A new MDA-SOA based framework for intercloud interoperability

Cloud computing has been one of the most important topics in Information Technology which aims to assure scalable and reliable on-demand services over the Internet. The expansion of the application scope of cloud services would require cooperation between clouds from different providers that have heterogeneous functionalities. This collaboration between different cloud vendors can provide better Quality of Services (QoS) at the lower price. However, current cloud systems have been developed without concerns of seamless cloud interconnection, and actually they do not support intercloud interoperability to enable collaboration between cloud service providers. Hence, the PhD work is motivated to address interoperability issue between cloud providers as a challenging research objective. This thesis proposes a new framework which supports inter-cloud interoperability in a heterogeneous computing resource cloud environment with the goal of dispatching the workload to the most effective clouds available at runtime. Analysing different methodologies that have been applied to resolve various problem scenarios related to interoperability lead us to exploit Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods as appropriate approaches for our inter-cloud framework. Moreover, since distributing the operations in a cloud-based environment is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-complete) problem, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based job scheduler proposed as a part of interoperability framework, offering workload migration with the best performance at the least cost. A new Agent Based Simulation (ABS) approach is proposed to model the inter-cloud environment with three types of agents: Cloud Subscriber agent, Cloud Provider agent, and Job agent. The ABS model is proposed to evaluate the proposed framework.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - (Referencia da bolsa: SFRH SFRH / BD / 33965 / 2009) and EC 7th Framework Programme under grant agreement n° FITMAN 604674 (http://www.fitman-fi.eu

The enterprise blockchain design framework and its application to an e-Procurement ecosystem

The research work of this paper has been partially funded by the project VORTAL INTER DATA (n° 038361), co-financed by Vortal and COMPETE Program P2020. We would also like to thank UNIDEMI, DEMI, and LASI for providing us with the research infrastucture and resources to conduct this research. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Elsevier LtdBlockchain technologies have seen a steady growth in interest from industries as the technology is gaining maturity. It is offering a novel way to establish trust amongst multiple stakeholders without relying or trusting centralised authorities. While its use as a decentralised store of value has been validated through the emergence of cryptocurrencies, its use case in industrial applications with multiple stakeholder ecosystems such as industrial supply chain management, is still at an early stage of design and experimentation where private blockchains are used as opposed to public blockchains. Many enterprise blockchain projects failed to gain traction after initial launches, due to inefficient design, lack of incentives to all stakeholders or simply because the use of blockchain was not really necessary in the first place. There has been a need for a framework that allows blockchain designers and researchers to evaluate scenarios when a blockchain solution is useful and design the key configurations for an enterprise blockchain solution. Literature on blockchain architectures are sparse and only applicable to specific use cases or functionalities. This paper proposes a comprehensive Enterprise Blockchain Design Framework (EBDF), that not only identifies the relevant use cases when a blockchain must be utilised, but also details all the characteristics and configurations for designing an enterprise blockchain ecosystem, applicable to multiple industries. To validate the EBDF, we apply the same to the Vortal e-Procurement ecosystem allowing for multiple platforms to interoperate with greater transparency and accountability over the proposed blockchain framework. In this use case, many vendors bid for procurement procedures, often for publicly managed funds where it is extremely vital that full transparency and accountability is ensured in the entire process. Ensuring that certain digital certification functions, such as timestamps are independent from e-Procurement platform owners has been a challenge. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution for not only ensuring transparency and immutability of records, but also providing for interoperability across different platforms by acting as a trusted third-party. The applied framework is used to design a Hyperledger based blockchain solution with some of the key architectural elements that could fulfil these needs while presenting the advantages of such a solution.publishersversionpublishe

Developing a macro-dynamic framework of start-up growth drivers supported by digital marketing

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The AuthorsThe contemporary market positions digital marketing as a powerful mediator between efficient digital interaction, data interpretation opportunities, and business growth, while extending its impact potential to tackle different growth challenges. As start-ups usually have limited resources and struggle with customer engagement, retention, and other growth challenges, the low investment and dynamic elements of digital marketing tools can be used to support constructive digital interactions impacting start-up growth. Consequently, these links have outlined an extended digital marketing impact in the areas which build on marketing and sales and influence growth components such as product & market testing, customer engagement, and partnership development. Through a systematic literature review, we present a holistic overview encompassing start-up growth areas that use digital marketing. We also discuss how digital marketing efforts complement the start-up maturity. Furthermore, we analyze the differences in B2B and B2C digital marketing usage and discuss how emerging technologies impact digital marketing. The link between the extended digital marketing impact, start-up challenges, and growth areas result in the identification of start-up growth drivers supported by digital marketing. We propose a Macro-Dynamic framework identifying the start-up growth drivers from product, market, team, and finance areas and digital marketing tactics connected to the identified growth drivers.publishersversionpublishe

Application of artificial intelligence techniques for automated detection of myocardial infarction: A review

Myocardial infarction (MI) results in heart muscle injury due to receiving insufficient blood flow. MI is the most common cause of mortality in middle-aged and elderly individuals around the world. To diagnose MI, clinicians need to interpret electrocardiography (ECG) signals, which requires expertise and is subject to observer bias. Artificial intelligence-based methods can be utilized to screen for or diagnose MI automatically using ECG signals. In this work, we conducted a comprehensive assessment of artificial intelligence-based approaches for MI detection based on ECG as well as other biophysical signals, including machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models. The performance of traditional ML methods relies on handcrafted features and manual selection of ECG signals, whereas DL models can automate these tasks. The review observed that deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) yielded excellent classification performance for MI diagnosis, which explains why they have become prevalent in recent years. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey of artificial intelligence techniques employed for MI diagnosis using ECG and other biophysical signals.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

On MDA - SOA based Intercloud Interoperability framework

Cloud computing has been one of the latest technologies which assures reliable delivery of on - demand computing services over the Internet. Cloud service providers have established geographically distributed data centers and computing resources, which are available online as service. The clouds operated by different service providers working together in collaboration can open up lots more spaces for innovative scenarios with huge amount of resources provisioning on demand. However, current cloud systems do not support intercloud interoperability. This paper is thus motivated to address Intercloud Interoperabilityby analyzing different methodologies that have been applied to resolve various scenarios of interoperability. Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) method have been used to address interoperability in various scenarios, which also opens up spaces to address intercloud interoperability by making use of these well accepted methodologies. The focus of this document is to show Intercloud Interoperability can be supported through a Model Driven approach and Service Oriented systems. Moreover, the current state of the art in Intercloud, concept and benefits of MDA and SOA are discussed in the paper. At the same time this paper also proposes a generic architecture for MDA - SOA based framework, which can be useful for developing applications which will require intercloud interoperability. The paper justi fies the usability of the framework by a use - case scenario for dynamic workload migration among heterogeneous clouds