TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2005

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Learning with Mobiles. A Developing Country Perspective on Mobile Technologies use in Learning for Livelihood Support

Paper VI is excluded from the dissertation until it will be published.This doctoral thesis focuses on understanding the role of mobile technologies as tools to enhance learning for livelihood support. To date, the body of knowledge on the use of mobile technologies for development is growing, as mobiles avail a chance for many developing countries’ communities to improve their economic and social well-being. The current integration of mobile technologies for development has to a large extent focused on information dissemination, with less emphasis on how mobiles offer learning spaces to propel development. Yet, mobile technologies offer possibilities for access to learning for communities in resource constrained settings. Dedicated studies in pedagogical integration of mobile technologies in teaching and learning mainly focus on formal and informal learning classroom-related activities, neglecting the substantial majority like smallholder farmers who constitute the biggest percentage in many rural areas.publishedVersio

Real-Time Context-Aware Microservice Architecture for Predictive Analytics and Smart Decision-Making

The impressive evolution of the Internet of Things and the great amount of data flowing through the systems provide us with an inspiring scenario for Big Data analytics and advantageous real-time context-aware predictions and smart decision-making. However, this requires a scalable system for constant streaming processing, also provided with the ability of decision-making and action taking based on the performed predictions. This paper aims at proposing a scalable architecture to provide real-time context-aware actions based on predictive streaming processing of data as an evolution of a previously provided event-driven service-oriented architecture which already permitted the context-aware detection and notification of relevant data. For this purpose, we have defined and implemented a microservice-based architecture which provides real-time context-aware actions based on predictive streaming processing of data. As a result, our architecture has been enhanced twofold: on the one hand, the architecture has been supplied with reliable predictions through the use of predictive analytics and complex event processing techniques, which permit the notification of relevant context-aware information ahead of time. On the other, it has been refactored towards a microservice architecture pattern, highly improving its maintenance and evolution. The architecture performance has been evaluated with an air quality case study

N-gram Based Croatian Language Network: Application in a Smart Environment

In the field of natural language processing, language networks represent a method for observing linguistic units and their interactions in different linguistic contexts. This paper uses the previously presented Croatian language network for building a solution capable of generating spoken notifications in Croatian language. The novelty of this paper is that it proposes an approach for generating spoken notifications in smart environments by combining specialized services that enable interaction with the environment and human users. The process employed for generating spoken notifications is described in detail. Also, a novel contribution of this paper is the case-study evaluation of the proposed approach in a smart home environment

Feature interaction in composed systems. Proceedings. ECOOP 2001 Workshop #08 in association with the 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Budapest, Hungary, June 18-22, 2001

Feature interaction is nothing new and not limited to computer science. The problem of undesirable feature interaction (feature interaction problem) has already been investigated in the telecommunication domain. Our goal is the investigation of feature interaction in componet-based systems beyond telecommunication. This Technical Report embraces all position papers accepted at the ECOOP 2001 workshop no. 08 on "Feature Interaction in Composed Systems". The workshop was held on June 18, 2001 at Budapest, Hungary

Run Time Models in Adaptive Service Infrastructure

Software in the near ubiquitous future will need to cope with vari- ability, as software systems get deployed on an increasingly large diversity of computing platforms and operates in different execution environments. Heterogeneity of the underlying communication and computing infrastruc- ture, mobility inducing changes to the execution environments and therefore changes to the availability of resources and continuously evolving requirements require software systems to be adaptable according to the context changes. Software systems should also be reliable and meet the user's requirements and needs. Moreover, due to its pervasiveness, software systems must be de- pendable. Supporting the validation of these self-adaptive systems to ensure dependability requires a complete rethinking of the software life cycle. The traditional division among static analysis and dynamic analysis is blurred by the need to validate dynamic systems adaptation. Models play a key role in the validation of dependable systems, dynamic adaptation calls for the use of such models at run time. In this paper we describe the approach we have un- dertaken in recent projects to address the challenge of assessing dependability for adaptive software systems

M-health review: joining up healthcare in a wireless world

In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver health and social care. This trend is bound to continue as providers (whether public or private) strive to deliver better care to more people under conditions of severe budgetary constraint

Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations