Is the future of the ATM past?

Just over 40 years ago the first cash dispensers became operational in the UK. From its modest beginnings this industry specific application evolved into the backbone of self service technology. In this article we consider their past and present to reflect on their future with the assistance of the so called ‘social construction of technology’ theory while supported by archival research and a summary of interviews with ‘actors’ in the UK. We tell how machine, functionality and shared networks will continue to interact in shaping the future of the cash dispensing market.cash dispenser, ATM, payment systems, UK, networks, self-service market, multilateral interchange fee (MIF), LINK

Achieving Robust Self-Management for Large-Scale Distributed Applications

Autonomic managers are the main architectural building blocks for constructing self-management capabilities of computing systems and applications. One of the major challenges in developing self-managing applications is robustness of management elements which form autonomic managers. We believe that transparent handling of the effects of resource churn (joins/leaves/failures) on management should be an essential feature of a platform for self-managing large-scale dynamic distributed applications, because it facilitates the development of robust autonomic managers and hence improves robustness of self-managing applications. This feature can be achieved by providing a robust management element abstraction that hides churn from the programmer. In this paper, we present a generic approach to achieve robust services that is based on finite state machine replication with dynamic reconfiguration of replica sets. We contribute a decentralized algorithm that maintains the set of nodes hosting service replicas in the presence of churn. We use this approach to implement robust management elements as robust services that can operate despite of churn. Our proposed decentralized algorithm uses peer-to-peer replica placement schemes to automate replicated state machine migration in order to tolerate churn. Our algorithm exploits lookup and failure detection facilities of a structured overlay network for managing the set of active replicas. Using the proposed approach, we can achieve a long running and highly available service, without human intervention, in the presence of resource churn. In order to validate and evaluate our approach, we have implemented a prototype that includes the proposed algorithm

Reach modelling for drive-up self-service

People using a self-service terminal such as an automated teller machine (ATM) tend to adjust their physical position throughout a transaction. This is particularly apparent with terminals that are designed to be used from a vehicle (i.e. drive up automated teller machines or ATMs). Existing predictive tools tend to focus on static reach and provide limited predictions for how far people are willing to stretch to complete a task. Drive-up self-service products have 3 main challenges: the variability of vehicles, people and driver behaviour. Such conventional tools are therefore of limited use in understanding how much people are willing to move to use a self-service terminal. Work is described to build in-house predictive models based on 2 large empirical studies of reach in a drive up installation. These 2 studies assessed comfortable and extended reach from 10 vehicle categories. Extended reach was defined as stretching/leaning as far as participants would normally be willing to in order to complete a drive-up transaction. Findings from these studies indicated that participants are prepared to adopt more extreme postures at drive-up than in other situations with extended reach at drive-up being significantly different to what might be seen at a walk-up kiosk

An Accounting Framework on Federated Service-Oriented Architecture

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is used in more and more scientific and business applications. But self-examination and adaptation are overlooked by most system designers. Extant service accounting functionalities mainly focus on error causes, which are insufficient for history analysis and event prediction. This paper not only analyzes system events from both service consumers and providers, but also, starting from Maslow's needs hierarchy, provides a layered accounting framework for service federations. More than that, in matching and prediction model, a pipeline approach is employed rather than deterministic finite automaton (DFA), and a dependence estimator algorithm is introduced avoiding the deficiency in naive Bayes network for machine-learning and prediction. And then, based on these modules, a self-healing layer is built up to achieve decomposing, ranking, re-composing functionalities

Performance evaluation of a distributed integrative architecture for robotics

The eld of robotics employs a vast amount of coupled sub-systems. These need to interact cooperatively and concurrently in order to yield the desired results. Some hybrid algorithms also require intensive cooperative interactions internally. The architecture proposed lends it- self amenable to problem domains that require rigorous calculations that are usually impeded by the capacity of a single machine, and incompatibility issues between software computing elements. Implementations are abstracted away from the physical hardware for ease of de- velopment and competition in simulation leagues. Monolithic developments are complex, and the desire for decoupled architectures arises. Decoupling also lowers the threshold for using distributed and parallel resources. The ability to re-use and re-combine components on de- mand, therefore is essential, while maintaining the necessary degree of interaction. For this reason we propose to build software components on top of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web Services. An additional bene t is platform independence regarding both the operating system and the implementation language. The robot soccer platform as well as the associated simulation leagues are the target domain for the development. Furthermore are machine vision and remote process control related portions of the architecture currently in development and testing for industrial environments. We provide numerical data based on the Python frameworks ZSI and SOAPpy undermining the suitability of this approach for the eld of robotics. Response times of signi cantly less than 50 ms even for fully interpreted, dynamic languages provides hard information showing the feasibility of Web Services based SOAs even in time critical robotic applications