PROFILING - CONCEPTS AND APPLICATIONS

Profiling is an approach to put a label or a set of labels on a subject, considering the characteristics of this subject. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines profiling as: “recording and analysis of a person’s psychological and behavioral characteristics, so as to assess or predict his/her capabilities in a certain sphere or to assist in identifying a particular subgroup of people”. This research extends this definition towards things demonstrating that many methods used for profiling of people may be applied for a different type of subjects, namely things. The goal of this research concerns proposing methods for discovery of profiles of users and things with application of Data Science methods. The profiles are utilized in vertical and 2 horizontal scenarios and concern such domains as smart grid and telecommunication (vertical scenarios), and support provided both for the needs of authorization and personalization (horizontal usage).:The thesis consists of eight chapters including an introduction and a summary. First chapter describes motivation for work that was carried out for the last 8 years together with discussion on its importance both for research and business practice. The motivation for this work is much broader and emerges also from business importance of profiling and personalization. The introduction summarizes major research directions, provides research questions, goals and supplementary objectives addressed in the thesis. Research methodology is also described, showing impact of methodological aspects on the work undertaken. Chapter 2 provides introduction to the notion of profiling. The definition of profiling is introduced. Here, also a relation of a user profile to an identity is discussed. The papers included in this chapter show not only how broadly a profile may be understood, but also how a profile may be constructed considering different data sources. Profiling methods are introduced in Chapter 3. This chapter refers to the notion of a profile developed using the BFI-44 personality test and outcomes of a survey related to color preferences of people with a specific personality. Moreover, insights into profiling of relations between people are provided, with a focus on quality of a relation emerging from contacts between two entities. Chapters from 4 to 7 present different scenarios that benefit from application of profiling methods. Chapter 4 starts with introducing the notion of a public utility company that in the thesis is discussed using examples from smart grid and telecommunication. Then, in chapter 4 follows a description of research results regarding profiling for the smart grid, focusing on a profile of a prosumer and forecasting demand and production of the electric energy in the smart grid what can be influenced e.g. by weather or profiles of appliances. Chapter 5 presents application of profiling techniques in the field of telecommunication. Besides presenting profiling methods based on telecommunication data, in particular on Call Detail Records, also scenarios and issues related to privacy and trust are addressed. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 target at horizontal applications of profiling that may be of benefit for multiple domains. Chapter 6 concerns profiling for authentication using un-typical data sources such as Call Detail Records or data from a mobile phone describing the user behavior. Besides proposing methods, also limitations are discussed. In addition, as a side research effect a methodology for evaluation of authentication methods is proposed. Chapter 7 concerns personalization and consists of two diverse parts. Firstly, behavioral profiles to change interface and behavior of the system are proposed and applied. The performance of solutions personalizing content either locally or on the server is studied. Then, profiles of customers of shopping centers are created based on paths identified using Call Detail Records. The analysis demonstrates that the data that is collected for one purpose, may significantly influence other business scenarios. Chapter 8 summarizes the research results achieved by the author of this document. It presents contribution over state of the art as well as some insights into the future work planned

Interdependent Security and Compliance in Service Selection

Application development today is characterized by ever shorter release cycles and more frequent change requests. Hence development methods such as service composition are increasingly arousing interest as viable alternative approaches. While employing web services as building blocks rapidly reduces development times, it raises new challenges regarding security and compliance since their implementation remains a black box which usually cannot be controlled. Security in particular gets even more challenging since some applications require domainspecific security objectives such as location privacy. Another important aspect is that security objectives are in general no singletons but subject to interdependence. Hence this thesis addresses the question of how to consider interdependent security and compliance in service composition. Current approaches for service composition do neither consider interdependent security nor compliance. Selecting suiting services for a composition is a combinatorial problem which is known to be NP-hard. Often this problem is solved utilizing genetic algorithms in order to obtain near-optimal solutions in reasonable time. This is particularly the case if multiple objectives have to be optimized simultaneously such as price, runtime and data encryption strength. Security properties of compositions are usually verified using formal methods. However, none of the available methods supports interdependence effects or defining arbitrary security objectives. Similarly, no current approach ensures compliance of service compositions during service selection. Instead, compliance is verified afterwards which might necessitate repeating the selection process in case of a non-compliant solution. In this thesis, novel approaches for considering interdependent security and compliance in service composition are being presented and discussed. Since no formal methods exist covering interdependence effects for security, this aspect is covered in terms of a security assessment. An assessment method is developed which builds upon the notion of structural decomposition in order to assess the fulfillment of arbitrary security objectives in terms of a utility function. Interdependence effects are being modeled as dependencies between utility functions. In order to enable compliance-awareness, an approach is presented which checks compliance of compositions during service selection and marks non-compliant parts. This enables to repair the corresponding parts during the selection process by replacing the current services and hence avoids the necessity to repeat the selection process. It is demonstrated how to embed the presented approaches into a genetic algorithm in order to ease integration with existing approaches for service composition. The developed approaches are being compared to state-of-the-art genetic algorithms using simulations