Components Interoperability through Mediating Connector Patterns

A key objective for ubiquitous environments is to enable system interoperability between system's components that are highly heterogeneous. In particular, the challenge is to embed in the system architecture the necessary support to cope with behavioral diversity in order to allow components to coordinate and communicate. The continuously evolving environment further asks for an automated and on-the-fly approach. In this paper we present the design building blocks for the dynamic and on-the-fly interoperability between heterogeneous components. Specifically, we describe an Architectural Pattern called Mediating Connector, that is the key enabler for communication. In addition, we present a set of Basic Mediator Patterns, that describe the basic mismatches which can occur when components try to interact, and their corresponding solutions.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Systematic Review on Privacy Categorization

In the modern digital world users need to make privacy and security choices that have far-reaching consequences. Researchers are increasingly studying people's decisions when facing with privacy and security trade-offs, the pressing and time consuming disincentives that influence those decisions, and methods to mitigate them. This work aims to present a systematic review of the literature on privacy categorization, which has been defined in terms of profile, profiling, segmentation, clustering and personae. Privacy categorization involves the possibility to classify users according to specific prerequisites, such as their ability to manage privacy issues, or in terms of which type of and how many personal information they decide or do not decide to disclose. Privacy categorization has been defined and used for different purposes. The systematic review focuses on three main research questions that investigate the study contexts, i.e. the motivations and research questions, that propose privacy categorisations; the methodologies and results of privacy categorisations; the evolution of privacy categorisations over time. Ultimately it tries to provide an answer whether privacy categorization as a research attempt is still meaningful and may have a future

Three Performance Models at Work: A Software Designer Perspective

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Exosoul: ethical profiling in the digital world

The development and the spread of increasingly autonomous digital technologies in our society pose new ethical challenges beyond data protection and privacy violation. Users are unprotected in their interactions with digital technologies and at the same time autonomous systems are free to occupy the space of decisions that is prerogative of each human being. In this context the multidisciplinary project Exosoul aims at developing a personalized software exoskeleton which mediates actions in the digital world according to the moral preferences of the user. The exoskeleton relies on the ethical profiling of a user, similar in purpose to the privacy profiling proposed in the literature, but aiming at reflecting and predicting general moral preferences. Our approach is hybrid, first based on the identification of profiles in a top-down manner, and then on the refinement of profiles by a personalized data-driven approach. In this work we report our initial experiment on building such top-down profiles. We consider the correlations between ethics positions (idealism and relativism) personality traits (honesty/humility, conscientiousness, Machiavellianism and narcissism) and worldview (normativism), and then we use a clustering approach to create ethical profiles predictive of user's digital behaviors concerning privacy violation, copy-right infringements, caution and protection. Data were collected by administering a questionnaire to 317 young individuals. In the paper we discuss two clustering solutions, one data-driven and one model-driven, in terms of validity and predictive power of digital behavior

Towards Self-evolving Context-aware Services

The introduction of new communication infrastructures such as Beyond 3rd Generation (B3G) and the widespread usage of small computing devices are rapidly changing the way we use and interact with technology to perform everyday tasks. Ubiquitous networking empowered by B3G networking makes it possible for mobile users to access networked software services across continuously changing heterogeneous infrastructures by resource-constrained devices. Heterogeneity and devices' limitedness, create serious problems for the development and dynamic deployment of mobile applications that are able to run properly on the execution context and consume services matching with the users' expectations. Furthermore, the everchanging B3G environment calls for applications that self-evolve according to context changes. Out of these problems, self-evolving adaptable applications are increasingly emerging in the software community. In this paper we describe how CHAMELEON, a declarative framework for tailoring adaptable applications, is being used for tackling adaptation and self-evolution within the IST PLASTIC project

08031 Abstracts Collection -- Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems

From 13.01. to 18.01.2008, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08031 ``Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

A Theory of Mediators for Eternal Connectors

International audienceOn the fly synthesis of mediators is a revolutionary approach to the seamless networking of today's and future digital systems that increasingly need be connected. The resulting emergent mediators (or Connectors) adapt the interaction protocols run by the connected systems to let them communicate. However, although the mediator concept has been studied and used quite extensively to cope with many heterogeneity dimensions, a remaining key challenge is to support on-the-fly synthesis of mediators. Towards this end, this paper introduces a theory of mediators for the ubiquitous networking environment. The proposed formal model: (i) precisely characterizes the problem of interoperability between networked systems, and (ii) paves the way for automated reasoning about protocol matching (interoperability) and related mediator synthesis