Cognitively-inspired Agent-based Service Composition for Mobile & Pervasive Computing

Automatic service composition in mobile and pervasive computing faces many challenges due to the complex and highly dynamic nature of the environment. Common approaches consider service composition as a decision problem whose solution is usually addressed from optimization perspectives which are not feasible in practice due to the intractability of the problem, limited computational resources of smart devices, service host's mobility, and time constraints to tailor composition plans. Thus, our main contribution is the development of a cognitively-inspired agent-based service composition model focused on bounded rationality rather than optimality, which allows the system to compensate for limited resources by selectively filtering out continuous streams of data. Our approach exhibits features such as distributedness, modularity, emergent global functionality, and robustness, which endow it with capabilities to perform decentralized service composition by orchestrating manifold service providers and conflicting goals from multiple users. The evaluation of our approach shows promising results when compared against state-of-the-art service composition models.Comment: This paper will appear on AIMS'19 (International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Services) on June 2

A Bibliometric Study on Authorship Trends and Research Themes in Knowledge Management Literature

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IFKAD via the link in this record.The aim of the study is to identify the contribution of authors in the domain of Knowledge Management (KM). The underlying data is from two leading KM journals, namely, the Journal of Knowledge Management (JKM) and the Journal of Intellectual Capital (JIC). We downloaded articles from Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS),with JKM and JIC-specific searches resulting in 508 and 73 citing articles respectively. The timeframe of analysis was 2009-2016. This dataset was used to create co-citation network visualisations to provide insights into the clusters of authors and research topics. Measures such as Betweenness centrality and hubs-authorities (HITS) were used to identify significant authors and their key themes of interest. More specifically, network analysis identified six dominant research themes, it revealed a total of 14,422 authors being cited (depicted as nodes in the visualisation) with a total of 1,023,123 citations (edges). Based on the findings of this study, the paper will explore the specific themes and the intellectual turning points in KM research and its evolution. Our bibliometric analysis has practical significance for researchers since it recognises the dominant research areas, and by extension, it identifies those that are still in their infancy; the latter having the potential of representing an interesting research gap. The limitation of the study is that the underlying data is only from two journals (albeit, from the top two journals in KM), which may lead to partially biased results. In future, the aim is to also leverage the analysis to more KM journals, e.g., the top ten journals within the Serenko & Bontis (2013) most updated list

The genetic variant rs4073 A→T of the Interleukin-8 promoter region is associated with the earlier onset of exudative age-related macular degeneration

Peer reviewe

Probabilistic Verification at Runtime for Self-Adaptive Systems

An effective design of effective and efficient self-adaptive systems may rely on several existing approaches. Software models and model checking techniques at run time represent one of them since they support automatic reasoning about such changes, detect harmful configurations, and potentially enable appropriate (self-)reactions. However, traditional model checking techniques and tools may not be applied as they are at run time, since they hardly meet the constraints imposed by on-the-fly analysis, in terms of execution time and memory occupation. For this reason, efficient run-time model checking represents a crucial research challenge. This paper precisely addresses this issue and focuses on probabilistic run-time model checking in which reliability models are given in terms of Discrete Time Markov Chains which are verified at run-time against a set of requirements expressed as logical formulae. In particular, the paper discusses the use of probabilistic model checking at run-time for self-adaptive systems by surveying and comparing the existing approaches divided in two categories: state-elimination algorithms and algebra-based algorithms. The discussion is supported by a realistic example and by empirical experiments

Reliability Analysis of Component-Based Systems with Multiple Failure Modes

This paper presents a novel approach to the reliability modeling and analysis of a component-based system that allows dealing with multiple failure modes and studying the error propagation among components. The proposed model permits to specify the components attitude to produce, propagate, transform or mask different failure modes. These component-level reliability specifications together with information about systems global structure allow precise estimation of reliability properties by means of analytical closed formulas, probabilistic modelchecking or simulation methods. To support the rapid identification of components that could heavily affect systems reliability, we also show how our modeling approach easily support the automated estimation of the system sensitivity to variations in the reliability properties of its components. The results of this analysis allow system designers and developers to identify critical components where it is worth spending additional improvement efforts

Towards a framework for work package allocation for GSD

Proceeding of: Proceeding of: OTM 2011 Workshops: Confederated International Workshops and Posters: EI2N+NSF ICE, ICSP+INBAST, ISDE, ORM, OTMA, SWWS+MONET+SeDeS, and VADER 2011, Hersonissos, Crete, Greece, October 17-21, 2011Global software development is an inexorable trend in the software industry. The impact of the trend in conventional software development can be found in many of its aspects. One of them is task or work package allocation. Task allocation was traditionally driven by resource competency and availability but GSD introduces new complexities to this process including time-zones differences, costs and cultural differences. In this work a report on the construction of a framework for work-package allocation within GSD projects is presented. This framework lies on three main pillars: individual and organizational competency, organizational customization and sound assessment methods.This work is supported by the Spanish Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI) under the Eureka Project E! 6244 PROPS-Tour and the national cooperation project SEM-IDi (IDI-20091150)

Suunnittelijan pätevyysvaatimukset geotekniikassa

Tiivistelmä. Kandidaatintyössä perehdyttiin suunnittelijan pätevyysvaatimuksiin geotekniikassa. Työssä käydään läpi kansallisten suunnittelijan pätevyysvaatimuksien lisäksi Oulun yliopiston rakennus- ja yhdyskuntatekniikan tutkinto-ohjelman kurssitarjonnassa tällä hetkellä olevia kursseja, joita opiskelija voisi hyödyntää pätevyyksiin vaadittavissa teoriaopinnoissa. Pätevyysvaatimuksia verrataan lopuksi vielä Ruotsin tilanteeseen. Tavoitteena on saada tietoa siitä, mitä erityisesti geotekniikassa yleisimpien suunnittelupätevyyksien saavuttaminen vaatii. Työssä keskitytään viiteen alalla olennaisimpaan pätevyyteen: infrakohteiden pohjarakenteiden, pohjarakenteiden, betonirakenteiden, teräsrakenteiden ja puurakenteiden suunnittelija. Suunnittelijan pätevyyksille on olemassa vaativuusluokat tavanomainen, vaativa (V ja V+) sekä poikkeuksellisen vaativa, johon tässä työssä keskitytään. Pätevyydet perustuvat maankäyttö- ja rakennuslakiin sekä sitä täydentäviin erilaisiin asetuksiin ja ohjeisiin. FISE on suomalainen henkilöpätevyyspalvelu, jota kautta henkilöt voivat hakea itselleen soveltuvaa pätevyyttä, jonka FISEn lautakunnat arvioivat heille toimitettavien dokumenttien pohjalta. Pätevyyden toteamisen edellytyksenä on riittävä koulutus ja opintosuoritukset sekä työkokemus. Poikkeuksellisen vaativia pätevyyksiä haettaessa vaaditaan vähintään 45 opintopistettä kullekin pätevyydelle ominaisia opintoja. Lisäksi pätevyydet vaativat työkokemusta suunnittelusta vähintään 10 vuoden ajalta kyseisen pätevyyden alaisista tehtävistä. Tähän kokemukseen täytyy kuitenkin sisältyä suunnittelutehtäviä vähintään 6 vuoden ajalta vaativan tai vaativa+-luokan tasolta. Työn kokeellisessa osiossa käytiin läpi tämänhetkinen kurssitarjonta ja opintoja pyrittiin taulukoimaan pätevyysvaatimuksien mukaisesti. Lisäksi selvitettiin Ruotsin tilannetta ja pyrittiin saamaan selville, onko heillä vastaava tapa myöntää suunnittelijoille pätevyyksiä. Ruotsissa pätevällä suunnittelijalla ei vaadita olevan sertifikaatteja eikä muita todisteita, vaan suunnittelijoiden tekemät suunnitelmat käydään läpi kunnan rakennuslautakunnassa. Rakennuslautakunnassa järjestetään tekninen neuvonta, jossa suunnitelmat käydään läpi ja sen pohjalta myönnetään lupa aloittaa rakennustyöt. Haasteena tässä on kuitenkin se, että julkisessa sääntelyssä ei käsitellä laadunvalvonnan tarvetta ja täten kunnan rakennuslautakunnassa olevien henkilöiden ammattitaidolla on suuri merkitys laadunvalvonnassa.Designer’s competence requirements in geotechnics. Abstract. The bachelors’ thesis subject is designer’s qualifications requirements in geotechnics. The thesis will go through the national design competence requirements as well as the courses currently offered in the University of Oulu’s degree programme in civil engineering, which the applicant for the qualification can use in the theory studies required for the qualifications. At the end of thesis, the qualification requirements are compared with the situation in Sweden. The goal is to gain information about what is required to achieve the most common designer qualifications in geotechnics. In this thesis we will focus on five most relevant qualifications in the field: infra ground structures designer, ground structures designer, concrete structures designer, steel structures designer and wood structures designer. For the designer’s qualifications, there are categories of complexity: usual, demanding, demanding+ and exceptionally demanding, which is the focus category in this thesis. The qualifications are based on the Land Use and Building Act and various supplementary regulations and instructions. FISE is a Finnish personal qualification service where people can apply for suitable qualifications, which is evaluated by FISE’s boards based on the documents delivered to them. The prerequisite for the ascertaining of qualifications is adequate education and credits as well as work experience. When applying for exceptionally demanding qualifications, at least 45 credits of studies specific to each qualification. Also, the qualifications require work experience in planning for at least 10 years in the tasks under the relevant qualification. This work experience must include also design tasks for at least 6 years at the demanding or demanding+ class level. In the experimental part of the work, the current course offering was reviewed, and an effort was made to tabulate the studies in accordance with the qualification requirements. Also, the situation in Sweden was investigated and an effort was made to find out if they have a similar way of awarding qualifications to designers. In Sweden a qualified designer is not required to have certificates or other evidence, but the plans made by designers are reviewed by the municipality’s building board. The building board organizes a technical consultation, where the plans are reviewed and based on that, permission is granted to start construction work. The challenge here is that public regulations do not deal with the need for quality control, and thus the professional skills of the people in the municipality’s building committee play a major role in quality control

Female responses to experimental removal of sexual selection components in Drosophila melanogaster

Despite the common assumption that multiple mating should in general be favored in males, but not in females, to date there is no consensus on the general impact of multiple mating on female fitness. Notably, very little is known about the genetic and physiological features underlying the female response to sexual selection pressures. By combining an experimental evolution approach with genomic techniques, we investigated the effects of single and multiple matings on female fecundity and gene expression. We experimentally manipulated the opportunity for mating in replicate populations of Drosophila melanogaster by removing components of sexual selection, with the aim of testing differences in short term post-mating effects of females evolved under different mating strategies

A Coordinated Approach to Control Mechanical and Computing Resources in Mobile Robots

Energy management of mechanical and cyber parts in mobile robots consists of two processes operating concurrently at runtime. Both the two processes can significantly improve the robots’ battery lifetime and further extend mission time. In each process, information on energy consumption of one of the two parts is captured and analyzed to manipulate various mechanical/computational actuators in a robot, such as motor speed and CPU voltage/frequency. In this paper, we show that considering management of mechanical and computational segments separately does not necessarily result in an energy-optimal solution due to their co-dependence; as a consequence, a runtime co-management scheme is required. We propose a proactive energy optimization methodology in which dynamically-trained internal models are utilized to predict the future energy consumption for the mechanical and computational parts of a mobile robot, and based on that, the optimal mechanical speed and CPU voltage/frequency are determined at runtime. The experimental results on a ground wheeled robot show up to 36.34% reduction in the overall energy consumption compared to the state-of-the-art methods