The Mobile-Stationary Divide in Ubiquitous Computing Environments: Lessons from the Transport Industry

The emergence of ubiquitous computing offers new possibilities and opportunities for organizations attempting to improve their productivity and effectiveness. in particular, the promises of ubiquitous computing are attractive to organizations such as transport firms, in which coordination of diverse sets of mobile units is central to organizational performance. This article analyzes the use of ubiquitous transport systems in Swedish road haulage firms and discusses the opportunities and challenges for the early adopters. It pays specific attention to the mobile-stationary divide; that is, the set of challenges associated with integration of mobile and stationary people and systems into a seamless computing environment.     

Interleaving Planning and Robot Execution for Asynchronous User Requests

ROGUE is an architecture built on a real robot which provides algorithms for the integration of high-level planning, low-level robotic execution, and learning. ROGUE addresses successfully several of the challenges of a dynamic office gopher environment. This article presents the techniques for the integration of planning and execution.ROGUE uses and extends a classical planning algorithm to create plans for multiple interacting goals introduced by asynchronous user requests. ROGUE translates the planner';s actions to robot execution actions and monitors real world execution. ROGUE is currently implemented using the PRODIGY4.0 planner and the Xavier robot. This article describes how plans are created for multiple asynchronous goals, and how task priority and compatibility information are used to achieve appropriate efficient execution. We describe how ROGUE communicates with the planner and the robot to interleave planning with execution so that the planner can replan for failed actions, identify the actual outcome of an action with multiple possible outcomes, and take opportunities from changes in the environment.ROGUE represents a successful integration of a classical artificial intelligence planner with a real mobile robot.     

计算实验方法的溯源、现状与展望

随着信息技术的发展,复杂系统越来越多地呈现出社会、物理、信息相融合的特征.因为这些系统涉及到了人和社会的因素,其设计、分析、管理、控制和综合等问题正面临前所未有的挑战.在这种背景下,计算实验应运而生,通过“反事实”的算法化,为量化分析复杂系统提供了一种数字化和计算化方法.对于计算实验方法的发展现状与未来挑战进行了全面梳理:首先介绍了计算实验方法的概念起源与应用特征;然后详细阐述了计算实验的方法框架与关键步骤;接着展示了计算实验方法的典型应用,包括现象解释、趋势预测与策略优化;最后给出了计算实验方法所面临的一些关键问题与挑战.旨在梳理出计算实验方法的技术框架,为其快速发展与跨学科应用提供支撑.     

Integration of Cloud computing and Internet of Things: A survey

Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) are two very different technologies that are both already part of our life. Their adoption and use are expected to be more and more pervasive, making them important components of the Future Internet. A novel paradigm where Cloud and IoT are merged together is foreseen as disruptive and as an enabler of a large number of application scenarios.In this paper, we focus our attention on the integration of Cloud and IoT, which is what we call the CloudIoT paradigm. Many works in literature have surveyed Cloud and IoT separately and, more precisely, their main properties, features, underlying technologies, and open issues. However, to the best of our knowledge, these works lack a detailed analysis of the new CloudIoT paradigm, which involves completely new applications, challenges, and research issues. To bridge this gap, in this paper we provide a literature survey on the integration of Cloud and IoT. Starting by analyzing the basics of both IoT and Cloud Computing, we discuss their complementarity, detailing what is currently driving to their integration. Thanks to the adoption of the CloudIoT paradigm a number of applications are gaining momentum: we provide an up-to-date picture of CloudIoT applications in literature, with a focus on their specific research challenges. These challenges are then analyzed in details to show where the main body of research is currently heading. We also discuss what is already available in terms of platforms–both proprietary and open source–and projects implementing the CloudIoT paradigm. Finally, we identify open issues and future directions in this field, which we expect to play a leading role in the landscape of the Future Internet.     

Electronic Detection of DNA Hybridization: Toward CMOS Microarrays

Low-cost mass fabrication methods and label-free capacitive biosensors are needed for many applications. This article presents a electronic microarrays, with single-chip implementations in CMOS technology. Although biochemical operations in CMOS-based arrays are almost the same as in optical devices, the simple readout of integrated CMOS sensors greatly facilitates system integration. These chips can perform a significant amount of sensor data processing and produce digital output signals in standardized form. They can be easily connected to simple, inexpensive, handheld or even wearable readers. However, these devices are in their infancy. Only a small subset of them are at the level of complete single-die integration of sensors, transducers, and data-conditioning circuits. Our purpose in this article is to outline the main technology, design, and implementation challenges involved in developing these highly integrated research prototypes.     

A review and framework of laser-based collaboration support

New technologies are emerging to enable and support physical, implicit and explicit collaborations. They are essential for dealing with increasingly complex systems in unstructured, dynamic environments. The purpose of this article is to review the role of laser technology in enabling better, more precise interactions and their control, and to identify opportunities and challenges in this area. While the most common applications of laser technology are found in medical and health care, manufacturing, and communication, other domains such as safety, quality assurance, agriculture, construction, entertainment, defense, transportation, and law enforcement also benefit from it. In spite of the rapid dissemination of this technology, its role in support of collaboration and discovery is still in its infancy. Research activities concerning new ways of using lasers as a collaboration supporting technology that may strengthen new areas have been relatively limited. Nevertheless, the translation to this domain of collaboration support has been recognized as vital for activities that demand increasingly more coordinated effort among interacting agents (e.g., humans, machines, particles) and digital, possibly also photonic agents. Recent advances in laser technology in a number of application domains are reviewed in this article, focusing primarily on lasers’ role for supporting different forms of precision interactions and collaboration. In addition, a framework with five collaboration support functions and five collaboration dimensions is defined for this review. The taxonomy framework is useful for enabling better understanding of the existing and emerging opportunities that laser-based technology offers for collaboration support, its advantages and several research gaps.     

Cyber-physical systems challenges: a needs analysis for collaborating embedded software systems

Embedding computing power in a physical environment has provided the functional flexibility and performance necessary in modern products such as automobiles, aircraft, smartphones, and more. As product features came to increasingly rely on software, a network infrastructure helped factor out common hardware and offered sharing functionality for further innovation. A logical consequence was the need for system integration. Even in the case of a single original end manufacturer who is responsible for the final product, system integration is quite a challenge. More recently, there have been systems coming online that must perform system integration even after deployment—that is, during operation. This has given rise to the cyber-physical systems (CPS) paradigm. In this paper, select key enablers for a new type of system integration are discussed. The needs and challenges for designing and operating CPS are identified along with corresponding technologies to address the challenges and their potential impact. The intent is to contribute to a model-based research agenda in terms of design methods, implementation technologies, and organization challenges necessary to bring the next-generation systems online.     

Getting on Board the Enterprise Service Bus

One of the biggest challenges facing businesses today is getting their diverse applications, often built on different platforms, to work together when necessary. To accomplish this, companies must implement effective application integration flexibly, quickly, and easily. Businesses initially turned to manual integration and then enterprise application integration (EAI) but subsequently have focused on service-oriented architectures. To leverage SOAs' benefits effectively, companies are beginning to use an approach known as the enterprise service bus, offered by a growing number of large and small vendors. ESB is the middleware glue that holds an SOA together and enables communication between Web-based enterprise applications. However, ESB also faces challenges, such as implementation costs and complex migration and management     

Ubiquitous Access to Unified Messaging: A Study of Usability and the Use of Pervasive Computing

The advent of mobile devices and the wireless Internet is having a profound impact on the way people communicate, as well as on the user interaction paradigms used to access information that was traditionally accessible only through visual interfaces. Applications for mobile devices entail the integration of various data sources optimized for delivery to limited hardware resources and intermittently connected devices through wireless networks. Although telephone interfaces arise as one of the most prominent pervasive applications, they present interaction challenges such as the augmentation of speech recognition through natural language (NL) understanding and high-quality text-to-speech conversion. This article presents an experience in building an automated assistant that is natural to use and could become an alternative to a human assistant. The Mobile Assistant (MA) can read e-mail messages, book appointments, take phone messages, and provide access to personal-organizer information. Key components are a conversational interface, enterprise integration, and notifications tailored to user preferences. The focus of the research has been on supporting the pressing communication needs of mobile workers and overcoming technological hurdles such as achieving high accuracy speech recognition in noisy environments, NL understanding, and optimal message presentation on a variety of devices and modalities. The article outlines findings from the 2 broad field trials and lessons learned regarding the support of mobile workers with pervasive computing devices and emerging technologies.     

Infrastructure for successful BEOL yield ramp, transfer to manufacturing, and DFM characterization at 65 nm and below

The challenges presented by deep-submicron interconnect back-end-of-line (BEOL) integration continue to grow in number, complexity, and required resolution at 90 nm and 65 nm. These challenges are causing industry-wide delays in technology deployment as well as low and often unstable yields. The historically observed improvements in time to successful yield ramp and final manufacturing yield as the industry deploys new technology nodes disappeared at 90 nm. Such improvements have been significant factors in fueling the semiconductor industry's growth. Optimized test structures are necessary to measure and analyze the causes for systematic yield loss. This article introduces a novel test structure for BEOL - an infrastructure IP for process monitoring. It also describes a method for characterizing and measuring yield ramp issues and solutions for improving silicon debug and DFM.     

Tracking and disrupting dark networks: Challenges of data collection and analysis

The attack on September 11, 2001 set off numerous efforts to counter terrorism and insurgencies. Central to these efforts has been the drive to improve data collection and analysis. Section 1 summarizes some of the more notable improvements among U.S. government agencies as they strive to develop their capabilities. Although progress has been made, daunting challenges remain. Section 2 reviews the basic challenges to data collection and analysis focusing in some depth on the difficulties of data integration. Three general approaches to data integration are identified—discipline-centric, placed-centric and virtual. A summary of the major challenges in data integration confronting field operators in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrates the work that lies ahead. Section 3 shifts gears to focus on the future and introduces the discipline of Visual Analytics—an emerging field dedicated to improving data collection and analysis through the use of computer-mediated visualization techniques and tools. The purpose of Visual Analytics is to maximize human capability to perceive, understand, reason, make judgments and work collaboratively with multidimensional, conflicting, and dynamic data. The paper concludes with two excellent examples of analytic software platforms that have been developed for the intelligence community—Palantir and ORA. They signal the progress made in the field of Visual Analytics to date and illustrate the opportunities that await other IS researchers interested in applying their knowledge and skills to the tracking and disrupting of dark networks.     

Wertorientiertes CRM

One major development within business practice is the increasing interest in customer relationship management (CRM) in recent years. CRM thereby focuses on establishing and maintaining profitable relationships with the customer using modern information technology (IT) and has emerged as a major research field in business and information systems engineering. However, despite huge investments many CRM projects fail to achieve their objectives as the complex and interdisciplinary nature of CRM is not addressed adequately. In fact an adoption of a customer-centric orientation within a value-based management requires not only a cross-functional integration of different business departments but also a selectively adjusted collaboration of those departments. This article provides an overview of the state of the art of CRM in literature as well as current practices in companies. Furthermore it outlines the specific challenges of a value-based CRM for the cross-functional integration and collaboration of marketing, financial management, and IT. Thus, in addition to a mutual alignment of marketing and IT, a value-based analysis, planning, and controlling of CRM-activities requires the development and implementation of standardized performance measurements and their adequate IT-support.     

Managing digital collections: Towards a strategic framework for the development of appropriate and effective organisational data policies. Part I 1

This article begins by looking at changes in the student body in recent years as useful indicators of how libraries need to alter and adapt their student library provision. Among the concepts explored are the student as consumer-customer, the Google generation, greater than ever competition among students especially for the job market, new technology as fashion accessory as much as learning tool, the widening participation agenda for higher education, and the almost ubiquitous presence of multi-functional electronic devices.

There is an examination of some challenges for librarians in meeting the needs and demands of this new generation of students. These include the balancing of electronic and print provision, the future of the physical library environment, push rather than pull to deliver library services, anytime anywhere access to information, integration with other university services, and helping to fit students for the world of work.

The main message of the article is that librarians are not under threat from the giant search engines as long as they embrace the interactive technologies which students so willingly and expertly use, and adapt them to get library services out to students as customers.     

Integrating risk-based testing in industrial test processes

Risk-based testing has a high potential to improve the software development and test process as it helps to optimize the allocation of resources and provides decision support for the management. But for many organizations, its integration into an existing test process is a challenging task. In this article, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing work and present a generic testing methodology enhancing an established test process to address risks. On this basis, we develop a procedure on how risk-based testing can be introduced in a test process and derive a stage model for its integration. We then evaluate our approach for introducing risk-based testing by means of an industrial study and discuss benefits, prerequisites and challenges to introduce it. Potential benefits of risk-based testing identified in the studied project are faster detection of defects resulting in an earlier release, a more reliable release quality statement as well as the involved test-process optimization. As necessary prerequisites for risk-based testing, we identified an inhomogeneous distribution of risks associated with the various parts of the tested software system as well as consolidated technical and business views on it. Finally, the identified challenges of introducing risk-based testing are reliable risk assessment in the context of complex systems, the availability of experts for risk assessment as well as established tool supports for test management.     

Integration von RFID in die betriebliche IT-Landschaft

Numerous industry and retail companies are currently faced with the challenge of integrating RFID technology with their existing IT landscapes.Against this background,this article provides an overview of the structure of RFID systems, their coupling with corporate application systems as well as associated integration problems and solution concepts based on an analysis of various real-world projects. We identify four different project types, each of them characterised by a different emphasis on certain problem situations.Another focus of the article is on the role of current standards, their limitations and potentials. It becomes evident that hardware components and numbering schemes are suitable for harmonisation due to their general applicability whereas other aspects of RFID systems integration must be considered to a larger extent from the respective process to be supported.     

Design of a framework for modeling, integration and simulation of physiological models

Multiscale modeling and integration of physiological models carry challenges due to the complex nature of physiological processes. High coupling within and among scales present a significant challenge in constructing and integrating multiscale physiological models. In order to deal with such challenges in a systematic way, there is a significant need for an information technology framework together with related analytical and computational tools that will facilitate integration of models and simulations of complex biological systems. Physiological Model Simulation, Integration and Modeling Framework (Phy-SIM) is an information technology framework providing the tools to facilitate development, integration and simulation of integrated models of human physiology. Phy-SIM brings software level solutions to the challenges raised by the complex nature of physiological systems. The aim of Phy-SIM, and this paper is to lay some foundation with the new approaches such as information flow and modular representation of the physiological models. The ultimate goal is to enhance the development of both the models and the integration approaches of multiscale physiological processes and thus this paper focuses on the design approaches that would achieve such a goal.     

Web Services: An Analysis of the Technology, its Benefits, and Implementation Difficulties

Software reuse and systems interoperability have been primary goals of many IT organizations, especially those that rely heavily on computer networks. Object-oriented (OO) technology has been utilized to accomplish these goals with relative success over the years; but there are many hurdles that OO technology could not overcome. One of them is due to lack of standards. An object developed in one vendor's technology cannot easily communicate with another's. Another difficulty is that the majority of software applications reside behind firewalls - security barriers that restrict communication between networks. Web services, self-describing services that can easily be consumed over the Web, is the latest trend in the industry to address the problems identified above. Web services enable a group of related applications to be programmatically invoked over the Internet. They are rapidly emerging as important building blocks for business integration. Companies are finding important Web service applications in B2B, B2C, and enterprise application integration solutions. This article reviews the technical underpinnings of Web services and discusses their business opportunities and potential benefits. It also assesses the challenges and implementation difficulties of the technology.     

基于UDDI体系架构及Web服务的电子商务解决方案模型

在新的电子商务发展背景下,企业面临着新的机遇和挑战。如何开发完全基于Web服务的企业间应用系统集成手段,在现有的基础设施之上,利用互联网的开放性和协议的规范性,在电子商务领域提供松散耦合的企业数据、应用程序、企业间内部解决方案的集成,已经成为一个备受关注的问题。论文阐述利用Web服务,在UDDI/SOAP/WSDL体系架构下实现的电子商务运作方式的前景、技术手段、遭遇的挑战及存在的问题,并提出了一个相应的电子商务解决方案模型。     

Organizational change and virtual teams: strategic and operational integration

Abstract. This paper focuses on the challenges involved in integrating virtual teams strategically and operationally into organizational systems. It argues that an understanding of virtual team integration must consider both the context within which virtual teams are being introduced and processes involved in their implementation. Such an approach demands that we consider the strategic rationales involved in teamworking generally, and virtual teams in particular. By looking at change processes, attention is drawn to the social, cultural and political dynamics that affect the implementation and operation of virtual teams. This analysis is used to suggest further avenues for research on virtual teams, as well as pointing to practical considerations