Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Counter-intuitive throughput behaviors in networks under end-to-end control

It has been shown that as long as traffic sources adapt their rates to aggregate congestion measure in their paths, they implicitly maximize certain utility. In this paper we study some counter-intuitive throughput behaviors in such networks, pertaining to whether a fair allocation is always inefficient and whether increasing capacity always raises aggregate throughput. A bandwidth allocation policy can be defined in terms of a class of utility functions parameterized by a scalar a that can be interpreted as a quantitative measure of fairness. An allocation is fair if alpha is large and efficient if aggregate throughput is large. All examples in the literature suggest that a fair allocation is necessarily inefficient. We characterize exactly the tradeoff between fairness and throughput in general networks. The characterization allows us both to produce the first counter-example and trivially explain all the previous supporting examples. Surprisingly, our counter-example has the property that a fairer allocation is always more efficient. In particular it implies that maxmin fairness can achieve a higher throughput than proportional fairness. Intuitively, we might expect that increasing link capacities always raises aggregate throughput. We show that not only can throughput be reduced when some link increases its capacity, more strikingly, it can also be reduced when all links increase their capacities by the same amount. If all links increase their capacities proportionally, however, throughput will indeed increase. These examples demonstrate the intricate interactions among sources in a network setting that are missing in a single-link topology

Pepper4Museum: Towards a Human-like Museum Guide

With the recent advances in technology, new ways to engage visitors in a museum have been proposed. Relevant examples range from the simple use of mobile apps and interactive displays to virtual and augmented reality settings. Recently social robots have been used as a solution to engage visitors in museum tours, due to their ability to interact with humans naturally and familiarly. In this paper, we present our preliminary work on the use of a social robot, Pepper in this case, as an innovative approach to engaging people during museum visiting tours. To this aim, we endowed Pepper with a vision module that allows it to perceive the visitor and the artwork he is looking at, as well as estimating his age and gender. These data are used to provide the visitor with recommendations about artworks the user might like to see during the visit. We tested the proposed approach in our research lab and preliminary experiments show its feasibility

Dagstuhl News January - December 2005

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

Community as Canvas: The Power of Culture in the Emergence of Intelligent Communities

Intelligent Communities are cities and regions that use information and communications technologies (ICT) to build prosperous economies, solve social problems and enrich their cultures in the 21st Century. Many people are familiar with the concept of the Smart City, which turns to technology for solutions to problems from traffic congestion to leakage from water mains, public safety to parking tickets. The Intelligent Community is the next evolutionary step. Intelligent Communities turn to technology not just to save money or make things work better: they create high quality employment, increase citizen participation and make themselves great places to live, work, start a business and prosper across generations.Each year, the Forum presents an awards program for Intelligent Communities. The program salutes their achievements in building those inclusive, prosperous economies on a foundation of ICT. In the process, it gathers data for ICF's research programs, which the Forum shares with other communities around the world.The Awards are divided into three phases,and the analysis becomes more detailed andrigorous at each successive stage

Concurrent engineering research center

The projects undertaken by The Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) at West Virginia University are reported and summarized. CERC's participation in the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Project relating to technology needed to improve the product development process is described, particularly in the area of advanced weapon systems. The efforts committed to improving collaboration among the diverse and distributed health care providers are reported, along with the research activities for NASA in Independent Software Verification and Validation. CERC also takes part in the electronic respirator certification initiated by The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, as well as in the efforts to find a solution to the problem of producing environment-friendly end-products for product developers worldwide. The 3M Fiber Metal Matrix Composite Model Factory Program is discussed. CERC technologies, facilities,and personnel-related issues are described, along with its library and technical services and recent publications