Patterns to distribute mobility simulations

Travelers mobility simulation is a powerful tool to test strategies in a virtual environment, without impacting the quality of the real traffic network. However, existing mobility multiagent and micro-simulations can only consider a sample of the real volumes of travelers, especially for big regions. With distributed simulations, it would be easier to analyze and predict the status of nowadays networks. This kind of simulations requires big computational power and methods to split the simulation between several machines. This work describes how to achieve such a distribution in a microscopic simulation context, and compare our results with a previous work on macro-scopic simulation

Sensing real-world events using Arabic Twitter posts

In recent years, there has been increased interest in event detection using data posted to social media sites. Automatically transforming user-generated content into information relating to events is a challenging task due to the short informal language used within the content and the variety oftopics discussed on social media. Recent advances in detecting real-world events in English and other languages havebeen published. However, the detection of events in the Arabic language has been limited to date. To address this task, wepresent an end-to-end event detection framework which comprises six main components: data collection, pre-processing, classification, feature selection, topic clustering and summarization. Large-scale experiments over millions of Arabic Twitter messages show the effectiveness of our approach for detecting real-world event content from Twitter posts

Automatic summarization of real world events using Twitter

Microblogging sites, such as Twitter, have become increasingly popular in recent years for reporting details of real world events via the Web. Smartphone apps enable people to communicate with a global audience to express their opinion and commentate on ongoing situations - often while geographically proximal to the event. Due to the heterogeneity and scale of the data and the fact that some messages are more salient than others for the purposes of understanding any risk to human safety and managing any disruption caused by events, automatic summarization of event-related microblogs is a non-trivial and important problem. In this paper we tackle the task of automatic summarization of Twitter posts, and present three methods that produce summaries by selecting the most representative posts from real-world tweet-event clusters. To evaluate our approaches, we compare them to the state-of-the-art summarization systems and human generated summaries. Our results show that our proposed methods outperform all the other summarization systems for English and non-English corpora

Preserving prosumer privacy in a district level smart grid

This study presents the anonymization of consumer data in a district-level smart grid using the k-anonymity approach. The data utilized in this study covers the demographic information and associated energy consumption of consumers. The anonymization process is implemented at the prosumer level, considering their importance in sharing flexibility and distributed generation at the low voltage grid, and the fact that they need to interact with each other and the grid while keeping their data private. The proposed approach is tested under three anonymization scenarios: prosecutor, journalist, and marketer. The smart grid data are investigated mostly under the prosecutor scenario with three risk levels: lowest, medium and highest. The results of the k-anonymity approach are compared to k-map and k-map + k-anonymity. No difference has been found between the three investigated approaches for the selected data set. Since, the aim of the k-anonymity is to not transform the information about any individual record among those k-1 individuals, the recorded type and the number of attributes play a key role in the anonymization process. One of the risks is the using continuous attributes in the anonymization process which may cause the information lose in the anonymization process such as near real-time energy consumptions. Hence we have focused on to anonymization of the consumers' demographic information, rather than their energy consumption

Performance analysis of multi-institutional data sharing in the Clouds4Coordination system

Cloud computing is used extensively in Architecture/ Engineering/ Construction projects for storing data and running simulations on building models (e.g. energy efficiency/environmental impact). With the emergence of multi-Clouds it has become possible to link such systems and create a distributed cloud environment. A multi-Cloud environment enables each organisation involved in a collaborative project to maintain its own computational infrastructure/ system (with the associated data), and not have to migrate to a single cloud environment. Such infrastructure becomes efficacious when multiple individuals and organisations work collaboratively, enabling each individual/ organisation to select a computational infrastructure that most closely matches its requirements. We describe the “Clouds-for-Coordination” system, and provide a use case to demonstrate how such a system can be used in practice. A performance analysis is carried out to demonstrate how effective such a multi-Cloud system can be, reporting “aggregated-time-to-complete” metric over a number of different scenarios

A cloud-based energy management system for building managers

A Local Energy Management System (LEMS) is described to control Electric Vehicle charging and Energy Storage Units within built environments. To this end, the LEMS predicts the most probable half hours for a triad peak, and forecasts the electricity demand of a building facility at those times. Three operational algorithms were designed, enabling the LEMS to (i) flatten the demand profile of the building facility and reduce its peak, (ii) reduce the demand of the building facility during triad peaks in order to reduce the Transmission Network Use of System (TNUoS) charges, and (iii) enable the participation of the building manager in the grid balancing services market through demand side response. The LEMS was deployed on over a cloud-based system and demonstrated on a real building facility in Manchester, UK

A combined classification-clustering framework for identifying disruptive events

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging web application serving hundreds of millions of users. Users publish short messages to communicate with friends and families, express their opinions and broadcast news and information about a variety of topics all in real-time. User-generated content can be utilized as a rich source of real-world event identification as well as extract useful knowledge about disruptive events for a given region. In this paper, we propose a novel detection framework for identifying real-time events, including a main event and associated disruptive events, from Twitter data. Theapproach is based on five steps:data collection, pre-processing,classification, online clustering and summarization. We use a Naïve Bayes classification model and an Online Clustering method to validate our model on a major real-world event (Formula 1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix 2013)