Big data analytics:Computational intelligence techniques and application areas

Big Data has significant impact in developing functional smart cities and supporting modern societies. In this paper, we investigate the importance of Big Data in modern life and economy, and discuss challenges arising from Big Data utilization. Different computational intelligence techniques have been considered as tools for Big Data analytics. We also explore the powerful combination of Big Data and Computational Intelligence (CI) and identify a number of areas, where novel applications in real world smart city problems can be developed by utilizing these powerful tools and techniques. We present a case study for intelligent transportation in the context of a smart city, and a novel data modelling methodology based on a biologically inspired universal generative modelling approach called Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal State Machine (HSTSM). We further discuss various implications of policy, protection, valuation and commercialization related to Big Data, its applications and deployment

Smartphone Augmented Reality Applications for Tourism

Invisible, attentive and adaptive technologies that provide tourists with relevant services and information anytime and anywhere may no longer be a vision from the future. The new display paradigm, stemming from the synergy of new mobile devices, context-awareness and AR, has the potential to enhance tourists’ experiences and make them exceptional. However, effective and usable design is still in its infancy. In this publication we present an overview of current smartphone AR applications outlining tourism-related domain-specific design challenges. This study is part of an ongoing research project aiming at developing a better understanding of the design space for smartphone context-aware AR applications for tourists

The transformation of transport policy in Great Britain? 'New Realism' and New Labour's decade of displacement activity

In a 1999 paper, Goodwin announced ‘the transformation of transport policy in Great Britain’. His central point was that consensus was emerging among policy makers and academics based on earlier work including Transport: The New Realism, which rejected previous orthodoxy that the supply of road space could and should be continually expanded to match demand. Instead a combination of investment in public transport, walking and cycling opportunities and – crucially – demand management should form the basis of transport policy to address rising vehicle use and associated increases in congestion and pollution / carbon emissions. This thinking formed the basis of the 1997 Labour government’s ‘sustainable transport’ policy, but after 13 years in power ministers neither transformed policy nor tackled longstanding transport trends. Our main aim in this paper is to revisit the concept of New Realism and re-examine its potential utility as an agent of change in British transport policy. Notwithstanding the outcome of Labour’s approach to transport policy, we find that the central tenets of the New Realism remain robust and that the main barriers to change are related to broader political and governance issues which suppress radical policy innovation

Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Size Matters: Microservices Research and Applications

In this chapter we offer an overview of microservices providing the introductory information that a reader should know before continuing reading this book. We introduce the idea of microservices and we discuss some of the current research challenges and real-life software applications where the microservice paradigm play a key role. We have identified a set of areas where both researcher and developer can propose new ideas and technical solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1706.0735

SecMon: End-to-End Quality and Security Monitoring System

The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming a more available and popular way of communicating for Internet users. This also applies to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and merging these two have already proven to be successful (e.g. Skype). Even the existing standards of VoIP provide an assurance of security and Quality of Service (QoS), however, these features are usually optional and supported by limited number of implementations. As a result, the lack of mandatory and widely applicable QoS and security guaranties makes the contemporary VoIP systems vulnerable to attacks and network disturbances. In this paper we are facing these issues and propose the SecMon system, which simultaneously provides a lightweight security mechanism and improves quality parameters of the call. SecMon is intended specially for VoIP service over P2P networks and its main advantage is that it provides authentication, data integrity services, adaptive QoS and (D)DoS attack detection. Moreover, the SecMon approach represents a low-bandwidth consumption solution that is transparent to the users and possesses a self-organizing capability. The above-mentioned features are accomplished mainly by utilizing two information hiding techniques: digital audio watermarking and network steganography. These techniques are used to create covert channels that serve as transport channels for lightweight QoS measurement's results. Furthermore, these metrics are aggregated in a reputation system that enables best route path selection in the P2P network. The reputation system helps also to mitigate (D)DoS attacks, maximize performance and increase transmission efficiency in the network.Comment: Paper was presented at 7th international conference IBIZA 2008: On Computer Science - Research And Applications, Poland, Kazimierz Dolny 31.01-2.02 2008; 14 pages, 5 figure

Towards a multidisciplinary user-centric design framework for context-aware applications

The primary aim of this article is to review and merge theories of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology, to propose a multidisciplinary model of context that would facilitate application developers in developing richer descriptions or scenarios of how a context-aware device may be used in various dynamic mobile settings. More specifically, the aim is to:1. Investigate different viewpoints of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology, to develop summary condensed models for each discipline. 2. Investigate the impact of contrasting viewpoints on the usability of context-aware applications. 3. Investigate the extent to which single-discipline models can be merged and the benefits and insightfulness of a merged model for designing mobile computers. 4. Investigate the extent to which a proposed multidisciplinary modelcan be applied to specific applications of context-aware computing