SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

Edge Computing for Extreme Reliability and Scalability

The massive number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their continuous data collection will lead to a rapid increase in the scale of collected data. Processing all these collected data at the central cloud server is inefficient, and even is unfeasible or unnecessary. Hence, the task of processing the data is pushed to the network edges introducing the concept of Edge Computing. Processing the information closer to the source of data (e.g., on gateways and on edge micro-servers) not only reduces the huge workload of central cloud, also decreases the latency for real-time applications by avoiding the unreliable and unpredictable network latency to communicate with the central cloud

Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering

Over the past two decades the field of computational science and engineering (CSE) has penetrated both basic and applied research in academia, industry, and laboratories to advance discovery, optimize systems, support decision-makers, and educate the scientific and engineering workforce. Informed by centuries of theory and experiment, CSE performs computational experiments to answer questions that neither theory nor experiment alone is equipped to answer. CSE provides scientists and engineers of all persuasions with algorithmic inventions and software systems that transcend disciplines and scales. Carried on a wave of digital technology, CSE brings the power of parallelism to bear on troves of data. Mathematics-based advanced computing has become a prevalent means of discovery and innovation in essentially all areas of science, engineering, technology, and society; and the CSE community is at the core of this transformation. However, a combination of disruptive developments---including the architectural complexity of extreme-scale computing, the data revolution that engulfs the planet, and the specialization required to follow the applications to new frontiers---is redefining the scope and reach of the CSE endeavor. This report describes the rapid expansion of CSE and the challenges to sustaining its bold advances. The report also presents strategies and directions for CSE research and education for the next decade.Comment: Major revision, to appear in SIAM Revie

Building Blocks for IoT Analytics Internet-of-Things Analytics

Internet-of-Things (IoT) Analytics are an integral element of most IoT applications, as it provides the means to extract knowledge, drive actuation services and optimize decision making. IoT analytics will be a major contributor to IoT business value in the coming years, as it will enable organizations to process and fully leverage large amounts of IoT data, which are nowadays largely underutilized. The Building Blocks of IoT Analytics is devoted to the presentation the main technology building blocks that comprise advanced IoT analytics systems. It introduces IoT analytics as a special case of BigData analytics and accordingly presents leading edge technologies that can be deployed in order to successfully confront the main challenges of IoT analytics applications. Special emphasis is paid in the presentation of technologies for IoT streaming and semantic interoperability across diverse IoT streams. Furthermore, the role of cloud computing and BigData technologies in IoT analytics are presented, along with practical tools for implementing, deploying and operating non-trivial IoT applications. Along with the main building blocks of IoT analytics systems and applications, the book presents a series of practical applications, which illustrate the use of these technologies in the scope of pragmatic applications. Technical topics discussed in the book include: Cloud Computing and BigData for IoT analyticsSearching the Internet of ThingsDevelopment Tools for IoT Analytics ApplicationsIoT Analytics-as-a-ServiceSemantic Modelling and Reasoning for IoT AnalyticsIoT analytics for Smart BuildingsIoT analytics for Smart CitiesOperationalization of IoT analyticsEthical aspects of IoT analyticsThis book contains both research oriented and applied articles on IoT analytics, including several articles reflecting work undertaken in the scope of recent European Commission funded projects in the scope of the FP7 and H2020 programmes. These articles present results of these projects on IoT analytics platforms and applications. Even though several articles have been contributed by different authors, they are structured in a well thought order that facilitates the reader either to follow the evolution of the book or to focus on specific topics depending on his/her background and interest in IoT and IoT analytics technologies. The compilation of these articles in this edited volume has been largely motivated by the close collaboration of the co-authors in the scope of working groups and IoT events organized by the Internet-of-Things Research Cluster (IERC), which is currently a part of EU's Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI)

Arquitectura, técnicas y modelos para posibilitar la Ciencia de Datos en el Archivo de la Misión Gaia

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Informática, Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automática, leída el 26/05/2017.The massive amounts of data that the world produces every day pose new challenges to modern societies in terms of how to leverage their inherent value. Social networks, instant messaging, video, smart devices and scientific missions are just mere examples of the vast number of sources generating data every second. As the world becomes more and more digitalized, new needs arise for organizing, archiving, sharing, analyzing, visualizing and protecting the ever-increasing data sets, so that we can truly develop into a data-driven economy that reduces inefficiencies and increases sustainability, creating new business opportunities on the way. Traditional approaches for harnessing data are not suitable any more as they lack the means for scaling to the larger volumes in a timely and cost efficient manner. This has somehow changed with the advent of Internet companies like Google and Facebook, which have devised new ways of tackling this issue. However, the variety and complexity of the value chains in the private sector as well as the increasing demands and constraints in which the public one operates, needs an ongoing research that can yield newer strategies for dealing with data, facilitate the integration of providers and consumers of information, and guarantee a smooth and prompt transition when adopting these cutting-edge technological advances. This thesis aims at providing novel architectures and techniques that will help perform this transition towards Big Data in massive scientific archives. It highlights the common pitfalls that must be faced when embracing it and how to overcome them, especially when the data sets, their transformation pipelines and the tools used for the analysis are already present in the organizations. Furthermore, a new perspective for facilitating a smoother transition is laid out. It involves the usage of higher-level and use case specific frameworks and models, which will naturally bridge the gap between the technological and scientific domains. This alternative will effectively widen the possibilities of scientific archives and therefore will contribute to the reduction of the time to science. The research will be applied to the European Space Agency cornerstone mission Gaia, whose final data archive will represent a tremendous discovery potential. It will create the largest and most precise three dimensional chart of our galaxy (the Milky Way), providing unprecedented position, parallax and proper motion measurements for about one billion stars. The successful exploitation of this data archive will depend to a large degree on the ability to offer the proper architecture, i.e. infrastructure and middleware, upon which scientists will be able to do exploration and modeling with this huge data set. In consequence, the approach taken needs to enable data fusion with other scientific archives, as this will produce the synergies leading to an increment in scientific outcome, both in volume and in quality. The set of novel techniques and frameworks presented in this work addresses these issues by contextualizing them with the data products that will be generated in the Gaia mission. All these considerations have led to the foundations of the architecture that will be leveraged by the Science Enabling Applications Work Package. Last but not least, the effectiveness of the proposed solution will be demonstrated through the implementation of some ambitious statistical problems that will require significant computational capabilities, and which will use Gaia-like simulated data (the first Gaia data release has recently taken place on September 14th, 2016). These ambitious problems will be referred to as the Grand Challenge, a somewhat grandiloquent name that consists in inferring a set of parameters from a probabilistic point of view for the Initial Mass Function (IMF) and Star Formation Rate (SFR) of a given set of stars (with a huge sample size), from noisy estimates of their masses and ages respectively. This will be achieved by using Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling (HBM). In principle, the HBM can incorporate stellar evolution models to infer the IMF and SFR directly, but in this first step presented in this thesis, we will start with a somewhat less ambitious goal: inferring the PDMF and PDAD. Moreover, the performance and scalability analyses carried out will also prove the suitability of the models for the large amounts of data that will be available in the Gaia data archive.Las grandes cantidades de datos que se producen en el mundo diariamente plantean nuevos retos a la sociedad en términos de cómo extraer su valor inherente. Las redes sociales, mensajería instantánea, los dispositivos inteligentes y las misiones científicas son meros ejemplos del gran número de fuentes generando datos en cada momento. Al mismo tiempo que el mundo se digitaliza cada vez más, aparecen nuevas necesidades para organizar, archivar, compartir, analizar, visualizar y proteger la creciente cantidad de datos, para que podamos desarrollar economías basadas en datos e información que sean capaces de reducir las ineficiencias e incrementar la sostenibilidad, creando nuevas oportunidades de negocio por el camino. La forma en la que se han manejado los datos tradicionalmente no es la adecuada hoy en día, ya que carece de los medios para escalar a los volúmenes más grandes de datos de una forma oportuna y eficiente. Esto ha cambiado de alguna manera con la llegada de compañías que operan en Internet como Google o Facebook, ya que han concebido nuevas aproximaciones para abordar el problema. Sin embargo, la variedad y complejidad de las cadenas de valor en el sector privado y las crecientes demandas y limitaciones en las que el sector público opera, necesitan una investigación continua en la materia que pueda proporcionar nuevas estrategias para procesar las enormes cantidades de datos, facilitar la integración de productores y consumidores de información, y garantizar una transición rápida y fluida a la hora de adoptar estos avances tecnológicos innovadores. Esta tesis tiene como objetivo proporcionar nuevas arquitecturas y técnicas que ayudarán a realizar esta transición hacia Big Data en archivos científicos masivos. La investigación destaca los escollos principales a encarar cuando se adoptan estas nuevas tecnologías y cómo afrontarlos, principalmente cuando los datos y las herramientas de transformación utilizadas en el análisis existen en la organización. Además, se exponen nuevas medidas para facilitar una transición más fluida. Éstas incluyen la utilización de software de alto nivel y específico al caso de uso en cuestión, que haga de puente entre el dominio científico y tecnológico. Esta alternativa ampliará de una forma efectiva las posibilidades de los archivos científicos y por tanto contribuirá a la reducción del tiempo necesario para generar resultados científicos a partir de los datos recogidos en las misiones de astronomía espacial y planetaria. La investigación se aplicará a la misión de la Agencia Espacial Europea (ESA) Gaia, cuyo archivo final de datos presentará un gran potencial para el descubrimiento y hallazgo desde el punto de vista científico. La misión creará el catálogo en tres dimensiones más grande y preciso de nuestra galaxia (la Vía Láctea), proporcionando medidas sin precedente acerca del posicionamiento, paralaje y movimiento propio de alrededor de mil millones de estrellas. Las oportunidades para la explotación exitosa de este archivo de datos dependerán en gran medida de la capacidad de ofrecer la arquitectura adecuada, es decir infraestructura y servicios, sobre la cual los científicos puedan realizar la exploración y modelado con esta inmensa cantidad de datos. Por tanto, la estrategia a realizar debe ser capaz de combinar los datos con otros archivos científicos, ya que esto producirá sinergias que contribuirán a un incremento en la ciencia producida, tanto en volumen como en calidad de la misma. El conjunto de técnicas e infraestructuras innovadoras presentadas en este trabajo aborda estos problemas, contextualizándolos con los productos de datos que se generarán en la misión Gaia. Todas estas consideraciones han conducido a los fundamentos de la arquitectura que se utilizará en el paquete de trabajo de aplicaciones que posibilitarán la ciencia en el archivo de la misión Gaia (Science Enabling Applications). Por último, la eficacia de la solución propuesta se demostrará a través de la implementación de dos problemas estadísticos que requerirán cantidades significativas de cómputo, y que usarán datos simulados en el mismo formato en el que se producirán en el archivo de la misión Gaia (la primera versión de datos recogidos por la misión está disponible desde el día 14 de Septiembre de 2016). Estos ambiciosos problemas representan el Gran Reto (Grand Challenge), un nombre grandilocuente que consiste en inferir una serie de parámetros desde un punto de vista probabilístico para la función de masa inicial (Initial Mass Function) y la tasa de formación estelar (Star Formation Rate) dado un conjunto de estrellas (con una muestra grande), desde estimaciones con ruido de sus masas y edades respectivamente. Esto se abordará utilizando modelos jerárquicos bayesianos (Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling). Enprincipio,losmodelospropuestos pueden incorporar otros modelos de evolución estelar para inferir directamente la función de masa inicial y la tasa de formación estelar, pero en este primer paso presentado en esta tesis, empezaremos con un objetivo algo menos ambicioso: la inferencia de la función de masa y distribución de edades actual (Present-Day Mass Function y Present-Day Age Distribution respectivamente). Además, se llevará a cabo el análisis de rendimiento y escalabilidad para probar la idoneidad de la implementación de dichos modelos dadas las enormes cantidades de datos que estarán disponibles en el archivo de la misión Gaia...Depto. de Arquitectura de Computadores y AutomáticaFac. de InformáticaTRUEunpu

High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications