Verification and Analysis of Web Service Composition

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Peranan Pengetua Sebagai Fasilitator Perubahan Dalam Mengurus Integrasi Ict Sebagai Satu Inovasi Pendidikan

Kajian ini bertujuan untuk mengkaji peranan pengetua sebagai fasilitator perubahan dalam mengurus integrasi ICT sebagai satu inovasi pendidikan dalam program Pengajaran dan Pembelajaran Sains dan Matematik dalam Bahasa Inggeris (PPSMI). Kajian ini dijalankan menerusi dua peringkat. Peringkat pertama dijalankan melalui satu tinjauan persepsi guru-guru dengan tujuan untuk menentukan gaya fasilitator perubahan yang diamalkan oleh pengetua terhadap penggunaan ICT dalam PPSMI. Maklum balas melalui soal selidik telah diperoleh daripada 1,104 orang guru PPSMI dari 89 buah sekolah menengah kebangsaan harian biasa di Negeri Pulau Pinang. Analisis kajian menunjukkan bahawa 73 orang pengetua (82 peratus) mengamalkan gaya fasilitator perubahan “Manager” manakala 16 orang pengetua (18 peratus) mengamalkan gaya fasilitator perubahan “Responder”. Namun, tiada pengetua yang mengamalkan gaya fasilitator perubahan “Initiator”. Pada peringkat kedua, dua buah sekolah yang dianggap efektif dan sebuah sekolah yang kurang efektif dipilih untuk kajian kes. Kajian kes ini dijalankan dengan menggunakan kaedah temu bual, pemerhatian dan kajian dokumen untuk mengumpul maklumat yang mendalam dan terperinci tentang cara pengetua memainkan peranan sebagai fasilitator perubahan yang efektif terhadap penggunaan ICT dalam PPSMI

Verification of functional and non-functional requirements of web service composition

Abstract. Web services have emerged as an important technology nowadays. There are two kinds of requirements that are crucial to web service composition, which are functional and non-functional requirements. Functional requirements focus on functionality of the composed service, e.g., given a booking service, an example of functional requirements is that a flight ticket with price higher than $2000 will never be purchased. Non-functional requirements are concerned with the quality of service (QoS), e.g., an example of the booking service’s non-functional requirements is that the service will respond to the user within 5 sec-onds. Non-functional requirements are important to web service composition, and are often an important clause in service-level agreements (SLAs). Even though the functional requirements are satisfied, a slow or unreliable service may still not be adopted. In our paper, we propose an automated approach to verify combined functional and non-functional requirements directly based on the semantics of web service composition. Our approach has been implemented and evaluated on the real-world case studies, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Automated runtime recovery for QoS-based service composition

No Full Tex

Optimizing selection of competing features via feedback-directed evolutionary algorithms

Software that support various groups of customers usually require complicated configurations to attain different functionalities. To model the configuration options, feature model is proposed to capture the commonalities and competing variabilities of the product variants in software family or Software Product Line (SPL). A key challenge for deriving a new product is to find a set of features that do not have inconsistencies or conflicts, yet optimize multiple objectives (e.g., minimizing cost and maximizing number of features), which are often competing with each other. Existing works have attempted to make use of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to address this problem. In this work, we incorporated a novel feedback-directed mechanism into existing EAs. Our empirical results have shown that our method has improved noticeably over all unguided version of EAs on the optimal feature selection. In particular, for case studies in SPLOT and LVAT repositories, the feedback-directed Indicator-Based EA (IBEA) has increased the number of correct solutions found by 72.33% and 75%, compared to unguided IBEA. In addition, by leveraging a pre-computed solution, we have found 34 sound solutions for Linux X86, which contains 6888 features, in less than 40 seconds.No Full Tex

Automated synthesis of local time requirement for service composition

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore ANR-NRF French-Singaporean research program ProMi

Optimizing selection of competing services with probabilistic hierarchical refinement

Recently, many large enterprises (e.g., Netflix, Amazon) have decomposed their monolithic application into services, and composed them to fulfill their business functionalities. Many hosting services on the cloud, with different Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., availability, cost), can be used to host the services. This is an example of competing services. QoS is crucial for the satisfaction of users. It is important to choose a set of services that maximize the overall QoS, and satisfy all QoS requirements for the service composition. This problem, known as optimal service selection, is NP-hard. Therefore, an effective method for reducing the search space and guiding the search process is highly desirable. To this end, we introduce a novel technique, called Probabilistic Hierarchical Refinement (ProHR). ProHR effectively reduces the search space by removing competing services that cannot be part of the selection. ProHR provides two methods, probabilistic ranking and hierarchical refinement, that enable smart exploration of the reduced search space. Unlike existing approaches that perform poorly when QoS requirements become stricter, ProHR maintains high performance and accuracy, independent of the strictness of the QoS requirements. ProHR has been evaluated on a publicly available dataset, and has shown significant improvement over existing approaches.No Full Tex

Wireless data gloves Malay sign language recognition system

This paper describes the structure and algorithm of the whole Wireless Bluetooth Data Gloves Sign Language Recognition System, which is defined as a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) system. This project is based on the need of developing an electronic device that can translate sign language into speech (sound) in order to make the communication take place between the mute & deaf community with the general public possible. Hence, the main objective of this project is to develop a system that can convert sign language into speech so that deaf people are able to communicate efficiently with normal people. This Human-Computer Interaction system is able to recognize 25 common words signing in Bahasa Isyarat Malaysia (BIM) by using Hidden Markov Models (HMM) methods. Both hands are involved in performing the BIM with all the sensor connecting wirelessly to PC with Bluetooth module. In the future, the system can be shrunk to become a stand alone system without any interaction with PC