On the Easy Use of Scientific Computing Services for Large Scale Linear Algebra and Parallel Decision Making with the P-Grade Portal

Scientific research is becoming increasingly dependent on the large-scale analysis of data using distributed computing infrastructures (Grid, cloud, GPU, etc.). Scientific computing (Petitet et al. 1999) aims at constructing mathematical models and numerical solution techniques for solving problems arising in science and engineering. In this paper, we describe the services of an integrated portal based on the P-Grade (Parallel Grid Run-time and Application Development Environment) portal (http://www.p-grade.hu) that enables the solution of large-scale linear systems of equations using direct solvers, makes easier the use of parallel block iterative algorithm and provides an interface for parallel decision making algorithms. The ultimate goal is to develop a single sign on integrated multi-service environment providing an easy access to different kind of mathematical calculations and algorithms to be performed on hybrid distributed computing infrastructures combining the benefits of large clusters, Grid or cloud, when needed.     

The Proactive and Preventive Privacy (3P) Framework for IoT Privacy by Design

The Problem

Internet of Things (IoT) is providing new services and insights by sensing contextual data but there are growing concerns of privacy risks from users that need immediate attention.

The Reason

The IoT devices and smart services can capture Personally Identifiable Information (PII) without user knowledge or consent. The IoT technology has not reached the desired level of maturity to standardize security and privacy requirements.

The Solution

IoT Privacy by Design is a user-centric approach for enabling privacy with security and safety as a ‘win-win’ positive outcome of IoT offerings, irrespective of business domain. The Proactive and Preventive Privacy (3P) Framework proposed in this paper should be adopted by the IoT stakeholders for building trust and confidence in end users about IoT devices and smart services.     

Recommender system design using movie genre similarity and preferred genres in SmartPhone

As e-commerce (e.g. www.amazon.com) and social media (e.g. www.facebook.com) services evolve, studies of recommender systems advance, especially concerning the application of collective intelligence to personalized service. With the development of smartphones and the new mobile environment, studies of customized services increase despite the physical limitations of mobile devices. A typical example combines customized services with location-based services. In this study, we propose a recommender system using movie genre similarity and preferred genres. A movie genre similarity profile is designed and generated to provide related services in a mobile experimental environment before prototyping and testing with data from MovieLens. In order to accomplish this, genre similarity correlations are determined with a Pearson correlation coefficient, and similar clusters are derived. The correlations within clusters are used to define genre similarity. Genre similarity is then used to recommend new genres to targeted customers.     

Push Notifications in Diet Apps: Influencing Engagement Times and Tasks

Background: Smartphones have reached levels of popularity and penetration where they are now suitable for use in population health interventions. A key feature of smartphones is push notification or in app messaging service, which can be used to alert users to messages or instructions pertaining to an installed app. Little evidence exists as to the persuasive power of these messages.

Method: We conducted a 24-week live user evaluation of push notifications used in a behavior-based mobile app for a meal replacement program to understand the role of push notifications in persuading users to engage with self-monitoring tasks.

Results: User perception of the prompts were verified through questionnaires, which in conjunction with the interaction logs show that users were tolerant of multiple daily prompts. The decline in compliance to the tasks set, however, shows that while the participants did not object to receiving prompts, they were less likely to respond to them as the study progressed.

Conclusions: Push notifications and user tasks are appropriate mechanisms to engage users with mobile technology in the short term.     

Morphological query expansion and language-filtering words for improving Basque web retrieval

The experience of a user of major search engines or other web information retrieval services looking for information in the Basque language is far from satisfactory: they only return pages with exact matches but no inflections (necessary for an agglutinative language like Basque), many results in other languages (no search engine gives the option to restrict its results to Basque), etc. This paper proposes using morphological query expansion and language-filtering words in combination with the APIs of search engines as a very cost-effective solution to build appropriate web search services for Basque. The implementation details of the methodology (choosing the most appropriate language-filtering words, the number of them, the most frequent inflections for the morphological query expansion, etc.) have been specified by corpora-based studies. The improvements produced have been measured in terms of precision and recall both over corpora and real web searches. Morphological query expansion can improve recall up to 47 % and language-filtering words can raise precision from 15 % to around 90 %, although with a loss in recall of about 30–35 %. The proposed methodology has already been successfully used in the Basque search service Elebila (http://www.elebila.eu) and the web-as-corpus tool CorpEus (http://www.corpeus.org), and the approach could be applied to other morphologically rich or under-resourced languages as well.     

Ontologies for Specifying and Reconciling Contexts of Web Services

This paper presents an ontology-based approach for the specification (using as a definition language) and reconciliation (using as a mediation tool) of contexts of Web services. Web services are independent components that can be triggered and composed for the satisfaction of user needs (e.g., hotel booking). Because Web services originate from different providers, their composition faces the obstacle of the context heterogeneity featuring these Web services. An unawareness of this context heterogeneity during Web services composition and execution results in a lack of the quality and relevancy of information that permits tracking the composition, monitoring the execution, and handling exceptions.     

A secure and privacy-preserving lightweight authentication protocol for wireless communications

In wireless networks, seamless roaming allows a mobile user (MU) to utilize its services through a foreign server (FS) when outside his home server (HS). However, security and efficiency of the authentication protocol as well as privacy of MUs are of great concern to achieve an efficient authentication protocol. Conventionally, authentication involves the participation of three entities (MU, HS, and FS); however, involving an HS in the authentication process incurs heavy computational burden on it due to huge amount of roaming requests. Moreover, wireless networks are often susceptible to various forms of passive and active attacks. Similarly, mobile devices have low processing, communication, and power capabilities.

In this paper, we propose an efficient, secure, and privacy-preserving lightweight authentication protocol for roaming MUs in wireless networks without engaging an HS. The proposed authentication protocol uses unlinkable pseudo-IDs and lightweight time-bound group signature to provide strong user anonymity, and a cost-effective cryptographic scheme to achieve security of the authentication protocol. Similarly, we implement a better billing system for MUs and a computationally efficient revocation scheme. Our analysis shows that the protocol has better performance than other related authentication protocols in wireless communications in terms of security, privacy, and efficiency.     

DISCRETE EVENT-DYNAMIC SYSTEMS FOR MODELING DYNAMIC VALUED NETS

The last few years have seen the development of Discrete Event-Dynamic Net Systems^1,2 as instruments for modeling complex systems. They are able to achieve the following objectives:

—formality of the modeling methodology

—ability to model static and dynamic aspects

—ability to pass between levels of differently rich structures by morphisms

—uniform representation of the communication process as

—an information process

—a decision process and

—a control process

—homogeneity of the representation and modeling methods

—ability to derive qualitative and quantitative statements.

The foundation is provided by a Discrete Event-Dynamic Net System which includes the axiomatic declaration of general Petri nets. In order to calculate the structural and dynamic aspects, so-called Petri net machines are developed. It is shown that this approach can even be used to treat the following aspects:

—use of time during the process

—increase of costs during the generation and transportation of information

—augmentation, evaluation and transformation of information objects.

Recursive formulas are derived and some examples calculated.     

ON THE REPRESENTATION OF ACTIVITY ARRAYS†

A general methodology for empirical investigaiion is described which consists of: (i) the selection of a system on the object of investigation with respect to the purpose and constraints of investigation, (ii) the gathering of data for the system and organizing them in the form of activity arrays, (iii) the processing of the data through which certain time-invariant properties representing the data are determined, (iv) the interpretation of these time-invariant data representations from the standpoint of the purpose of investigation.

It is shown that each activity array yields many different representations. A procedure through which the various representations can be obtained is described that consists of: (1) the selection of a mask specifying a pattern for sampling the data, (2) the sampling procedure through which certain types of time-invariant relations are determined for the given mask, (3) the simplification of the time-invariant relations, if necessary or desirable.

A basis for the objective comparison of possible representations and ascertainment of the representation with the highest possible degree of determinism, subject to given constraints, is developed.

The procedure is applicable to both well defined and fuzzy variables of any scale. No classification into input and output variables is required, although it is not prohibited.     

Behavioural modification framework to address wastage in household electricity consumption

Household electricity wastage poses a sustainability issue. Ergonomic interventions that prevent wastage through technological innovations are expensive and complex, making consumers unwilling to adopt them. The study aimed to investigate the motivations and impediments in avoiding electricity wastage. Thirteen Repertory Grid interviews were conducted on household electricity users relating to the behaviour of those living with them. The key motivational themes found were altruistic and egoistic reasons while the impediments were perceived behavioural control, hedonism and self-efficacy. Based on the research findings, a behavioural modification framework was developed to encourage consumers to adopt a higher level of responsible electricity practice through the following suggested interventions – (1) reframing sustainability from ‘future-for-others’ to ‘present-for-us’, (2) clarifying responsible consumption and (3) performance feedback. The research identified the key motivations and impediments of being a responsible household electricity user and provided a framework to encourage a higher responsibility level.

Practitioner Summary: Household electricity wastage poses sustainability issue: excess CO₂ & high costs. We developed a mindset changing behavioural modification framework. We investigated HFE issues: motivations & impediments of avoiding the wastage, i.e. altruistic, egoistic, behavioural control, hedonism & self-efficacy. The framework provides governments insights into strategies to address the wastage.     

HealthLinks: A ColdFusion Web Application

SUMMARY

Libraries are beginning to use Web applications as they grapple with sites of increasing complexity, and the move of more user services to the Web. This article reviews the basic concepts of a Web application, and outlines some of the features of the HealthLinks Web application and site http://healthlinks.washington.edu at the University of Washington Health Science Libraries, and the transition from a Java-based application to ColdFusion.     

Variability in decision-making and critical cue use by different road users at rail level crossings

Collisions at rail level crossings (RLXs) are typically high-severity and high-cost, often involving serious injuries, fatalities and major disruptions to the transport network. Most research examining behaviour at RLXs has focused exclusively on drivers and consequently there is little knowledge on how other road users make decisions at RLXs. We collected drivers’, motorcyclists’, bicyclists’ and pedestrians’ self-reported daily experiences at RLXs for two weeks, focusing on behaviour, decision-making and information use in the presence of a train and/or activated RLX signals. Both information use and behaviour differed between road users. Visual information (e.g. flashing lights) was more influential for motorists, whereas pedestrians and cyclists relied more on auditory information (e.g. bells). Pedestrians were also more likely to violate active RLX warnings and/or cross before an approaching train. These results emphasise the importance of adopting holistic RLX design approaches that support cognition and behaviour across for all road users.

Practitioner Summary: This study explores how information use and decision-making at rail level crossings (RLXs) differ between road user groups, using a two-week self-report study. Most users make safe decisions, but pedestrians are most likely to violate RLX warnings. Information use (visual vs. auditory) also differs substantially between road user groups.     

云数据中心基于贪心模式的虚拟机选择算法

针对如何从云数据中心的异常物理主机中选择出候选迁移虚拟机列表是虚拟机迁移中的问题，提出了基于贪心模式的虚拟机选择算法(GAO-VMS)。GAO-VMS每次都选择那些目标函数最优的虚拟机作为标准来迁移，形成候选迁移虚拟机列表,它有三类贪心模式：最大能量降低消耗策略(MPR)、最小迁移时间及能量消耗均衡策略(TPT)、最小每秒百万条指令数虚拟机请求策略(VVM)。使用CloudSim模拟器作为GAO-VMS的仿真环境。仿真结果表明：与常见的虚拟机迁移策略相比较，GAO-VMS使得云数据中心的能量消耗减少了30%~35%,虚拟机迁移次数减少了40%~45%，服务等级协议(SLA)违规率以及SLA违规和能量消耗联合指标只有5%的增加。GAO-VMS策略可用于企业构造绿色云计算中心。     

THEORY OF CYBERNETIC AND INTELLIGENT MACHINE BASED ON LIE COMMUTATORS

Many attempts^{1, 7, 8, 35} have been made to overcome the limit imposed by the Turing Machine³⁴ to realise general mathematical functions and models of (physical) phenomena.

They center around the notion of computability.

In this paper we propose a new definition of computability which lays the foundations for a theory of cybernetic and intelligent machines in which the classical limits imposed by discrete algorithmic procedures are offset by the use of continuous operators on unlimited data. This data is supplied to the machine in a totally parallel mode, as a field or wave.

This theory of machines draws its concepts from category theory, Lie algebras, and general systems theory. It permits the incorporation of intelligent control into the design of the machine as a virtual element. The incorporated control can be realized in many (machine) configurations of which we give three:

a) a quantum mechanical realization appropriate to a possible understanding of the quantum computer and other models of the physical microworld,

b) a stochastic realization based on Kolmogorov-Gabor theory leading to a possible understanding of generalised models of the physical or thermodynamic macroworld, and lastly

c) a classical mechanical realization appropriate lo the study of a new class of robots.

Particular applications at a fundamental level are cited in geometry, mathematics, biology, acoustics, aeronautics, quantum mechanics, general relativity and. Markov chains. The proposed theory therefore opens a new way towards understanding the processes that underlie intelligence.     

Behavioral Analysis of E-commerce Acceptance in Micro-enterprises简

E-commerce present opportunities and challenges for businesses, especially for micro-enterprises. This paper proposed a theoretical framework that in line with the unique characteristics of E-commerce acceptance in micro-enterprises in Chengdu, which is based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology （UTAUT） model. The extending UTAUT model includes key constructs of performance expectation, perceived behavioral control and the characteristics of owner-managers.     

3D interactive topology optimization on hand-held devices

This educational paper describes the implementation aspects, user interface design considerations and workflow potential of the recently published TopOpt 3D App. The app solves the standard minimum compliance problem in 3D and allows the user to change design settings interactively at any point in time during the optimization. Apart from its educational nature, the app may point towards future ways of performing industrial design. Instead of the usual geometrize, then model and optimize approach, the geometry now automatically adapts to the varying boundary and loading conditions. The app is freely available for iOS at Apple’s App Store and at http://www.topopt.dtu.dk/TopOpt3D for Windows and OSX.