On a Catalogue of Metrics for Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services

Given the continually increasing amount of commercial Cloud services in the market, evaluation of different services plays a significant role in cost-benefit analysis or decision making for choosing Cloud Computing. In particular, employing suitable metrics is essential in evaluation implementations. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any systematic discussion about metrics for evaluating Cloud services. By using the method of Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we have collected the de facto metrics adopted in the existing Cloud services evaluation work. The collected metrics were arranged following different Cloud service features to be evaluated, which essentially constructed an evaluation metrics catalogue, as shown in this paper. This metrics catalogue can be used to facilitate the future practice and research in the area of Cloud services evaluation. Moreover, considering metrics selection is a prerequisite of benchmark selection in evaluation implementations, this work also supplements the existing research in benchmarking the commercial Cloud services.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid 2012), pp. 164-173, Beijing, China, September 20-23, 201

Electronic transformation of government in the U.K.: a research agenda

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory research project into future e-Government (electronic Government) initiatives. The Virtual Institute for Electronic Government Research (VIEGO) project aimed at identifying and further developing the research agenda of e-Government based on a solid practical ground. As such, the paper offers a novel methodology in identifying the road map for future e-Government initiatives based on a series of workshops organised around the U.K. hosting a mixture of stakeholders involving both academics and parishioners. The analysis of the VIEGO workshops depicted that an e-Government research agenda involves a combination of social, technological and organisational issues at both governmental and individual citizen level, ultimately driven by empirical case-based experience and active participation in e-Government processes. Unlike other propositions for the future of e-Government offered in the e- Government literature, raised research questions not only originated from an analysis of e-Government literature but also on the outcome of brainstorming, reflections and contemplations throughout the duration of the project

Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

January 23, 2017 Armstrong Faculty Senate Agenda

January 23, 2017 Armstrong Faculty Senate Agend

On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review

Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work. Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services (e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) lessons

Can Markets Secure Human Rights?

In recent years, State inefficiency in delivering some public goods to everybody has been the main argument set forth by those who sustain that markets should play a more active role in providing those goods and services that are needed to secure human rights. In result, in many parts of the world, we have been witnessing extensive privatization of social security and water distribution, for example. This article argues that markets are not fully equipped to play the role of a supplier of goods and services as human rights, and more specifically of the right to social security and the right to water. The main reason for this is that in the language of markets capability to pay is the key question whereas within the rights language it is entitlement. If in the first case exclusion and inequality are acceptable in the second case the only acceptable situation is the one characterized by inclusion and equality. In other words goods and services can be unequally distributed, rights cannot. Secondly a provider of goods and services as human rights must be a democratically accountable institution, whereas markets are anonymous, and therefore, unaccountable by definition. Finally, markets are also inefficient in providing goods and services as human rights, either because human rights “markets” are not competitive or because market incentives for private provision of human rights are notoriously weak.