A novel cloud services recommendation system based on automatic learning techniques

The Cloud Computing technology is evolving constantly but essence remains the same that is to offer distinct cost saving opportunities by consolidating and restructuring information technology as a service. With the continuously increasing cloud provisions, cloud consumers start to have difficulties to find the best relevant services that suit their requirements. Therefore, selecting best services by cloud users is becoming a greater challenge. In this paper, we present a framework of services' recommendation system in a Cloud environment, using automatic learning techniques. The system aims at finding the services that suit the interests and preferences of cloud consumers by combining content based and behaviour based recommendations. In this paper, we present, USTHBCLOUD, a cloud services recommendation prototype evaluated with an experimental study. © 2017 IEEE

Selecting cloud computing service provider with fuzzy ahp

With the growing demand for outsourcing the ICT section of enterprises, Cloud Computing service providers increased their popularity. Selecting the most appropriate provider for a demanding enterprise depends on many criteria that are based on the strategies, requirements, and resources of the enterprise. Since this problem is a kind of decision problem and depends on criteria of decision-maker, it can be modeled as Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem. In this research, a pilot case study is conducted in which the Cloud Computing service provider selection problem is modeled as a MCDM problem. For selecting the most appropriate provider, Fuzzy Extend Analysis is implemented in the case study

Service recommendation and selection in centralized and decentralized environments.

With the increasing use of web services in everyday tasks we are entering an era of Internet of Services (IoS). Service discovery and selection in both centralized and decentralized environments have become a critical issue in the area of web services, in particular when services having similar functionality but different Quality of Service (QoS). As a result, selecting a high quality service that best suits consumer requirements from a large list of functionally equivalent services is a challenging task. In response to increasing numbers of services in the discovery and selection process, there is a corresponding increase of service consumers and a consequent diversity in Quality of Service (QoS) available. Increases in both sides leads to a diversity in the demand and supply of services, which would result in the partial match of the requirements and offers. Furthermore, it is challenging for customers to select suitable services from a large number of services that satisfy consumer functional requirements. Therefore, web service recommendation becomes an attractive solution to provide recommended services to consumers which can satisfy their requirements.In this thesis, first a service ranking and selection algorithm is proposed by considering multiple QoS requirements and allowing partially matched services to be counted as a candidate for the selection process. With the initial list of available services the approach considers those services with a partial match of consumer requirements and ranks them based on the QoS parameters, this allows the consumer to select suitable service. In addition, providing weight value for QoS parameters might not be an easy and understandable task for consumers, as a result an automatic weight calculation method has been included for consumer requirements by utilizing distance correlation between QoS parameters. The second aspect of the work in the thesis is the process of QoS based web service recommendation. With an increasing number of web services having similar functionality, it is challenging for service consumers to find out suitable web services that meet their requirements. We propose a personalised service recommendation method using the LDA topic model, which extracts latent interests of consumers and latent topics of services in the form of probability distribution. In addition, the proposed method is able to improve the accuracy of prediction of QoS properties by considering the correlation between neighbouring services and return a list of recommended services that best satisfy consumer requirements. The third part of the thesis concerns providing service discovery and selection in a decentralized environment. Service discovery approaches are often supported by centralized repositories that could suffer from single point failure, performance bottleneck, and scalability issues in large scale systems. To address these issues, we propose a context-aware service discovery and selection approach in a decentralized peer-to-peer environment. In the approach homophily similarity was used for bootstrapping and distribution of nodes. The discovery process is based on the similarity of nodes and previous interaction and behaviour of the nodes, which will help the discovery process in a dynamic environment. Our approach is not only considering service discovery, but also the selection of suitable web service by taking into account the QoS properties of the web services. The major contribution of the thesis is providing a comprehensive QoS based service recommendation and selection in centralized and decentralized environments. With the proposed approach consumers will be able to select suitable service based on their requirements. Experimental results on real world service datasets showed that proposed approaches achieved better performance and efficiency in recommendation and selection process.N/

A toolkit for multi-scale mapping of the solar energy-generation potential of buildings in urban environments under uncertainty

Many municipalities and public authorities have supported the creation of solar cadastres to map the solar energy-generation potential of existing buildings. Despite advancements in modelling solar potential, most of these tools provide simple evaluations based on benchmarks, neglecting the effect of uncertain environmental conditions and that of the spatial aggregation of multiple buildings. We argue that including such information in the evaluation process can lead to more robust planning decisions and a fairer allocation of public subsidies. To this end, this paper presents a novel method to incorporate uncertainty in the evaluation of the solar electricity generation potential of existing buildings using a multi-scale approach. It also presents a technique to visualise the results through their integration in a 3D-mapping environment and the use of false-colour overlays at different scales. Using multiple simulation scenarios, the method is able to provide information about confidence intervals of summary statistics of production due to variation in two typical uncertain factors: vegetation and weather. The uncertainty in production introduced by these factors is taken into account through pairwise comparisons of nominal values of indicators, calculating a comprehensive ranking of the energy potential of different spatial locations and a corresponding solar score. The analysis is run at different scales, using space- and time-aggregated results, to provide results relevant to decision-makers

Quantitative Techniques in Participatory Forest Management

Forest management has evolved from a mercantilist view to a multi-functional one that integrates economic, social, and ecological aspects. However, the issue of sustainability is not yet resolved. Quantitative Techniques in Participatory Forest Management brings together global research in three areas of application: inventory of the forest variables that determine the main environmental indices, description and design of new environmental indices, and the application of sustainability indices for regional implementations. All these quantitative techniques create the basis for the development of scientific methodologies of participatory sustainable forest management

Serverless Cloud Computing: A Comparative Analysis of Performance, Cost, and Developer Experiences in Container-Level Services

Serverless cloud computing is a subset of cloud computing considerably adopted to build modern web applications, while the underlying server and infrastructure management duties are abstracted from customers to the cloud vendors. In serverless computing, customers must pay for the runtime consumed by their services, but they are exempt from paying for the idle time. Prior to serverless containers, customers needed to provision, scale, and manage servers, which was a bottleneck for rapidly growing customer-facing applications where latency and scaling were a concern. The viability of adopting a serverless platform for a web application regarding performance, cost, and developer experiences is studied in this thesis. Three serverless container-level services are employed in this study from AWS and GCP. The services include GCP Cloud Run, GKE AutoPilot, and AWS EKS with AWS Fargate. Platform as a Service (PaaS) underpins the former, and Container as a Service (CaaS) the remainder. A single-page web application was created to perform incremental and spike load tests on those services to assess the performance differences. Furthermore, the cost differences are compared and analyzed. Lastly, the final element considered while evaluating the developer experiences is the complexity of using the services during the project implementation. Based on the results of this research, it was determined that PaaS-based solutions are a high-performing, affordable alternative for CaaS-based solutions in circumstances where high levels of traffic are periodically anticipated, but sporadic latency is never a concern. Given that this study has limitations, the author recommends additional research to strengthen it

Solving Multi-objective Integer Programs using Convex Preference Cones

Esta encuesta tiene dos objetivos: en primer lugar, identificar a los individuos que fueron víctimas de algún tipo de delito y la manera en que ocurrió el mismo. En segundo lugar, medir la eficacia de las distintas autoridades competentes una vez que los individuos denunciaron el delito que sufrieron. Adicionalmente la ENVEI busca indagar las percepciones que los ciudadanos tienen sobre las instituciones de justicia y el estado de derecho en Méxic