Seamless Task Offloading on Multi-Clouds and Edge Resources: an Experiment

Cloud computing has been growing at an increasing rate over the last few years. Commercial and scientific applications have come to rely on it as a development tool due to its exceptional characteristics in processing power and storage. The trend has been augmented with the emergence of the Internet of Things and smart processing devices at the edge. Contrary to the line of thought commonly adopted, we present in this work an alternative platform that considers edge devices as possible processing nodes, and provide a two-level task scheduling deployment that can handle not only binary modules, but also code-level fragmentations. We also go through a simple implementation of the platform, using production-ready solutions, while validating it on public and private clouds, and physically-separated edge devices

PaaSword: A Holistic Data Privacy and Security by Design Framework for Cloud Services

Enterprises increasingly recognize the compelling economic and operational benefits from virtualizing and pooling IT resources in the cloud. Nevertheless, the significant and valuable transformation of organizations that adopt cloud computing is accompanied by a number of security threats that should be considered. In this position paper, we outline significant security challenges presented when migrating to a cloud environment and propose PaaSword - a novel holistic framework that aspires to alleviate these challenges. Specifically, this proposed framework involves a context-aware security model, the necessary policies enforcement mechanism along with a physical distribution, encryption and query middleware

Determination of the Insulation Condition in Synchronous Generators: Industrial Methods and Case Study

[EN] Electrical Machines, and especially Synchronous Generators (SG), take a significant position in Power Generation plants and in Industry Production Lines and their unscheduled outages may have very negative repercussions. One of the main reasons for their failure relies on the degradation of their stator and rotor insulation systems. Although there are several industrial methods that are commonly used for diagnosing the health of such parts, some critical aspects remain unsolved. This paper reviews the different diagnostic methods and techniques that are most commonly used in practice to determine the condition of these two insulation systems in SG, emphasizing their respective drawbacks and analyzing their variants. Consequently, a case study on a SG operating in a Power Plant in Greece which illustrates the application of all these methods is presented.Part of this research was funded by Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria de Educacion, Investigacion, Cultura y Deporte, under Grant AICO/2019/224. The authors of this article would like to thank Pericles Stratigopoulos, director of the Komotini Power Plant, Public Power Corporation S.A., Greece, for providing the pictures of the stator and rotor and the measurements for this SG.Verginadis, D.; Antonino-Daviu, J.; Karlis, A.; Danikas, M. (2022). Determination of the Insulation Condition in Synchronous Generators: Industrial Methods and Case Study. IEEE Industry Applications Magazine. 28(2):67-77. https://doi.org/10.1109/MIAS.2021.3114659677728

Agent-based interoperability for e-government

The provision of valuable e-government services depends upon the capacity to integrate the disperse provision of services by the public administration and thus upon the availability of interoperability platforms. These platforms are commonly built according to the principles of service oriented architectures, which raise the question of how to dynamically orchestrate services while preserving information security. Recently, it was presented an e-government interoperability model that preserves privacy during the dynamic orchestration of services. In this paper we present a prototype that implements that model using software agents. The model and the prototype are briefly described; an illustrative use case is presented; and the advantages of using software agents to implement the model are discussed. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013

Brokerage for Quality Assurance and Optimisation of Cloud Services: An Analysis of Key Requirements

As the number of cloud service providers grows and the requirements of cloud service consumers become more complex, the latter will come to depend more and more on the intermediation services of cloud service brokers. Continuous quality assurance and optimisation of services is becoming a mission-critical objective that many consumers will find difficult to address without help from cloud service intermediaries. The Broker@Cloud project envisages a software framework that will make it easier for cloud service intermediaries to address this need, and this paper provides an analysis of key requirements for this framework. We discuss the methodology that we followed to capture these requirements, which involved defining a conceptual service lifecycle model, carrying out a series of Design Thinking workshops, and formalising requirements based on an agile requirements information model. Then, we present the key requirements identified through this process in the form of summarised results

Data Mining in Electrical Machine Maintenance Reports

Industrial electrical machine maintenance logs pertinent information, such as fault causality and earlier indications, in the form of a semi-standardized report, previously written and now in digital form. New practices in predictive maintenance, state-of-the-art condition monitoring, include increasing applications of machine learning. Reports contain a large volume of natural text in various languages and semantics, proving costly for feature extraction. This chapter aims to present novel techniques in information extraction to enable literature access to this untapped information reserve. A high level of correlation between text features and fault causality is noted, encouraging research for extended application in the scope of electrical machine maintenance, especially in artificial intelligence indication detection training. Furthermore, these innovative models can be used for decision-making during the repair. Information from well-trained classifiers can be extrapolated to advance fault causality understanding

PLAY: Semantics-based Event Marketplace

International audienceIn this paper we present PLAY Platform, a Web-oriented distributed semantic middleware that serves as an Event M arketplace: the place where heterogeneous events can be integrated and combined. The purpose of the platform is to derive useful information from diverse real-time sources such as collaborative processes. The platform provides technology where instant results are needed or where heterogeneous data must be integrated on the fly or where the data arrive fast enough to require the stream processing nature of our approach. The main advantages of the platforms are its scalability (cloud-based nature) and the expressivity of the event combinations that can be defined (using both real-time and historical data). The platform has been applied in a use case about Personal data management. In this paper we present some results from the validation, focusing on smartphone and social media integration

ATF4 couples MYC-dependent translational activity to bioenergetic demands during tumour progression.

The c-Myc oncogene drives malignant progression and induces robust anabolic and proliferative programmes leading to intrinsic stress. The mechanisms enabling adaptation to MYC-induced stress are not fully understood. Here we reveal an essential role for activating transcription factor 4 (ATF4) in survival following MYC activation. MYC upregulates ATF4 by activating general control nonderepressible 2 (GCN2) kinase through uncharged transfer RNAs. Subsequently, ATF4 co-occupies promoter regions of over 30 MYC-target genes, primarily those regulating amino acid and protein synthesis, including eukaryotic translation initiation factor 4E-binding protein 1 (4E-BP1), a negative regulator of translation. 4E-BP1 relieves MYC-induced proteotoxic stress and is essential to balance protein synthesis. 4E-BP1 activity is negatively regulated by mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1)-dependent phosphorylation and inhibition of mTORC1 signalling rescues ATF4-deficient cells from MYC-induced endoplasmic reticulum stress. Acute deletion of ATF4 significantly delays MYC-driven tumour progression and increases survival in mouse models. Our results establish ATF4 as a cellular rheostat of MYC activity, which ensures that enhanced translation rates are compatible with survival and tumour progression