Privacy-Preserving Outsourcing of Large-Scale Nonlinear Programming to the Cloud

The increasing massive data generated by various sources has given birth to big data analytics. Solving large-scale nonlinear programming problems (NLPs) is one important big data analytics task that has applications in many domains such as transport and logistics. However, NLPs are usually too computationally expensive for resource-constrained users. Fortunately, cloud computing provides an alternative and economical service for resource-constrained users to outsource their computation tasks to the cloud. However, one major concern with outsourcing NLPs is the leakage of user's private information contained in NLP formulations and results. Although much work has been done on privacy-preserving outsourcing of computation tasks, little attention has been paid to NLPs. In this paper, we for the first time investigate secure outsourcing of general large-scale NLPs with nonlinear constraints. A secure and efficient transformation scheme at the user side is proposed to protect user's private information; at the cloud side, generalized reduced gradient method is applied to effectively solve the transformed large-scale NLPs. The proposed protocol is implemented on a cloud computing testbed. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that significant time can be saved for users and the proposed mechanism has the potential for practical use.Comment: Ang Li and Wei Du equally contributed to this work. This work was done when Wei Du was at the University of Arkansas. 2018 EAI International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm

The Investigation of Pump Performance and Evaluation over the Internet

Selection and configuration are widely met tasks in design; this is an example of a web-based selection/configuration tool with embedded optimisation. Pumps inevitably deteriorate over their product lifecycle, in which interaction generally occurs in terms of flow, pressure and electricity consumption. Practical implementations of pump scheduling suggest that a 10% of the annual expenditure on energy costs may be saved. The object is to minimise the energy cost incurred, while selecting the best schedule of legal available pumps. The results illustrate that the recording of pump characteristics over the internet provides an efficient method of pump performance and evaluation

Proceedings of International Workshop "Global Computing: Programming Environments, Languages, Security and Analysis of Systems"

According to the IST/ FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING, the goal is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient. The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself. Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively. The research should concentrate on systems having the following characteristics: • The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners. • The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another. • The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion. The behaviour of the entities may vary over time. • The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment. For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered. The ultimate goal of the research action is to provide a solid scientific foundation for the design of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving effective principles for building and analysing such systems. This workshop covers the aspects related to languages and programming environments as well as analysis of systems and resources involving 9 projects (AGILE , DART, DEGAS , MIKADO, MRG, MYTHS, PEPITO, PROFUNDIS, SECURE) out of the 13 founded under the initiative. After an year from the start of the projects, the goal of the workshop is to fix the state of the art on the topics covered by the two clusters related to programming environments and analysis of systems as well as to devise strategies and new ideas to profitably continue the research effort towards the overall objective of the initiative. We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica and Tlc of the University of Trento, the Comune di Rovereto, the project DEGAS for partially funding the event and the Events and Meetings Office of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration