Second Screen User Profiling and Multi-level Smart Recommendations in the context of Social TVs

In the context of Social TV, the increasing popularity of first and second screen users, interacting and posting content online, illustrates new business opportunities and related technical challenges, in order to enrich user experience on such environments. SAM (Socializing Around Media) project uses Social Media-connected infrastructure to deal with the aforementioned challenges, providing intelligent user context management models and mechanisms capturing social patterns, to apply collaborative filtering techniques and personalized recommendations towards this direction. This paper presents the Context Management mechanism of SAM, running in a Social TV environment to provide smart recommendations for first and second screen content. Work presented is evaluated using real movie rating dataset found online, to validate the SAM's approach in terms of effectiveness as well as efficiency.Comment: In: Wu TT., Gennari R., Huang YM., Xie H., Cao Y. (eds) Emerging Technologies for Education. SETE 201

Challenges for the comprehensive management of cloud services in a PaaS framework

The 4CaaSt project aims at developing a PaaS framework that enables flexible definition, marketing, deployment and management of Cloud-based services and applications. The major innovations proposed by 4CaaSt are the blueprint and its lifecycle management, a one stop shop for Cloud services and a PaaS level resource management featuring elasticity. 4CaaSt also provides a portfolio of ready to use Cloud native services and Cloud-aware immigrant technologies

Software modernization and cloudification using the ARTIST migration methodology and framework

International audienceCloud computing has leveraged new software development and provisioning approaches by changing the way computing, storage and networking resources are purchased and consumed. The variety of cloud offerings on both technical and business level has considerably advanced the development process and established new business models and value chains for applications and services. However, the modernization and cloudification of legacy software so as to be offered as a service still encounters many challenges. In this work, we present a complete methodology and a methodology instantiation framework for the effective migration of legacy software to modern cloud environments

Roadmap on signal processing for next generation measurement systems

Signal processing is a fundamental component of almost any sensor-enabled system, with a wide range of applications across different scientific disciplines. Time series data, images, and video sequences comprise representative forms of signals that can be enhanced and analysed for information extraction and quantification. The recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are shifting the research attention towards intelligent, data-driven, signal processing. This roadmap presents a critical overview of the state-of-the-art methods and applications aiming to highlight future challenges and research opportunities towards next generation measurement systems. It covers a broad spectrum of topics ranging from basic to industrial research, organized in concise thematic sections that reflect the trends and the impacts of current and future developments per research field. Furthermore, it offers guidance to researchers and funding agencies in identifying new prospects.AerodynamicsMicrowave Sensing, Signals & System

Architectures and mechanisms assuring quality of service in service oriented infrastructures

Service Oriented architectures - SOA constitute a prevailed tendency for the development of modern information and communication systems. Additionally, an important characteristic of modern systems, specifically for these with business orientation, is the need for guaranteeing the Quality of Service (QoS) levels for the end users, which is the key factor for their adoption from the community and also for their commercial viability. The thesis focuses on the study of architectures and mechanisms that support the guaranteeing of Quality of Service in Service Oriented Infrastructures (SOI). The objective of the thesis is not only the guaranteeing of Quality of Service that can be defined in a generic way or based on international standards, but also for QoS that is individually/specifically defined for each service and realized by the entities involved in the process of using/providing the service and is agreed in their contract. The business model, through which the infrastructure offers the services, has a considerable effect on the level of Quality of Service and the way that is provided. In this frame, several object oriented architectural solutions and mechanisms, which tackle the challenges of the guaranteeing of Quality of Services in the wide sector of Object Oriented Infrastructures and Next Generation Grids, are analyzed, designed and developed. Furthermore we focused on biomedical applications and to this direction, mechanisms that guarantee the Quality of Services through dynamic scheduling, workload and capacity estimation, are proposed and evaluated. The architectures and the mechanisms on both user and service provider side have been also analysed for business applications such as the digital media applications. Finally, an innovative architectural approach that covers the requirements of interactive real-time applications that are deployed and executed in virtual environments of Object Oriented Infrastructures is presented and evaluated.Οι υπηρεσιοστρεφείς αρχιτεκτονικές (Service Oriented Architectures - SOA) αποτελούν αδιαμφισβήτητα την επικρατούσα τάση για την ανάπτυξη των σύγχρονων συστημάτων πληροφορικής και επικοινωνιών. Επιπρόσθετα, χαρακτηριστικό γνώρισμα όλων των σύγχρονων συστημάτων, και ειδικότερα αυτών με επιχειρηματικό προσανατολισμό, είναι η ανάγκη για διασφάλιση του επιπέδου παροχής ποιότητας υπηρεσιών (Quality of Service - QoS) για τους χρήστες τους, κάτι που καθορίζει τόσο την αποδοχή τους στο ευρύ κοινό όσο και την οικονομική βιωσιμότητά τους. Η διατριβή επικεντρώνεται στη μελέτη ολοκληρωμένων αρχιτεκτονικών και μηχανισμών με σκοπό τη διασφάλιση ποιότητας υπηρεσιών σε υπηρεσιοστρεφείς υποδομές (SOIs). Ο στόχος της διατριβής δεν είναι μόνο η διασφάλιση της ποιότητας υπηρεσιών η οποία μπορεί να ορίζεται γενικά ή μέσα από διεθνή πρότυπα αλλά και μεμονωμένα/ειδικά για κάθε υπηρεσία, όπως την αντιλαμβάνονται οι εμπλεκόμενες οντότητες κατά τη διαδικασία παροχής/χρήσης της και την εκφράζουν στη μεταξύ τους συμφωνία. Καθοριστικό στοιχείο για το επίπεδο της ποιότητας υπηρεσιών και τον τρόπο που αυτή παρέχεται είναι το επιχειρηματικό μοντέλο στο οποίο εντάσσεται η υποδομή και οι υπηρεσίες που προσφέρονται. Στο πλαίσιο αυτό αναλύεται, σχεδιάζεται και υλοποιείται μια σειρά από ολοκληρωμένες υπηρεσιοστρεφείς αρχιτεκτονικές λύσεις και μηχανισμούς που αντιμετωπίζουν τις προκλήσεις για την διασφάλιση της ποιότητας υπηρεσιών στον ευρύ τομέα των υπηρεσιοστρεφών υποδομών και των πλεγμάτων επόμενης γενιάς. Ιδιαίτερη έμφαση δίνεται σε εφαρμογές βιοϊατρικής, όπου προτείνονται και αξιολογούνται μηχανισμοί που διασφαλίζουν την ποιότητα υπηρεσιών μέσα από δυναμική δρομολόγηση και αποδοτικό υπολογισμό φόρτου εργασίας και χωρητικότητας. Παράλληλα μελετήθηκαν οι επιδόσεις των υποδομών και των μηχανισμών, τόσο από την πλευρά του χρήστη όσο και από την πλευρά του παρόχου υπηρεσιών, αναφορικά με επιχειρηματικές εφαρμογές όπως οι εφαρμογές πολυμέσων. Τέλος μελετήθηκε και παρουσιάζεται μια καινοτόμος αρχιτεκτονική προσέγγιση που αναπτύχθηκε με σκοπό να καλύψει τις ανάγκες διαδραστικών εφαρμογών πραγματικού χρόνου, οι οποίες εκτελούνται σε εικονικά περιβάλλοντα υπηρεσιοστρεφών υποδομών

An IoT-Enabled Platform for the Assessment of Physical and Mental Activities Utilizing Augmented Reality Exergaming

Augmented reality (AR) and Internet of Things (IoT) are among the core technological elements of modern information systems and applications in which advanced features for user interactivity and monitoring are required. These technologies are continuously improving and are available nowadays in all popular programming environments and platforms, allowing for their wide adoption in many different business and research applications. In the fields of healthcare and assisted living, AR is extensively applied in the development of exergames, facilitating the implementation of innovative gamification techniques, while IoT can effectively support the users’ health monitoring aspects. In this work, we present a prototype platform for exergames that combines AR and IoT on commodity mobile devices for the development of serious games in the healthcare domain. The main objective of the solution was to promote the utilization of gamification techniques to boost the users’ physical activities and to assist the regular assessment of their health and cognitive statuses through challenges and quests in the virtual and real world. With the integration of sensors and wearable devices by design, the platform has the capability of real-time monitoring the users’ biosignals and activities during the game, collecting data for each session, which can be analyzed afterwards by healthcare professionals. The solution was validated in real world scenarios and the results were analyzed in order to further improve the performance and usability of the prototype

Increasing Usability of Homecare Applications for Older Adults: A Case Study

As the world’s population is ageing, the field dealing with technology adoption by seniors has made headway in the scientific community. Recent technological advances have enabled the development of intelligent homecare systems that support seniors’ independent living and allow monitoring of their health status. However, despite the amount of research to understand the requirements of systems designed for the elderly, there are still unresolved usability issues that often prevent seniors from enjoying the benefits that modern ICT technologies may offer. This work presents a usability assessment of “HeartAround”, an integrated homecare solution incorporating communication functionalities, as well as health monitoring and emergency response features. An assessment with the system usability scale (SUS) method, along with in-depth interviews and qualitative analysis, has provided valuable insights for designing homecare systems for seniors, and validated some effective practical guidelines

A novel mechanism for provisioning of high-level quality of service information in grid environments

Grids, like other heterogeneous systems, have reached the level of maturity where they are addressing the Quality of Service (QoS) provision aspect as a fundamental part of their architecture. However, due to the multi-layer nature of these environments, the QoS characteristics of the infrastructure are revealed to the service-consumer through a complex procedure, in which each layer maps its own QoS parameters to another. Most of these approaches are starting the delegation of QoS information from the service provider's side, resulting in delivering low-level terms to the service consumer. In this paper, we define the architecture of a mechanism that is able to provide application-oriented and user-specific QoS information in the internal layers of the Grid middleware. This way, it enables the service consumer and especially the end-user to express his business perspectives through the service level agreement life cycle. We also demonstrate the operation of this mechanism and evaluate its performance using a specific Grid scenario.

A Fully Open-Source Approach to Intelligent Edge Computing: AGILE’s Lesson

In this paper, we describe the main outcomes of AGILE (acronym for “Adaptive Gateways for dIverse muLtiple Environments”), an EU-funded project that recently delivered a modular hardware and software framework conceived to address the fragmented market of embedded, multi-service, adaptive gateways for the Internet of Things (IoT). Its main goal is to provide a low-cost solution capable of supporting proof-of-concept implementations and rapid prototyping methodologies for both consumer and industrial IoT markets. AGILE allows developers to implement and deliver a complete (software and hardware) IoT solution for managing non-IP IoT devices through a multi-service gateway. Moreover, it simplifies the access of startups to the IoT market, not only providing an efficient and cost-effective solution for industries but also allowing end-users to customize and extend it according to their specific requirements. This flexibility is the result of the joint experience of established organizations in the project consortium already promoting the principles of openness, both at the software and hardware levels. We illustrate how the AGILE framework can provide a cost-effective yet solid and highly customizable, technological foundation supporting the configuration, deployment, and assessment of two distinct showcases, namely a quantified self application for individual consumers, and an air pollution monitoring station for industrial settings