Intangible trust requirements - how to fill the requirements trust "gap"?

Previous research efforts have been expended in terms of the capture and subsequent instantiation of "soft" trust requirements that relate to HCI usability concerns or in relation to "hard" tangible security requirements that primarily relate to security a ssurance and security protocols. Little direct focus has been paid to managing intangible trust related requirements per se. This 'gap' is perhaps most evident in the public B2C (Business to Consumer) E- Systems we all use on a daily basis. Some speculative suggestions are made as to how to fill the 'gap'. Visual card sorting is suggested as a suitable evaluative tool; whilst deontic logic trust norms and UML extended notation are the suggested (methodologically invariant) means by which software development teams can perhaps more fully capture hence visualize intangible trust requirements

A gentle transition from Java programming to Web Services using XML-RPC

Exposing students to leading edge vocational areas of relevance such as Web Services can be difficult. We show a lightweight approach by embedding a key component of Web Services within a Level 3 BSc module in Distributed Computing. We present a ready to use collection of lecture slides and student activities based on XML-RPC. In addition we show that this material addresses the central topics in the context of web services as identified by Draganova (2003)

Can intelligent optimisation techniques improve computing job scheduling in a Grid environment? review, problem and proposal

In the existing Grid scheduling literature, the reported methods and strategies are mostly related to high-level schedulers such as global schedulers, external schedulers, data schedulers, and cluster schedulers. Although a number of these have previously considered job scheduling, thus far only relatively simple queue-based policies such as First In First Out (FIFO) have been considered for local job scheduling within Grid contexts. Our initial research shows that it is worth investigating the potential impact on the performance of the Grid when intelligent optimisation techniques are applied to local scheduling policies. The research problem is defined, and a basic research methodology with a detailed roadmap is presented. This paper forms a proposal with the intention of exchanging ideas and seeking potential collaborators

Population Based Methods for Optimising Infinite Behaviours of Timed Automata

Timed automata are powerful models for the analysis of real time systems. The optimal infinite scheduling problem for double-priced timed automata is concerned with finding infinite runs of a system whose long term cost to reward ratio is minimal. Due to the state-space explosion occurring when discretising a timed automaton, exact computation of the optimal infinite ratio is infeasible. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of ant colony optimisation for approximating the optimal schedule for a given double-priced timed automaton. The application of ant colony optimisation to the corner-point abstraction of the automaton proved generally less effective than a random method. The best found optimisation method was obtained by formulating the choice of time delays in a cycle of the automaton as a linear program and utilizing ant colony optimisation in order to determine a sequence of profitable discrete transitions comprising an infinite behaviour