Enabling allied concurrent engineering through distributed engineering information management

The management of engineering information to ensure that the right information is quickly provided to the right place at the right time in the right format is one of the most critical tasks in the engineering process. Within the practice of allied concurrent engineering, the importance and difficulty of engineering information management is increased due to the issues of inter-enterprise communication and process control, system heterogeneity, information and system security, differing engineering data formats and multi-database formats. This paper presents an engineering information management approach for the practice of allied concurrent engineering (ACE). An ACE-based engineering information management methodology is proposed under the concept of enterprise integration. This methodology includes an information management life cycle, a distributed management framework, and rules and methods for information management. Based on this methodology, an ACE-based engineering information system was developed using Unified Modeling Language (UML) modeling techniques. The result of this research will enable the practice of allied concurrent engineering and consequently help increase product development capability and quality, reduce development cycle time and cost, and hence increase product marketability.     

Enabling customer relationship management in ISP services through mining usage patterns

The monopoly of state ownership of telecommunication industry in Taiwan was lifted in 1997. In choosing an ISP, pricing was and still is a main differentiating factor in the mind of customers; however, service quality has emerged as a major concern among users lately. Management of ISP has discovered that service quality is important not only for attracting new customers, but, more importantly, for retaining existing customers who may otherwise be lured away by lower fees. Hence, it is essential to develop a CRM system, which could help keeping existing customers and exploring further business opportunities at the same time. In this study, we, based on the IP traffic data, developed a CRM systematic approach for a major ISP company in Taiwan to enhance customers' longer-term loyalty. This approach employs CRISP-DM methodology, and applies Attribute-Oriented Induction as the mining technique to discover network usage behaviors of customers, which help management identify usage pattern and also pinpoint the time when usage is excessively heavy. The former allows management to make effective personal calls for services or maintenance, and the latter presents opportunities for management to offer personalized cares and advanced products. Pixel-oriented visualization is applied to improve the understanding of mining results.     

新一代联邦运行管理工具的设计

复杂、大规模仿真联邦对联邦运行管理提出了全过程和全系统的要求,并且对管理功能的操作和信息的表示也提出了更高的要求。在原有运行管理工具的基础上,结合对当前典型运行管理工具的研究,设计了符合新需求的新一代联邦运行管理工具。新的设计采用套件以及框架组件的方式,得到了快速高效的实现,并在实用中得到检验。     

Enabling community-driven information integration through clustering

Distributed and Parallel Databases - It has become widely recognized that user feedback can play a fundamental role in facilitating information integration tasks, e.g., the construction of...     

Enabling video privacy through computer vision

Closed-circuit television cameras used today for surveillance sometimes enable privacy intrusion. The authors' privacy console manages operator access to different versions of video-derived data according to access-control lists. Additionally, their PrivacyCam is a smart camera that produces a video stream with privacy-intrusive information already removed.     

Enabling Italian e-government through a cooperative architecture

The Italian government is using the successes and failures of previous e-government networking projects to develop a unitary network that links all public administrations     

Enabling agile adoption practices through network organizations

As distributed organizations increasingly rely on technological innovations to enhance organizational efficiency and competitiveness, interest in agile practices that enable adoption of information technology (IT) based innovations has grown. This study examines the influence of a network organization environment on the ability to develop agile adoption practices. An exploratory case study design was used to investigate the interactions between network structure, social information processing, organizational similarity (homophily), and absorptive capacity during the adoption of a large-scale IT system in two network organization environments within New York State. The data suggest that network organization characteristics and communication processes that reinforced social influence and supported knowledge transfer positively influenced adoption agility. We propose a model of agile adoption practices and discuss implications for the development of theory about network organization characteristics and capabilities to adopt IT-based innovations.     

Dreamer: A resource management architecture for Jini federation

In the paper, we developed a resource management architecture for Jini federation. Jini introduces in a leasing concept that handles partial failure of distributed applications, and also supports service resource allocation. However, current leasing model does not lay a stress on fairness and priority issues on the resource allocation. On the other hand, current lookup service lacks the capability to handle sophisticated service assignment, such as load balance issue, non-functional requirement matching, urgent service request and so on. In this paper, we aim to solve the deficiency described above by providing an architecture, which uses the information contained in resource leases to achieve better resource management.     

Enabling device independent co-browsing through adaptive view points

Efficient co-browsing of web-pages from devices with different capabilities requires users to have a shared understanding of those web-pages. This paper outlines the concept of shared view point (SVP) and personal view point (PVP) for co-browsing before detailing a framework for implementing these concepts and some of the algorithms involved. Particular emphasis is given to the display structure and semantic grouping of web-page objects and the subsequent repositioning of the same in the different view points. The effectiveness of the system is demonstrated through a perceptual experiment.     

Enabling user-driven rule management in event data analysis

Event data analysis is becoming increasingly of interest to academic researchers looking for patterns in the data. Unlike domain experts working in large companies who have access to IT staff and expensive software infrastructures, researchers find it harder to efficiently manage their event data analysis by themselves. Particularly, user-driven rule management is a challenge especially when analysis rules increase in size and complexity over time. In this paper, we propose an event data analysis platform called EP-RDR intended for non-IT experts that facilitates the evolution of event processing rules according to changing requirements. This platform integrates a rule learning framework called Ripple-Down Rules (RDR) operating in conjunction with an event pattern detection component invoked as a service (EPDaaS). We have built a prototype to demonstrate this solution on real-life scenario involving financial data analysis.     

Enabling OSI CMISE via X/Open management APIs

This paper describes the development of an industry-standard Application Programming Interface (API) which provides access to the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Common Management Information Service Element (CMISE). The management API solution that has been defined by X/Open^® and the results of the API experimental prototype effort performed at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) is presented. This paper is based on and extends from a paper that was submitted to Globecom '92 [1].     

Enabling declarative security through the use of Java Data Objects

The concept of declarative security allows the separation of security concerns from business logic and enables the development of highly flexible and secure applications. Whereas Hibernate and the Enterprise Java Beans specification provide sufficient authentication and authorization functionalities in the context of object persistence, the Java Data Objects (JDO) specification designed as a lightweight persistence approach doesn’t provide any declarative security capabilities.

The novel security approach, JDOSecure, introduces a role-based permission system to the JDO persistence layer, which is based on the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS). JDOSecure is based on the dynamic proxy approach and ensures the collaboration with any JDO implementation. It comprises a management solution for users, roles, and permissions and allows storing the authentication and authorization information in any arbitrary JDO resource. Furthermore, a Java-based administration utility with a graphical user interface simplifies the maintenance of security privileges and permissions.     

基于事务和Agent联邦的工作流异常处理机制

异常处理和恢复是工作流管理系统(workflow management system,WFMS)不可缺少的部分.在把工作流异常分为技能级异常、活动级异常和工作流级异常的基础上,结合工作流中活动的事务性,提出了基于事务的异常处理策略,并在基于Agent联邦中各Agent的合作性,提出了异常的检测方法和传递机制,提高了系统处理异常的灵活性.     

HLA步进联邦时间管理性能的影响因素分析*

为了提高HLA（high level architecture,高层体系结构）仿真联邦的时间管理性能,研究了时间管理性能的影响因素。首先,提出了着色交互Petri网,建立了HLA的时间管理模型,并在该模型的基础上应用Stateflow建立了HLA时间管理性能测试平台;然后,应用该测试平台研究HLA步进联邦中计算负载、前瞻量、步长等几个主要因素对时间管理性能的影响,获得了提高HLA步进联邦时间管理性能的一般结论;最后,通过在水声对抗仿真系统中的应用,验证了结论的有效性。     

Enabling user-oriented management for ubiquitous computing: The meta-design approach

This paper presents iPlumber, a user-oriented management system for ubiquitous computing environments. Different from previous low-benefit “zero-configuration” systems or high cognitive-cost “end user programming” tools, our work attempts to attain a better balance between user benefits and cost by exploring the meta-design approach. A set of typical management activities in ubicomp environments are supported, from basic-level software sharing, foraging, and low-cost software configuration to advanced-level cooperative software co-design and error handling. These activities are elaborated through a smart home control scenario. The usability of our system is validated through an initial user study with a total of 33 subjects to test the management activities from an open exhibition environment and a controlled university environment.     

Kokkos: Enabling manycore performance portability through polymorphic memory access patterns

The manycore revolution can be characterized by increasing thread counts, decreasing memory per thread, and diversity of continually evolving manycore architectures. High performance computing (HPC) applications and libraries must exploit increasingly finer levels of parallelism within their codes to sustain scalability on these devices. A major obstacle to performance portability is the diverse and conflicting set of constraints on memory access patterns across devices. Contemporary portable programming models address manycore parallelism (e.g., OpenMP, OpenACC, OpenCL) but fail to address memory access patterns. The Kokkos C++ library enables applications and domain libraries to achieve performance portability on diverse manycore architectures by unifying abstractions for both fine-grain data parallelism and memory access patterns. In this paper we describe Kokkos’ abstractions, summarize its application programmer interface (API), present performance results for unit-test kernels and mini-applications, and outline an incremental strategy for migrating legacy C++ codes to Kokkos. The Kokkos library is under active research and development to incorporate capabilities from new generations of manycore architectures, and to address a growing list of applications and domain libraries.     

Enabling individualized recommendations and dynamic pricing of value-added services through willingness-to-pay data

When managing their growing service portfolio, many manufacturers in B2B markets face two significant problems: They fail to communicate the value of their service offerings and they lack the capability to generate profits with value-added services. To tackle these two issues, we have built and evaluated a collaborative filtering recommender system which (a) makes individualized recommendations of potentially interesting value-added services when customers express interest in a particular physical product and also (b) leverages estimations of a customer’s willingness to pay to allow for a dynamic pricing of those services and the incorporation of profitability considerations into the recommendation process. The recommender system is based on an adapted conjoint analysis method combined with a stepwise componential segmentation algorithm to collect individualized preference and willingness-to-pay data. Compared to other state-of-the-art approaches, our system requires significantly less customer input before making a recommendation, does not suffer from the usual sparseness of data and cold-start problems of collaborative filtering systems, and, as is shown in an empirical evaluation with a sample of 428 customers in the machine tool market, does not diminish the predictive accuracy of the recommendations offered.     

Enabling automated threat response through the use of a dynamic security policy

Information systems security issues are currently being addressed using different techniques, such as authentication, encryption and access control, through the definition of security policies, but also using monitoring techniques, in particular intrusion detection systems. We can observe that security monitoring is currently totally decorrelated from security policies, that is security requirements are not linked with the means used to control their fulfillment. Most of the time, security operators have to analyze monitoring results and manually react to provide countermeasures to threats compromising the security policy. The response process is far from trivial, since it both relies on the relevance of the threat analysis and on the adequacy of the selected countermeasures. In this paper, we present an approach aiming at connecting monitoring techniques with security policy management in order to provide response to threat. We propose an architecture allowing to dynamically and automatically deploy a generic security policy into concrete policy instances taking into account the threat level characterized thanks to intrusion detection systems. Such an approach provides means to bridge the gap between existing detection approaches and new requirements, which clearly deal with the development of intrusion prevention systems, enabling a better protection of the resources and services.     

Enabling progressive system integration for AIoT and speech-based HCI through semantic-aware computing

The Journal of Supercomputing - A novel integration architecture for speech-based human–computer interaction was developed using a progressive growth framework and semantic-aware computing....