Microservices Architecture Enables DevOps: an Experience Report on Migration to a Cloud-Native Architecture

This article reports on experiences and lessons learned during incremental migration and architectural refactoring of a commercial mobile back end as a service to microservices architecture. It explains how the researchers adopted DevOps and how this facilitated a smooth migration

Steps in the development of the Romanian financial system and the corellation with the level of economical growth

Along the history it has been asserted that among the determinant agents of the economical growth can be also cited the conservation and the endowment with physical, technological and human capital. This thing involves the realization of certain investigations in the infrastructure, development, and innovation, as well as in the education and the formation, that can raise the existent level of these resources in every country and to lead to a growth in the productivity, and in the competition of that country materialized through a higher GDP of a capital. But there is an extremely important factor like the way of financing, the degree of development of the financial system of the economy that leads to economical growth. On a microeconomic level, in what concerns the economical agents, financing is the most important for the development. All in all, no matter how good the product or how efficient the commercialization channels or the correlation level between technology and the human factor may be, if the business does not have an efficient financing politics, regarding the liquidity as well as the solvency and the profitableness, it will crash minimizing the other successfully realized aspects. Except the fact that it offers an efficient allocation and a reduced cost of the financial services, a well developed financial compartment identifies the potential investors, monitors and gives information regarding the behavior of the beneficiaries of the chartered capital. The financial system unifies the capital demand and the offer through banks, capital markets, and other financial mediates like mutual funds or pension funds. An efficient financial system mobilizes the collected saving by the unities that, after they satisfy their own objectives of investment and consumption, have a financing capacity for channeling it towards those units that, for realizing their investing objectives, need financing, offer an efficient payment and clearing system, in this way facilitating the financial transactions. An efficient system is the one that realizes an optimum getting in and allocation of the resources, that it has realized in a satisfying manner the remuneration conditions, assurance, and liquidity of the equivalent deposits or the instruments of collecting the resources, and on the other hand, the cost conditions and financing term for the allocated resources. Until short time ago, it was believed that the financial system develops after the contracting sector, channeling towards investments, at the request of the undertaker, the over pluses obtained as a consequence of the economies of the population. Following what Schumpeter first expressed in 1912, recent theories showed that an efficient financial system is a stimulus for the technological innovation identifying and financing the undertakers capable to successfully innovate the product and the production process. One of those who have opted for this kind of thought is Ross Levine who assures the fact that “a theoretical as well as an empirical constant work volume tends to make even the most skeptical to believe that the development of the financial system is a determinant of the economical growth, and not only a passive answer to this growth.” Levine and the others that share his opinion believe that there are inherent relations between financial intermediate and productivity and , as the amelioration of the productivity level produces on a long term benefic effects on the level of economic development, it can be said that also the financial intermediate generates economical growth. Moreover, Levine suggests that the development of the financial system has an important positive effect over the economical growth saying that “it can be eliminated a third of the already existent inequality between the countries with an important growth and those with a slow growth through the development of the financial intermediation for the latter ones until they reach a developing level comparable with the one of the countries with a quick development”. The positive association between the degree of development of the financial system and economical growth was at large analyzed also by Demirguc-Kunt (2006), Levine and King (1993), and Levine and Beck (2004). They get to the conclusion that this correlation stays significant even when other factors of influence are taken into consideration. Moreover, they prove that regarding a country with a developing financial system, the degree of financial development is correlated not only with the current growth, but also with the future economical growth. In order to do a thorough analysis of the way in which the Romanian financial system evolved, being correlated with the economical growth of the financing structure of the Romanian economy between 1990 and 2006, we leveled this analysis depending on the mutations that took place during the time in the Romanian economical and financial landscape. We have taken one by one the mutations that took place during this period regarding the Romanian banking system and capital market, as main financial agents, then the macro economical politics and their impact on the development of the financial system, and, least but not last, recent evolutions experienced by the Romanian financial system and regional level (Central and Eastern Europe) and European Union comparisons.Romanian financial system, capital market, development

Trust-Based Fusion of Untrustworthy Information in Crowdsourcing Applications

In this paper, we address the problem of fusing untrustworthy reports provided from a crowd of observers, while simultaneously learning the trustworthiness of individuals. To achieve this, we construct a likelihood model of the userss trustworthiness by scaling the uncertainty of its multiple estimates with trustworthiness parameters. We incorporate our trust model into a fusion method that merges estimates based on the trust parameters and we provide an inference algorithm that jointly computes the fused output and the individual trustworthiness of the users based on the maximum likelihood framework. We apply our algorithm to cell tower localisation using real-world data from the OpenSignal project and we show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy, by up to 21%, and consistency, by up to 50% of its predictions. Copyright © 2013, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved

A Role-Based Approach for Orchestrating Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned as a global network of connected things enabling ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. With estimations of billions of sensors and devices to be connected in the coming years, the IoT has been advocated as having a great potential to impact the way we live, but also how we work. However, the connectivity aspect in itself only accounts for the underlying M2M infrastructure. In order to properly support engineering IoT systems and applications, it is key to orchestrate heterogeneous 'things' in a seamless, adaptive and dynamic manner, such that the system can exhibit a goal-directed behaviour and take appropriate actions. Yet, this form of interaction between things needs to take a user-centric approach and by no means elude the users' requirements. To this end, contextualisation is an important feature of the system, allowing it to infer user activities and prompt the user with relevant information and interactions even in the absence of intentional commands. In this work we propose a role-based model for emergent configurations of connected systems as a means to model, manage, and reason about IoT systems including the user's interaction with them. We put a special focus on integrating the user perspective in order to guide the emergent configurations such that systems goals are aligned with the users' intentions. We discuss related scientific and technical challenges and provide several uses cases outlining the concept of emergent configurations.Comment: In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on the Internet of Agents @AAMAS201

Impact of the virtual assistant's interactive dimensions in the Portuguese young adults' customer experience expectations and patronage intentions, in the retail context

Throughout the times it has been witnessed a continuous evolution in the way people make business transactions, across sectors. This has been highly influenced by technological developments and the constant need for companies to adjust to their clients’ needs and expectations. The retail sector has been no exception, evolving alongside innovation, and adapting to new trends. One of its results is the emergence of conversational commerce, a new form of commerce that combines the trend of communicating via instant messages and the use of artificial intelligence, introducing virtual assistants to the retail context. The aim of this study is to better understand the potentialities virtual assistants have in the Portuguese retail context, amongst young adults. By identifying which of the dimensions of the interaction with a retailer virtual assistant - "Cognitive Perception, Affective Engagement, and Communication Quality" - have a significant impact on the expectation users create towards their customer experience and how this is determinant to their patronage intentions towards the retailer. A quantitative methodology was used to perform this investigation, with the development of an introductory chatbot and an online survey, completed by 385 individuals (Portuguese young adults, with ages ranging from 18 to 35, and that had access to the Facebook Messenger app). The Customer Experience Expectation was proven to have a significant impact on the respondent' patronage intentions towards the virtual assistant and the retailer. However, only the cognitive dimension of the virtual assistant was confirmed to significantly impact the expectations on the customer experienceAo longo dos tempos, tem-se vindo a testemunhar uma evolução na forma como o comércio é feito nos vários setores de atividade. As empresas têm de se reinventar constantemente para satisfazer as necessidades e expectativas dos consumidores, que resultam dos avanços tecnológicos. O mesmo acontece no setor do Retalho, que tem vindo a inovar, acompanhando a tecnologia e as tendências dos consumidores. Um exemplo disto é o aparecimento da uma nova forma de comércio, o comércio conversacional. Este combina a tendência de comunicação via mensagens instantâneas com o desenvolvimento da inteligência artificial, introduzindo assistentes virtuais neste setor. O principal objetivo deste estudo prende-se com a investigação do impacto que a inclusão de um assistente virtual teria no setor do retalho interagindo com os jovens adultos portugueses. Para tal, procurou identificar-se quais as dimensões da interação com um assistente virtual - cognitiva, afetiva e comunicativa - que influenciariam as expectativas relativas à experiência de compra e consequentemente as intenções de uso e compra dos consumidores. Para a investigação foi utilizada uma metodologia quantitativa, com a criação de um "chatbot" informativo e de um questionário "online", ao qual responderam 385 portugueses com idades desde os 18 até aos 35 anos, com acesso ao Facebook Messenger. Neste estudo foi provado que as expectativas dos consumidores em relação à experiência de compra influenciam as suas intenções de uso (assistente virtual) e compra (retalhista). No entanto, apenas a dimensão cognitiva mostrou ter um impacto significativo na criação de expectativas relativas à experiência de compra