Application of unified methodical approach to online planning of target operation of satellite monitoring and communication systems

A unified methodical approach to online planning of target operation of satellite monitoring and communication systems is considered. Based on the general principles of formal representation of optimization problems of online planning for such systems and the methods and algorithms proposed for their solution, the generalized mathematical statement of the problem of online planning is presented, and the main stages of application of this methodical approach to its solution are unified; the approach is of practical interest both for monitoring and communication systems. The application of the methodical approach is demonstrated using the examples of planning the controlled process of target operation of multisatellite systems: for monitoring of fire-risky region by low-orbit satellites of the project China-Brazil Earth Remote Satellite (CBERS) and for speech transmission via mobile channels in low-orbit global systems of personal satellite communication of the projects “Koskon” and “Iridium”.     

What are a Location’s “File” and “Edit” Menus?

The promise of mobile devices lies not in their capacity to duplicate the capabilities of desktop machines, but rather in their promise of enabling location-specific tasks. One of the challenges that must be addressed if they are to be used in this way is how intuitive interfaces for mobile devices can be designed that enable access to location-specific services usable across locations. We are developing a prototype mobile valet application that presents location-specific services organised around the tasks associated with a location. The basic elements of the interface exploits commonalties in the way we address tasks at various locations just as the familiar “file” and “edit” menus in various software applications exploit regularities in software tasks.     

Designing manipulative technologies for children with different abilities

We present a design approach for manipulative technologies that consider “user diversity” as a main lever for design. Different dimensions of “diversity” are considered, e.g., the users' age, abilities, culture, cultural background, and alphabetization. These dimensions drive the development of a user-centered design process for manipulative technologies for learning and play environments. In particular, we explore the possibility of allowing young children to develop and interact with virtual/physical worlds by manipulating physical objects in different contexts, like the classroom, the hospital, or the playground. In our scenarios, we consider children with different abilities (fully able, physically impaired, or with cognitive delays), in different cultures (Denmark, Tanzania, and Italy), and with a different level of alphabetization. The needs and expectations of such heterogeneous user-groups are taken into account through a user-centered design process to define a concept of tangible media for collaborative and distributed edutainment environments. The concept is implemented as a set of building blocks called I-Blocks with individual processing and communication power. Using the I-Blocks system, children can do “programming by building,” and thereby construct interacting artefacts in an intuitive manner without the need to learn and use traditional programming languages. Here, we describe in detail the technology of I-Blocks and discuss lessons learned from “designing for diversity.”     

Autonomic communication services: a new challenge for software agents

The continuous growth in ubiquitous and mobile network connectivity, together with the increasing number of networked devices populating our everyday environments, call for a deep rethinking of traditional communication and service architectures. The emerging area of autonomic communication addresses such challenging issues by trying to identify novel flexible network architectures, and by conceiving novel conceptual and practical tools for the design, development, and execution of “autonomic” (i.e., self-organizing, self-adaptive and context-aware) communication services. In this paper, after having introduced the general concepts behind autonomic communication and autonomic communication services, we analyze the key issue of defining suitable “component” models for autonomic communication services, and discuss the strict relation between such models and agent models. On this basis, we survey and compare different approaches, and eventually try to synthesize the key desirable characteristics that one should expect from a general-purpose component model for autonomic communication services. The key message we will try to deliver is that current research in software agents and multi-agent systems have the potential for playing a major role in inspiring and driving the identification of such a model, and more in general for influencing and advancing the whole area of autonomic communication.     

Look, Ma, My homepage is Mobile!

Much of the ongoing research in ubiquitous computing has concentrated on providing context information, e.g. location information, to the level of services and applications. Typically, mobile clients obtain location information from their environment which is used to provide “locally optimal” services. In contrast, it may be of interest to obtain information about the current context a mobile user or device is in, from a client somewhere on the Web, i.e. to use the mobile device as an information provider for Internet clients. As an instance of such services we propose the metaphor of a “location-aware” Web homepage of mobile users providing information about, e.g. the current location a mobile user is at. Requesting this homepage can be as easy as typing a URL containing the mobile user's phone number such ashttp://mhp.net/+49123456789 in an off-the-shelf browser. The homepage is dynamically constructed as Web users access it and it can be configured in various ways that are controlled by the mobile user. We present the architecture and implementation and discuss issues around this example of “inverse” ubiquitous computing.     

A study on PDAs for onboard applications and technologies and methodologies

In 2005, the European Space Agency carried out a study intended to clarify the use of PDAs for onboard space operations. Being this a rather new application domain due to the introduction of uncommon technology onboard, a need for feasibility clarification was perceived. The study narrowed its unbounded technological dimension by focusing on Java technologies. Furthermore, at a software engineering level an “agile” approach was chosen for evaluation because of the high degree of user interaction and their ability to cope with general requirement changes like those resulting from the uncertainty about the actual features and quality of specific PDA platforms and COTS. Two studies were performed in parallel with the same objectives but obtaining different solutions. Suitable “agile-like” approaches compatible with space software standards were defined and tried. A space crew representative was involved from the early phases of the studies, and a final evaluation exercise at the European Astronaut Centre training facilities was performed. Feedback on the suitability of the technologies and the MMI design choices were obtained together with other unexpected lessons. The paper is concluded with an enumeration of lessons learnt and hypotheses about “agile” approaches of interest for the software engineering community.     

Near field communication: an assessment for future payment systems

In this paper, we present an assessment of near field communication (NFC) in the context of a payment market. During these past years, we have been witnessing a number of mobile payment trials based on NFC. Early experiences are already quite encouraging and many expect NFC to become a highly efficient and effective technology for mobile payments. The objective of our research is to evaluate in a systematic manner the potential of NFC as an upcoming technology for mobile payments. In order to ensure the rigor of our research, we used a formal and structured approach based on multi-actor multi-criteria methods. Our research provides one of the first assessment of NFC and a realistic picture of the current Swiss situation as we involved numerous mobile payment experts. Our findings show that Swiss industry experts are quite enthusiastic about the future of NFC. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 6th international conference on mobile business, 2007. “Jan Ondrus, Yves Pigneur, An assessment of NFC for Future Payment Systems, Proceedings, Sixth International Conference on Mobile Business, 8–11 July 2007, IEEE Computer Society, ISBN 0-7695-2803-1.”     

Charting the behavioural state of a person using a backpropagation neural network

This paper describes the application of a backpropagation artificial neural network (ANN) for charting the behavioural state of previously unseen persons. In a simulated theft scenario participants stole or did not steal some money and were interviewed about the location of the money. A video of each interview was presented to an automatic system, which collected vectors containing nonverbal behaviour data. Each vector represented a participant’s nonverbal behaviour related to “deception” or “truth” for a short period of time. These vectors were used for training and testing a backpropagation ANN which was subsequently used for charting the behavioural state of previously unseen participants. Although behaviour related to “deception” or “truth” is charted the same strategy can be used to chart different psychological states over time and can be tuned to particular situations, environments and applications. We thank those who kindly volunteered to participate in the study.     

Requirement emergence computation of networked software

Emergence Computation has become a hot topic in the research of complex systems in recent years. With the substantial increase in scale and complexity of network-based information systems, the uncertain user requirements from the Internet and personalized application requirement result in the frequent change for the software requirement. Meanwhile, the software system with non self-possessed resource become more and more complex. Furthermore, the interaction and cooperation requirement between software units and running environment in service computing increase the complexity of software systems. The software systems with complex system characteristics are developing into the “Networked Software” with characteristics of change-on-demand and change-with-cooperation. The concepts “programming”, “compiling” and “running” of software in common sense are extended from “desktop” to “network”. The core issue of software engineering is moving to the requirement engineering, which becomes the research focus of complex system software engineering. In this paper, we present the software network view based on complex system theory, and the concept of networked software and networked requirement. We propose the challenge problem in the research of emergence computation of networked software requirement. A hierarchical & cooperative unified requirement modeling framework URF (Unified Requirement Framework) and related RGPS (Role, Goal, Process and Service) meta-models are proposed. Five scales and the evolutionary growth mechanism in requirement emergence computation of networked software are given with focus on user-dominant and domain-oriented requirement, and the rules and predictability in requirement emergence computation are analyzed. A case study in the application of networked e-Business with evolutionary growth based on State design pattern is presented in the end.     

Spatial cloaking for anonymous location-based services in mobile peer-to-peer environments

This paper tackles a privacy breach in current location-based services (LBS) where mobile users have to report their exact location information to an LBS provider in order to obtain their desired services. For example, a user who wants to issue a query asking about her nearest gas station has to report her exact location to an LBS provider. However, many recent research efforts have indicated that revealing private location information to potentially untrusted LBS providers may lead to major privacy breaches. To preserve user location privacy, spatial cloaking is the most commonly used privacy-enhancing technique in LBS. The basic idea of the spatial cloaking technique is to blur a user’s exact location into a cloaked area that satisfies the user specified privacy requirements. Unfortunately, existing spatial cloaking algorithms designed for LBS rely on fixed communication infrastructure, e.g., base stations, and centralized/distributed servers. Thus, these algorithms cannot be applied to a mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) environment where mobile users can only communicate with other peers through P2P multi-hop routing without any support of fixed communication infrastructure or servers. In this paper, we propose a spatial cloaking algorithm for mobile P2P environments. As mobile P2P environments have many unique limitations, e.g., user mobility, limited transmission range, multi-hop communication, scarce communication resources, and network partitions, we propose three key features to enhance our algorithm: (1) An information sharing scheme enables mobile users to share their gathered peer location information to reduce communication overhead; (2) A historical location scheme allows mobile users to utilize stale peer location information to overcome the network partition problem; and (3) A cloaked area adjustment scheme guarantees that our spatial cloaking algorithm is free from a “center-of-cloaked-area” privacy attack. Experimental results show that our P2P spatial cloaking algorithm is scalable while guaranteeing the user’s location privacy protection.     

An integrated technology for intelligent software risk management

The paper presents a formalized technology for risk management intellectualized with new functions to increase the software process maturity. Intelligent risk management (IRM) is represented by a double spiral with “inner” turns being the processes of expert assessment of IRM objects to support the increased consistency of decisions and the efficiency of IRM participants. They link “outer” turns (the cycles of efficient risk mitigation in a common information environment at the levels of both developing organization and software project) to support the integration of project targets and improvement of software quality and strategic goals of the executing organization.     

A software architecture centric engineering approach for Internetware

As a new software paradigm evolved by the Internet, Internetware brings many challenges for the traditional software development methods and techniques. Though architecture-based component composition (ABC) approach is originated in the traditional software paradigm, it supports the engineering of Internetware effectively due to its philosophy, rationales and mechanisms. ABC has three major contributions to the en- gineering of Internetware in detail. First, the feature oriented domain modeling method can structure the “disordered”“software entities” to “ordered Internetware” bottom-up in the problem space. Second, the architecture centric design and analysis method can support the development of self-adaptive Internetware. Third, the component operating platform is a reflective and self-adaptive middleware that not only provides Internetware with a pow- erful and flexible runtime infrastructure but also enables the self-adaptation of the structure and individual entities of Internetware.     

Optimal propagation-based protocols implementing causal memories

Ensuring causal consistency in a Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) means all operations executed at each process will be compliant to a causality order relation. This paper first introduces an optimality criterion for a protocol P, based on a complete replication of variables at each process and propagation of write updates, that enforces causal consistency. This criterion measures the capability of a protocol to update the local copy as soon as possible while respecting causal consistency. Then we present an optimal protocol built on top of a reliable broadcast communication primitive and we show how previous protocols based on complete replication presented in the literature are not optimal. Interestingly, we prove that the optimal protocol embeds a system of vector clocks which captures the read/write semantics of a causal memory. From an operational point of view, an optimal protocol strongly reduces its message buffer overhead. Simulation studies show that the optimal protocol roughly buffers a number of messages of one order of magnitude lower than non-optimal ones based on the same communication primitive. R. Baldoni Roberto Baldoni is a Professor of Distributed Systems at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. He published more than one hundred papers (from theory to practice) in the fields of distributed and mobile computing, middleware platforms and information systems. He is the founder of MIDdleware LABoratory <://www.dis.uniroma1.it/&dollar;∼midlab> textgreater (MIDLAB) whose members participate to national and european research projects. He regularly serves as an expert for the EU commission in the evaluation of EU projects. Roberto Baldoni chaired the program committee of the “distributed algorithms” track of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-99) and /he was PC Co-chair of the ACM International Workshop on Principles of Mobile Computing/ (POMC). He has been also involved in the organizing and program committee of many premiership international conferences and workshops. A. Milani Alessia Milani is currently involved in a joint research doctoral thesis between the Department of Computer and Systems Science of the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and the University of Rennes I, IRISA.She earned a Laurea degree in Computer Engineering at University of Rome “La Sapienza” on May 2003. Her research activity involves the area of distributed systems. Her current research interests include communication paradigms, in particular distributed shared memories, replication and consistency criterions. S. Tucci Piergiovanni Sara Tucci Piergiovanni is currently a Ph.D. Student at the Department of Computer and Systems Science of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.She earned a Laurea degree in Computer Engineering at University of Rome “La Sapienza” on March 2002 with marks 108/110. Her laurea thesis has been awarded the italian national “Federcommin-AICA” prize 2002 for best laurea thesis in Information Technology. Her research activity involves the area of distributed systems. Early works involved the issue of fault-tolerance in asynchronous systems and software replication. Currently, her main focus is on communication paradigms that provide an “anonymous” communication as publish/subscribe and distributed shared memories. The core contributions are several papers published in international conferences and journals.     

Dynamic Bayesian approach for detecting cheats in multi-player online games

Massively multi-player games hold a huge market in the digital entertainment industry. Companies invest heavily in game developments since a successful online game can attract millions of users, and this translates to a huge investment payoff. However, multi-player online games are also subjected to various forms of “hacks” and “cheats”. Hackers can alter the graphic rendering to reveal information otherwise be hidden in a normal game, or cheaters can use software robots to play the game automatically and thus gain an unfair advantage. To overcome these problems, some popular online games release software patches constantly to block “known” hacks or incorporate anti-cheating software to detect “known” cheats. This not only creates deployment difficulty but new cheats will still be able to breach the normal game logic until software patches or updates of the anti-cheating software are available. Moreover, the anti-cheating software themselves are also vulnerable to hacks. In this paper, we propose a “scalable” and “efficient” method to detect whether a player is cheating or not. The methodology is based on the dynamic Bayesian network approach. The detection framework relies solely on the game states and runs in the game server only. Therefore, it is invulnerable to hacks and it is a much more deployable solution. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we have implemented a prototype multi-player game system to detect whether a player is using any “aiming robot” for cheating or not. Experiments show that the proposed method can effectively detect cheaters on a first-person shooter game with extremely low false positive rate. We believe the proposed methodology and the prototype system provide a first step toward a systematic study of cheating detection and security research in the area of online multi-player games.     

Debouncing the speech button: A sliding capture window device for synchronizing turn-taking

When human beings converse, they alternate between talking and listening. Participating in such turntaking behaviors is more difficult for machines that use speech recognition to listen and speech output to talk. This paper describes an algorithm for managing such turn-taking through the use of a sliding capture window. The device is specific to discrete speech recognition technologies that do not have access to echo cancellation. As such, it addresses those inexpensive applications that suffer the most from turn-taking errors—providing a “speech button” that stabilizes the interface. Correcting for short-lived turn-taking errors can be thought of as “debouncing” the button. An informal study based on ten subjects using a voice dialing application illuminates the design.     

Virtual Links: intergenerational learning and experience sharing across age divides and distances

This article presents and discusses “Virtual Links”. This builds on “The Golden Link”, a model which was developed to address the challenge of how to make experience based competencies of senior workers available to the organisation and to younger workers with less experience. “Virtual Links” support cross-generational communication and learning, as well as enabling access for mobile workers to the knowledge of experienced seniors not physically present.     

Design Rationale for a Wide Spectrum Specification Language FGSPEC

FGSPEC is a wide spectrum specification language intended to facilitate the software specification and the expression of transformation process from the functional specification whic describes “what to do ”to the corresponding design(perational)specification whic describer“how to do ”.The design emphasizes the coherence of multi-level specification mechanisms and a tree structure model is provided whic unifies the wide spectrum specification styles from“what”to“how”.     

Avatopia: a cross-media community for societal action

A cross-media platform was designed for a community of young teenagers oriented towards societal change. The platform involved an interactive web-forum featuring creative and communicative collaborative tools in a 3D avatar environment, and a weekly show in national public-service television. Informal assessment of the work indicated that (1) an integrated spiral of production and consumption across the two media channels involved is a viable design concept to support community building, (2) off-the-shelf avatar technology and consumer-grade Internet connectivity can form a feasible infrastructure for collaborative storytelling tools, and (3) a participatory design process wherein participants transition into the role of mentors and norm carriers upon deployment can be a feasible way to support subcultural community building towards “difficult” topics, even though it entails considerable resource demands. All of these findings are potentially transferable to other design domains and audiences.     

Matters of (Meta-) Modeling

With the recent trend to model driven engineering a common understanding of basic notions such as “model” and “metamodel” becomes a pivotal issue. Even though these notions have been in widespread use for quite a while, there is still little consensus about when exactly it is appropriate to use them. The aim of this article is to start establishing a consensus about generally acceptable terminology. Its main contributions are the distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of model roles, i.e. “token model” versus “type model” (The terms “type” and “token” have been introduced by C.S. Peirce, 1839–1914.), a formal notion of “metaness”, and the consideration of “generalization” as yet another basic relationship between models. In particular, the recognition of the fundamental difference between the above mentioned two kinds of model roles is crucial in order to enable communication among the model driven engineering community that is free of both unnoticed misunderstandings and unnecessary disagreement.     

The future of IPTV

As more and more content migrates to the Internet, “personal” video choices are becoming the norm not the exception. The impact of Internet content and IP-based video distribution is still difficult to evaluate. However, there is obviously no turning back as this content pervades the home and the community. Driven in large part by the near-ubiquitous IP-based communication services, the TV experience has been extended over the years to embrace many of the same ancillary services provided by web applications. This new TV promises to deliver a world of content and services to “any device, anywhere, anytime.” This article addresses the architecture, the value chain and the technical and business challenges of implementing this new connected mobile and social TV experience. To put the architecture into a context, this article also presents a use case of the distributed community Digital Video Recorder (DVR) as an implementation of this vision.