A survey of QoS-aware web service composition techniques

Web service composition can be briefly described as the process of aggregating services with disparate functionalities into a new composite service in order to meet increasingly complex needs of users. Service composition process has been accurate on dealing with services having disparate functionalities, however, over the years the number of web services in particular that exhibit similar functionalities and varying Quality of Service (QoS) has significantly increased. As such, the problem becomes how to select appropriate web services such that the QoS of the resulting composite service is maximized or, in some cases, minimized. This constitutes an NP-hard problem as it is complicated and difficult to solve. In this paper, a discussion of concepts of web service composition and a holistic review of current service composition techniques proposed in literature is presented. Our review spans several publications in the field that can serve as a road map for future research

A retrieval-based dialogue system utilizing utterance and context embeddings

Finding semantically rich and computer-understandable representations for textual dialogues, utterances and words is crucial for dialogue systems (or conversational agents), as their performance mostly depends on understanding the context of conversations. Recent research aims at finding distributed vector representations (embeddings) for words, such that semantically similar words are relatively close within the vector-space. Encoding the "meaning" of text into vectors is a current trend, and text can range from words, phrases and documents to actual human-to-human conversations. In recent research approaches, responses have been generated utilizing a decoder architecture, given the vector representation of the current conversation. In this paper, the utilization of embeddings for answer retrieval is explored by using Locality-Sensitive Hashing Forest (LSH Forest), an Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) model, to find similar conversations in a corpus and rank possible candidates. Experimental results on the well-known Ubuntu Corpus (in English) and a customer service chat dataset (in Dutch) show that, in combination with a candidate selection method, retrieval-based approaches outperform generative ones and reveal promising future research directions towards the usability of such a system.Comment: A shorter version is accepted at ICMLA2017 conference; acknowledgement added; typos correcte

International conference on software engineering and knowledge engineering: Session chair

The Thirtieth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2018) will be held at the Hotel Pullman, San Francisco Bay, USA, from July 1 to July 3, 2018. SEKE2018 will also be dedicated in memory of Professor Lofti Zadeh, a great scholar, pioneer and leader in fuzzy sets theory and soft computing. The conference aims at bringing together experts in software engineering and knowledge engineering to discuss on relevant results in either software engineering or knowledge engineering or both. Special emphasis will be put on the transference of methods between both domains. The theme this year is soft computing in software engineering & knowledge engineering. Submission of papers and demos are both welcome

Microservices and Machine Learning Algorithms for Adaptive Green Buildings

In recent years, the use of services for Open Systems development has consolidated and strengthened. Advances in the Service Science and Engineering (SSE) community, promoted by the reinforcement of Web Services and Semantic Web technologies and the presence of new Cloud computing techniques, such as the proliferation of microservices solutions, have allowed software architects to experiment and develop new ways of building open and adaptable computer systems at runtime. Home automation, intelligent buildings, robotics, graphical user interfaces are some of the social atmosphere environments suitable in which to apply certain innovative trends. This paper presents a schema for the adaptation of Dynamic Computer Systems (DCS) using interdisciplinary techniques on model-driven engineering, service engineering and soft computing. The proposal manages an orchestrated microservices schema for adapting component-based software architectural systems at runtime. This schema has been developed as a three-layer adaptive transformation process that is supported on a rule-based decision-making service implemented by means of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. The experimental development was implemented in the Solar Energy Research Center (CIESOL) applying the proposed microservices schema for adapting home architectural atmosphere systems on Green Buildings

AIMS: An Automatic Semantic Machine Learning Microservice Framework to Support Biomedical and Bioengineering Research

The fusion of machine learning and biomedical research offers novel ways to understand, diagnose, and treat various health conditions. However, the complexities of biomedical data, coupled with the intricate process of developing and deploying machine learning solutions, often pose significant challenges to researchers in these fields. Our pivotal achievement in this research is the introduction of the Automatic Semantic Machine Learning Microservice Framework (AIMS). AIMS addresses these challenges by automating various stages of the machine learning pipeline, with a particular emphasis on the ontology of machine learning services tailored for the biomedical domain. This ontology encompasses everything from task representation, service modeling, and knowledge acquisition to knowledge reasoning and the establishment of a self-supervised learning policy. Our framework has been crafted to prioritize model interpretability, integrate domain knowledge effortlessly, and handle biomedical data with efficiency. Additionally, AIMS boasts a distinctive feature: it leverages self-supervised knowledge learning through reinforcement learning techniques, paired with an ontology-based policy recording schema. This enables it to autonomously generate, fine-tune, and continually adapt to machine learning models, especially when faced with new tasks and data. Our work has two standout contributions of demonstrating that machine learning processes in the biomedical domain can be automated, while integrating a rich domain knowledge base and providing a way for machines to have a self-learning ability, ensuring they handle new tasks effectively. To showcase AIMS in action, we've highlighted its prowess in three case studies from biomedical tasks. These examples emphasize how our framework can simplify research routines, uplift the caliber of scientific exploration, and set the stage for notable advances

Reinforcement machine learning for predictive analytics in smart cities

The digitization of our lives cause a shift in the data production as well as in the required data management. Numerous nodes are capable of producing huge volumes of data in our everyday activities. Sensors, personal smart devices as well as the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm lead to a vast infrastructure that covers all the aspects of activities in modern societies. In the most of the cases, the critical issue for public authorities (usually, local, like municipalities) is the efficient management of data towards the support of novel services. The reason is that analytics provided on top of the collected data could help in the delivery of new applications that will facilitate citizens’ lives. However, the provision of analytics demands intelligent techniques for the underlying data management. The most known technique is the separation of huge volumes of data into a number of parts and their parallel management to limit the required time for the delivery of analytics. Afterwards, analytics requests in the form of queries could be realized and derive the necessary knowledge for supporting intelligent applications. In this paper, we define the concept of a Query Controller ( QC ) that receives queries for analytics and assigns each of them to a processor placed in front of each data partition. We discuss an intelligent process for query assignments that adopts Machine Learning (ML). We adopt two learning schemes, i.e., Reinforcement Learning (RL) and clustering. We report on the comparison of the two schemes and elaborate on their combination. Our aim is to provide an efficient framework to support the decision making of the QC that should swiftly select the appropriate processor for each query. We provide mathematical formulations for the discussed problem and present simulation results. Through a comprehensive experimental evaluation, we reveal the advantages of the proposed models and describe the outcomes results while comparing them with a deterministic framework