Contributions to Desktop Grid Computing : From High Throughput Computing to Data-Intensive Sciences on Hybrid Distributed Computing Infrastructures

Since the mid 90’s, Desktop Grid Computing - i.e the idea of using a large number of remote PCs distributed on the Internet to execute large parallel applications - has proved to be an efficient paradigm to provide a large computational power at the fraction of the cost of a dedicated computing infrastructure.This document presents my contributions over the last decade to broaden the scope of Desktop Grid Computing. My research has followed three different directions. The first direction has established new methods to observe and characterize Desktop Grid resources and developed experimental platforms to test and validate our approach in conditions close to reality. The second line of research has focused on integrating Desk- top Grids in e-science Grid infrastructure (e.g. EGI), which requires to address many challenges such as security, scheduling, quality of service, and more. The third direction has investigated how to support large-scale data management and data intensive applica- tions on such infrastructures, including support for the new and emerging data-oriented programming models.This manuscript not only reports on the scientific achievements and the technologies developed to support our objectives, but also on the international collaborations and projects I have been involved in, as well as the scientific mentoring which motivates my candidature for the Habilitation `a Diriger les Recherches

Spectrum Rights in the Telecosm to Come

The spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies impact the way individuals and society communicate. The discussion involves reforming the structures governing the spectrum, a debate that centers on the benefits of public versus private control over the resources. This article focuses on articulating governmental standards for managing and regulating public or private control of the spectrum. However, standards will not be easy to establish given the difficult cost assessments necessary to balance the public interest against communication. A regulatory agency can better govern spectrum management that accommodates both commonly and privately owned spectrum. Spectrum conflicts can be remedied easily by defining a class of per se nuisances. The article concludes by encouraging attentiveness to the costs of dispute resolution, the regulators? roles in reducing these costs, and the policy choices inherent in spectrum management. Any regulator agency that is established must play a role in resolving spectrum conflicts

Process of change in organisations through eHealth: 2nd International eHealth Symposium 2010, Stuttgart, Germany, June 7 - 8, 2010 ; Proceedings edited by Stefan Kirn

Foreword: On behalf of the Organizing Committee, it is my pleasure to welcome you to Hohenheim, Stuttgart for the 2nd International eHealth Symposium which is themed 'Process of change in organisations through eHealth'. Starting with the inaugural event in 2009, which took place in Turku, Finland, we want to implement a tradition of international eHealth symposia. The presentations and associated papers in this proceedings give a current and representative outline of technical options, application potentials, usability, acceptance and potential for optimization in health care by ICT. We are pleased to present a high-quality program. This year we convey a unique opportunity for academic researchers and industry practitioners to report their state-of-the-art research findings in the domain of eHealth. The symposium aims to foster the international community by gathering experts from various countries such as Australia, Great Britain, Finland and Germany. A first step is done by this symposium which considers this interaction and delivers an insight into current advances made and open research questions. The organizers would like to take the opportunity to thank all the people which made the Symposium possible. We are pleased if both attendance to the 2nd International eHealth Symposium 2010 and reading of this proceedings give you answers to urging questions, a basis for critical discussions, references on interesting tasks and stimulations for new approaches. Table of Contents: Martin Sedlmayr, Andreas Becker, Hans-Ulrich Prokosch, Christian Flügel, Fritz Meier: OPAL Health - A Smart Object Network for Hospital Logistics // Rajeev K. Bali, M. Chris Gribbons, Vikraman Baskaran, Raouf NG Naguib: Perspectives on E-Health: the human touch // Falk Zwicker, Torsten Eymann: Why RFID projects in hospitals (necessarily) fail. Lesson from comparative studies // Nilmin Wickramasinghe, F. Moghimi, J. Schaffer: Designing an intelligent risk detection framework using knowledge discovery techniques to improve efficiency and accuracy of healthcare care decision making // Volker Viktor, Heiko Schellhorn: In search of an appropriate service model for telehealth in Germany // Simone Schillings, Julia Fernandes: Towards a reference model for telemedicine // Reima Suomi: Towards rewards awareness in health care information systems // Manuel Zwicker, Jürgen Seitz, Nilmini Wickramasingh: Adaptions for e-kiosk systems to develop barrier-free terminals for handicapped persons --

Privacy-Aware and Reliable Complex Event Processing in the Internet of Things - Trust-Based and Flexible Execution of Event Processing Operators in Dynamic Distributed Environments

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to be an enhanced platform for supporting a heterogeneous range of context-aware applications in the fields of traffic monitoring, healthcare, and home automation, to name a few. The essence of the IoT is in the inter-networking of distributed information sources and the analysis of their data to understand the interactions between the physical objects, their users, and their environment. Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a cogent paradigm to infer higher-level information from atomic event streams (e.g., sensor data in the IoT). Using functional computing modules called operators (e.g., filters, aggregates, sequencers), CEP provides for an efficient and low-latency processing environment. Privacy and mobility support for context processing is gaining immense importance in the age of the IoT. However, new mobile communication paradigms - like Device-to-Device (D2D) communication - that are inherent to the IoT, must be enhanced to support a privacy-aware and reliable execution of CEP operators on mobile devices. It is crucial to preserve the differing privacy constraints of mobile users, while allowing for flexible and collaborative processing. Distributed mobile environments are also susceptible to adversary attacks, given the lack of sufficient control over the processing environment. Lastly, ensuring reliable and accurate CEP becomes a serious challenge due to the resource-constrained and dynamic nature of the IoT. In this thesis, we design and implement a privacy-aware and reliable CEP system that supports distributed processing of context data, by flexibly adapting to the dynamic conditions of a D2D environment. To this end, the main contributions, which form the key components of the proposed system, are three-fold: 1) We develop a method to analyze the communication characteristics of the users and derive the type and strength of their relationships. By doing so, we utilize the behavioral aspects of user relationships to automatically derive differing privacy constraints of the individual users. 2) We employ the derived privacy constraints as trust relations between users to execute CEP operators on mobile devices in a privacy-aware manner. In turn, we develop a trust management model called TrustCEP that incorporates a robust trust recommendation scheme to prevent adversary attacks and allow for trust evolution. 3) Finally, to account for reliability, we propose FlexCEP, a fine-grained flexible approach for CEP operator migration, such that the CEP system adapts to the dynamic nature of the environment. By extracting intermediate operator state and by leveraging device mobility and instantaneous characteristics, FlexCEP provides a flexible CEP execution model under varying network conditions. Overall, with the help of thorough evaluations of the above three contributions, we show how the proposed distributed CEP system can satisfy the requirements established above for a privacy-aware and reliable IoT environment

Process of change in organisations through eHealth

Foreword: On behalf of the Organizing Committee, it is my pleasure to welcome you to Hohenheim, Stuttgart for the 2nd International eHealth Symposium which is themed ?Process of change in organisations through eHealth?. Starting with the inaugural event in 2009, which took place in Turku, Finland, we want to implement a tradition of international eHealth symposia. The presentations and associated papers in this proceedings give a current and representative outline of technical options, application potentials, usability, acceptance and potential for optimization in health care by ICT. We are pleased to present a high-quality program. This year we convey a unique opportunity for academic researchers and industry practitioners to report their state-of-the-art research findings in the domain of eHealth. The symposium aims to foster the international community by gathering experts from various countries such as Australia, Great Britain, Finland and Germany. A first step is done by this symposium which considers this interaction and delivers an insight into current advances made and open research questions. The organizers would like to take the opportunity to thank all the people which made the Symposium possible. We are pleased if both attendance to the 2nd International eHealth Symposium 2010 and reading of this proceedings give you answers to urging questions, a basis for critical discussions, references on interesting tasks and stimulations for new approaches

Technology and Australia's Future: New technologies and their role in Australia's security, cultural, democratic, social and economic systems

Chapter 1. Introducing technology -- Chapter 2. The shaping of technology -- Chapter 3. Prediction of future technologies -- Chapter 4. The impacts of technology -- Chapter 5. Meanings, attitudes and behaviour -- Chapter 6. Evaluation -- Chapter 7. Intervention -- Conclusion - adapt or wither.This report was commisioned by Australian Council of Learned Academies

Exploring rural young women’s lives: the young generation of women in Li village

Since 1949, especially after the implementation of the reform and opening up policy, China has been facing new changes. Multiple ideas influence each other and coexist in today’s China. With the rapid expansion of urbanization in China, rural China is also undergoing profound changes. The main purpose of this thesis is to explore the lives of the young women in the external environment and intergenerational interaction to summarise the evolution of their lives though social, economic, political and cultural change. I focus on specific areas of their everyday lives (such as: childhood and adolescent years, consumption, migration, education, love, relationships with husbands and in-laws, and filial piety). I also investigate how the women are affected by change, including both the structural constraints on their lives, but also their agency and gendered subjectivities in this thesis

Discrete Event Simulations

Considered by many authors as a technique for modelling stochastic, dynamic and discretely evolving systems, this technique has gained widespread acceptance among the practitioners who want to represent and improve complex systems. Since DES is a technique applied in incredibly different areas, this book reflects many different points of view about DES, thus, all authors describe how it is understood and applied within their context of work, providing an extensive understanding of what DES is. It can be said that the name of the book itself reflects the plurality that these points of view represent. The book embraces a number of topics covering theory, methods and applications to a wide range of sectors and problem areas that have been categorised into five groups. As well as the previously explained variety of points of view concerning DES, there is one additional thing to remark about this book: its richness when talking about actual data or actual data based analysis. When most academic areas are lacking application cases, roughly the half part of the chapters included in this book deal with actual problems or at least are based on actual data. Thus, the editor firmly believes that this book will be interesting for both beginners and practitioners in the area of DES

Code: Version 2.0

Discusses the regulation of cyberspace via code, as well as possible trends to expect in this regulation. Additional topics discussed in this context include intellectual property, privacy, and free speech