Social Networking Healthcare

The world of “Social Networking”, a cultural phenomenon of recent years, has evolved an application paradigm, Instant Messaging (IM), into a feature rich, highly interactive and context sensitive service delivery environment. Terms such as buddy lists, presence and IM-bots have emerged as building blocks for services that significantly enhance the user experience. Mapping this paradigm to healthcare can deliver a highly innovative communication platform for information sharing, monitoring and care plan execution. Buddy lists become care groups, presence becomes patient context (e.g. blood sugar level) and IM-bots become E-heathcare services, capable of delivering appropriate contextual information to the care groups. Consider the following scenario: A pharmacist and a local health nurse are both monitoring the blood sugar level for a diabetes patient - the patient appearing as a “buddy” in one of their care groups. Through an IM application, the health nurse first notices a heightened blood sugar level for one of her patients. The nurse messages the patient immediately to ascertain his general status. The pharmacist is also alerted, and the nurse and the pharmacist discuss medication types and levels. A revised prescription is agreed and the patient collects it on his next visit to the pharmacist

A Model For IM and Media Driven Communication Services

Constructing graphical client applications for the Instant Messaging (IM) domain can be complex and error prone. As well as coping with the details of a specific IM protocol, the developer must also master specific user interface toolkits, deal with media streaming protocols and codecs, handle capability negotiation and deploy a robust event handling strategy for this highly asynchronous application style. These often competing concerns must be encapsulated in a clean design that can be evolved to cater for an ever expanding set of capabilities now viable for IM client applications. This paper proposes an architecture, component set and pattern based framework to encapsulate this domain, which facilitates the rapid construction of rich media client IM applications. These may be conventional or specialised IM clients or add-on components for existing applications

Flexible Multi-Service Telecommunications Accounting System

Due to market deregulation and technological advances, a multi-service broadband environment is emerging, generating a requirement for a new approach to pricing systems. This paper presents such an approach and describes a working implementation of an innovative and flexible multi-service accounting system. The system is based on a mature understanding of the nature of charging algorithms, and is implemented as a set of interoperating distributed components. At the heart of the system is a rating engine built around a service portfolio, tying together spreadsheet specification of arbitrarily complex services, charging algorithms and tariff tables. The very wide range of service delivery technologies in existence motivates the design of a system that is independent of proprietary formats and based on a dynamic service portfolio structure and a generic service detail record definition

Scaling Instant Messaging Communication Services: A Comparison of Blocking and Non-Blocking techniques

Designing innovative communications services that scale to facilitate potential new usage patterns can pose significant challenges. This is particularly the case if these services are to be delivered over existing protocols and interoperate with legacy services. This work explores design choices for such a service: large scale message delivery to existing Instant Messaging users. In particular we explore message throughput, accuracy and server load for several alternative implementation strategies. These strategies focus on approaches to concurrency, with best practice in current and emerging techniques thoroughly benchmarked. Specifically, a conventional Java Executor approach is compared with a functional approach realised through Scala and its Actors framework. These could be termed “blocking I/O” technology. A third approach has also been measured - a “non-blocking I/O” based on an alternative to Java Virtual Machine approaches - employing Node.js and Javascript. We believe that some of the results are startling

A Rating Bureau Service for Next Generation IP Services

The marked increase of IP-based services has resulted in the need for a more flexible rating process than the present 'flat-rate' accounting approach. This paper presents the design and development of a Rating Bureau Service for the IP telecommunications environment. It illustrates the architecture, information model, technologies, and standards used in development of the system, as well as expounding upon some of the key implementation goals. In the proposed rating environment, flexibility is achieved by decoupling the charging algorithm and the core rating system. Hence, algorithms can be changed independently of the core system, avoiding the need to recode and recompile. Algorithms can be swapped in and out of the system during rating, allowing a potentially limitless range of services to be rated by equal numbers of tailored algorithms. All algorithms in the system are spreadsheet-based. This approach moves the modelling and construction of algorithms from the programming domain into the business design arena. Anyone with a working knowledge of spreadsheets can effortlessly construct/update these arbitrarily complex charging algorithms. This paper focuses on the development of a fixed line call charging algorithm that may be employed by a large telecommunications company

Value-Based Billing in a 3G IP Services Environment

The proliferation of IP-based services has resulted in a paradigm shift away from traditional flat-rat, single service billing to content and usage based billing for composed service sets. The Information Societies Technology (IST) FORM project has prototyped an accounting and billing solution for IP-based telecommunications services. A key element of the solution is the IPDR Network Data Management - Usage specification. This paper presents the FORM development of a federated accounting and billing solution for inter-enterprise IP-based service billing and accounting

On the performance of access control policy evaluation

There is growing awareness of the need to protect digital resources and services in both corporate and home ICT scenarios. Meanwhile, communication tools tailored for corporations are blurring the line between communication mech- anisms and (near) real-time resource sharing. The resulting requirement for near real-time policy-based access control is technically challenging. In a corporate domain, such access control mechanisms must be unobtrusive and comply with strict security objectives. Thus policy evaluation performance needs to be considered while addressing traditional security concerns. This paper discusses policy system design principles that motivate a novel Policy Decision Point (PDP) implementation and associated policy language. These principles are consistent with recent web development techniques designed to improve performance and scalability. Given a modern web development stack comprising a language (Javascript), a framework (Node.js) and a database management system (Redis), the proposition is that significant performance gains can be made. Our performance experiments suggest this is the case when, through various design iterations, our prototype PDP implementation is compared with an estab- lished, Java/XACML-based access control PDP implementation. The experiments presented in this paper suggest that newer technologies offer better performance. The analysis suggests that this is because they offer a more efficient data representation and make better use of computing resources

Service Group Management facilitated by DSL driven Policies in embedded Middleware

Middleware by its very nature is fundamental to the functioning of systems as it provides the communication between software components. It is very much an underlying technology and is rarely visible to end users. As systems develop, certain domain semantics, provided by the domain experts, need to be injected into the behaviour of the underlying middleware, but in a controlled manner. The methods used to achieve this are often static in nature, wholly dependent on how they are implemented, deployed and managed. An increasingly popular way to manage this behaviour injection is through the use of policies, a technique used to govern defined rules, triggered by associated events, resulting in specific actions when certain conditions are encountered. Strong efforts have been made throughout the evolution of software development methods and programming languages to solve the lack of dynamicity which can arise through poor practices. Successive language based attempts to attain a higher level of abstraction in the notations used and techniques deployed have resulted in the re-discovery of Domain Specific Languages (DSL). This paper looks at injecting the dynamicity required in the management of service groups through a policy based DSL

Eamonn de Leastar Presentation on the Use of Technology to Support Teaching Practices

Presentation given by Eamonn de Leastar at the 'Use of Technology to Support Teaching Practices' Seminar on Wednesday, 21st of May 2008

Flexible Multi-Service Telecommunications Accounting System

Due to market deregulation and technological advances, a multi-service broadband environment is emerging, generating a requirement for a new approach to pricing systems. This paper presents such an approach and describes a working implementation of an innovative and flexible multi-service accounting system. The system is based on a mature understanding of the nature of charging algorithms, and is implemented as a set of interoperating distributed components. At the heart of the system is a rating engine built around a service portfolio, tying together spreadsheet specification of arbitrarily complex services, charging algorithms and tariff tables. The very wide range of service delivery technologies in existence motivates the design of a system that is independent of proprietary formats and based on a dynamic service portfolio structure and a generic service detail record definition