Interaction-awareness for self-adaptive volunteer computing

In this paper, we contribute to a self-adaptive approach, namely interaction-awareness which adopts self-aware principles to dynamically manage and maintain the knowledge on the interactions between volunteer services in the volunteer computing paradigm. Such knowledge can inform the adaptation decisions, leading to increase in the precision of selecting and composing services. We evaluate the approaches using a volunteer storage composition scenario. The evaluation results show the advantages of dynamic knowledge management in self-adaptive VC in selecting dependable services and satisfying higher number of requests

Self-aware computing systems:from psychology to engineering

At the current time, there are several fundamental changes in the way computing systems are being developed, deployed and used. They are becoming increasingly large, heterogeneous, uncertain, dynamic and decentralised. These complexities lead to behaviours during run time that are difficult to understand or predict. One vision for how to rise to this challenge is to endow computing systems with increased self-awareness, in order to enable advanced autonomous adaptive behaviour. A desire for self-awareness has arisen in a variety of areas of computer science and engineering over the last two decades, and more recently a more fundamental understanding of what self-awareness concepts might mean for the design and operation of computing systems has been developed. This draws on self-awareness theories from psychology and other related fields, and has led to a number of contributions in terms of definitions, architectures, algorithms and case studies. This paper introduces some of the main aspects of self-awareness from psychology, that have been used in developing associated notions in computing. It then describes how these concepts have been translated to the computing domain, and provides examples of how their explicit consideration can lead to systems better able to manage trade-offs between conflicting goals at run time in the context of a complex environment, while reducing the need for a priori domain modelling at design or deployment time

Clinical governance, education and learning to manage health information

Purpose – This paper aims to suggest that the concept of clinical governance goes beyond a bureaucratic accountability structure and can be viewed as a negotiated balance between imperfectly aligned and sometimes conflicting goals within a complex adaptive system. On this view, the information system cannot be separated conceptually from the system of governance it supports or the people whose work it facilitates or hinders. Design/methodology/approach – The study, located within the English National Health Service (NHS) between 1999 and 2005, is case study based using a multi method approach to data collection within two primary care organisations (PCOs). The research strategy is conducted within a social constructionist ontological perspective. Findings – The findings reflect the following broad-based themes: mutual adjustment of a plurality of stakeholder perceptions, preferences and priorities; the development of information and communication systems, empowered by informatics; an emphasis on education and training to build capacity and capability. Research limitations/implications – Limitations of case study methodology include a tendency to provide selected accounts. These are potentially biased and risk trivialising findings. Rooted in specific context, their generalisability to other contexts is limited by the extent to which contexts are similar. Reasonable attempts were made to minimise any bias. The diversity of data collection methods used in the study was an attempt to counterbalance the limitations highlighted in one method by strength from alternative techniques. Practical implications – The paper makes recommendations in two key governance areas: education and learning to manage health information. In practice, the lessons learned provide opportunities to inform future approaches to health informatics educational programmes. Originality/value – With regard to topicality, it is suggested that many of the developmental issues highlighted during the establishment of quality improvement programmes within primary care organisations (PCGs/PCTs) are relevant in the light of current NHS reforms and move towards commissioning consortia

Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges

Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware, phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more. As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure

Engineering self-awareness with knowledge management in dynamic systems: a case for volunteer computing

The complexity of the modem dynamic computing systems has motivated software engineering researchers to explore new sources of inspiration for equipping such systems with autonomic behaviours. Self-awareness has recently gained considerable attention as a prominent property for enriching the self-adaptation capabilities in systems operating in dynamic, heterogeneous and open environments. This thesis investigates the role of knowledge and its dynamic management in realising various levels of self-awareness for enabling self­adaptivity with different capabilities and strengths. The thesis develops a novel multi-level dynamic knowledge management approach for managing and representing the evolving knowledge. The approach is able to acquire 'richer' knowledge about the system's internal state and its environment in addition to managing the trade-offs arising from the adaptation conflicting goals. The thesis draws on a case from the volunteer computing, as an environment characterised by openness, heterogeneity, dynamism, and unpredictability to develop and evaluate the approach. This thesis takes an experimental approach to evaluate the effectiveness of the of the dynamic knowledge management approach. The results show the added value of the approach to the self-adaptivity of the system compared to classic self­adaptation capabilities

The role of social media in the collaboration, interaction, co-creation and co-delivery of a social venture in an uncertain conflict environment

This research case study examines the creation and development of a bottom-up social enterprise immediately after the outbreak of a civil war in an Arab country by a group of young patriots in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings in the 2010s. Drawing on Linders’ (2012) model of social action lifecycle, our study examines how different actors become involved and co-created a socially entrepreneurial venture (SEV), how these actors contributed to the coproduction and co-delivery of the social actions (values) over time, and how social media play roles in these processes. Drawing from the empirical evidences of citizen co-production within the existing literature, we found that SEVs operate in very different ways in which the role of social media is critical, both from their equivalents operating in a penurious but stable environment, and those intending to pursue political action within a conflict situation. In our case study, social media was not intended for mass-mobilisation, but for selected mobilisation amongst those within the network. This is due to the insecure environment and the fear of infiltration from opposing parties. We also examine how new actors were, over time, being carefully screened and selected, and potential harmful existing players being excluded, which in turn contributed to the evolving nature of the social enterprises

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing