4 research outputs found
The Need of Multidisciplinary Approaches and Engineering Tools for the Development and Implementation of the Smart City Paradigm
This paper is motivated by the concept that the successful, effective, and sustainable implementation of the smart city paradigm requires a close cooperation among researchers with different, complementary interests and, in most cases, a multidisciplinary approach. It first briefly discusses how such a multidisciplinary methodology, transversal to various disciplines such as architecture, computer science, civil engineering, electrical, electronic and telecommunication engineering, social science and behavioral science, etc., can be successfully employed for the development of suitable modeling tools and real solutions of such sociotechnical systems. Then, the paper presents some pilot projects accomplished by the authors within the framework of some major European Union (EU) and national research programs, also involving the Bologna municipality and some of the key players of the smart city industry. Each project, characterized by different and complementary approaches/modeling tools, is illustrated along with the relevant contextualization and the advancements with respect to the state of the art
A Distributed Stream Processing Middleware Framework for Real-Time Analysis of Heterogeneous Data on Big Data Platform: Case of Environmental Monitoring
ArticleIn recent years, the application and wide adoption of Internet of Things (IoT)-based
technologies have increased the proliferation of monitoring systems, which has consequently
exponentially increased the amounts of heterogeneous data generated. Processing and analysing
the massive amount of data produced is cumbersome and gradually moving from classical
‘batch’ processing—extract, transform, load (ETL) technique to real-time processing. For instance,
in environmental monitoring and management domain, time-series data and historical dataset are
crucial for prediction models. However, the environmental monitoring domain still utilises legacy
systems, which complicates the real-time analysis of the essential data, integration with big data
platforms and reliance on batch processing. Herein, as a solution, a distributed stream processing
middleware framework for real-time analysis of heterogeneous environmental monitoring and
management data is presented and tested on a cluster using open source technologies in a big data
environment. The system ingests datasets from legacy systems and sensor data from heterogeneous
automated weather systems irrespective of the data types to Apache Kafka topics using Kafka Connect
APIs for processing by the Kafka streaming processing engine. The stream processing engine executes
the predictive numerical models and algorithms represented in event processing (EP) languages
for real-time analysis of the data streams. To prove the feasibility of the proposed framework,
we implemented the system using a case study scenario of drought prediction and forecasting based
on the Effective Drought Index (EDI) model. Firstly, we transform the predictive model into a form
that could be executed by the streaming engine for real-time computing. Secondly, the model is
applied to the ingested data streams and datasets to predict drought through persistent querying of
the infinite streams to detect anomalies. As a conclusion of this study, a performance evaluation of
the distributed stream processing middleware infrastructure is calculated to determine the real-time
effectiveness of the framework
Computational Methods for Medical and Cyber Security
Over the past decade, computational methods, including machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), have been exponentially growing in their development of solutions in various domains, especially medicine, cybersecurity, finance, and education. While these applications of machine learning algorithms have been proven beneficial in various fields, many shortcomings have also been highlighted, such as the lack of benchmark datasets, the inability to learn from small datasets, the cost of architecture, adversarial attacks, and imbalanced datasets. On the other hand, new and emerging algorithms, such as deep learning, one-shot learning, continuous learning, and generative adversarial networks, have successfully solved various tasks in these fields. Therefore, applying these new methods to life-critical missions is crucial, as is measuring these less-traditional algorithms' success when used in these fields
Real-Time Stream Processing in Social Networks with RAM3S
The avalanche of (both user- and device-generated) multimedia data published in online social networks poses serious challenges to researchers seeking to analyze such data for many different tasks, like recommendation, event recognition, and so on. For some such tasks, the classical “batch” approach of big data analysis is not suitable, due to constraints of real-time or near-real-time processing. This led to the rise of stream processing big data platforms, like Storm and Flink, that are able to process data with a very low latency. However, this complicates the task of data analysis since any implementation has to deal with the technicalities of such platforms, like distributed processing, synchronization, node faults, etc. In this paper, we show how the RAM 3 S framework could be profitably used to easily implement a variety of applications (such as clothing recommendations, job suggestions, and alert generation for dangerous events), being independent of the particular stream processing big data platforms used. Indeed, by using RAM 3 S, researchers can concentrate on the development of their data analysis application, completely ignoring the details of the underlying platform