition of the importance of the configuratio

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

Bridging the Semantic Gap in Multimedia Information Retrieval: Top-down and Bottom-up approaches

Semantic representation of multimedia information is vital for enabling the kind of multimedia search capabilities that professional searchers require. Manual annotation is often not possible because of the shear scale of the multimedia information that needs indexing. This paper explores the ways in which we are using both top-down, ontologically driven approaches and bottom-up, automatic-annotation approaches to provide retrieval facilities to users. We also discuss many of the current techniques that we are investigating to combine these top-down and bottom-up approaches