Relooking at services science and services innovation

In lots of countries, service economy has become the dominant economy. Modern services industries require talents skillful at multidiscipline subjects including IT services, business models, management skills, psychology, etc. There is the rise of services science, service-oriented computing, and services computing. The multidiscipline features bring new challenges for services science. In this paper, we go beyond the traditional view of services and propose a three-layer framework for services science and services innovation. The framework covers service needs, service competencies, and service resources. We believe that these are the common building blocks and foundations for modern services industries. We use Amazon as an example to show the relevant of the framework for analyzing patterns of services innovation. We also use this framework to derive a set of service curricula for training talents for modern services.

Knowledge representations for the interactive selling of financial services

Selling financial services requires deep knowledge about the product domain as well as about potential wishes and needs of customers. In the financial services domain (especially in the retail sector) sales representatives can differ greatly in their expertise and level of sales knowledge. Therefore financial service providers ask for tools effectively supporting sales representatives in the dialog with the customer. In this paper we present technologies which allow a flexible mapping of product, marketing and sales knowledge to the representation of a recommender knowledge-base thus providing an infrastructure for the interactive selling of financial services. Furthermore, we report experiences gained from financial service recommender development projects.

Integrated access to legal literature through automated semantic classification

Access to legal information and, in particular, to legal literature is examined for the creation of a search and retrieval system for Italian legal literature. The design and implementation of services such as integrated access to a wide range of resources are described, with a particular focus on the importance of exploiting metadata assigned to disparate legal material. The integration of structured repositories and Web documents is the main purpose of the system: it is constructed on the basis of a federation system with service provider functions, aiming at creating a centralized index of legal resources. The index is based on a uniform metadata view created for structured data by means of the OAI approach and for Web documents by a machine learning approach, which, in this paper, has been assessed as regards document classification. Semantic searching is a major requirement for legal literature users and a solution based on the exploitation of Dublin Core metadata, as well as the use of legal ontologies and related terms prepared for accessing indexed articles have been implemented.

A Service Oriented Architecture-based Approach for Interdomain Optical Network Services

This work presents a service-oriented architecture for interdomain service provisioning in optical networks. The architecture introduces a service layer that concentrates all the interactions among domains necessary for service provisioning. A service layer is an alternative to the GMPLS (Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching) architecture, but without a rigid control plane as found in GMPLS. We start by defining a set of basic services to provide single end-to-end (e2e) interdomain connections. Then, more sophisticated services are created through the composition of these basic services. The interdomain Optical VPN (Virtual Private Network) service is considered in order to illustrate the composition of services. A prototype of the architecture was designed and implemented using Web services as the main technology. The architecture was evaluated in terms of speed, scalability, and bandwidth consumption necessary to establish e2e interdomain connections and Optical VPNs.

Protecting business intelligence and customer privacy while outsourcing data mining tasks

Nowadays data mining plays an important role in decision making. Since many organizations do not possess the in-house expertise of data mining, it is beneficial to outsource data mining tasks to external service providers. However, most organizations hesitate to do so due to the concern of loss of business intelligence and customer privacy. In this paper, we present a Bloom filter based solution to enable organizations to outsource their tasks of mining association rules, at the same time, protect their business intelligence and customer privacy. Our approach can achieve high precision in data mining by trading-off the storage requirement. This research was supported by the USA National Science Foundation Grants CCR-0310974 and IIS-0546027.

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Quality analysis of composed services through fault injection

Web service composition can be adopted to develop information systems through integration of services to obtain complex composed services. While interfaces of services are known at composition time, the quality of a composed service may depend on the ability of its component services to react to unforeseen situations, such as data quality problems and service coordination problems. In this work, we propose an approach to analyze the quality of composed services using fault injection techniques, by inspecting the reaction of a composed process to injected faults; the aim is to assess the process quality in terms of fault monitoring and, more generally, fault tolerance capabilities. The component services are analyzed either as black-boxes, when only input and output messages are considered or as white-boxes, when data sources used by services are considered. A test bed is illustrated on a selected example, and results of extensive testing are discussed and framed into a process analysis methodology.

Interacting with mobile services: an evaluation of camera-phones and visual tags

We present a study of using camera-phones and visual-tags to access mobile services. Firstly, a user-experience study is described in which participants were both observed learning to interact with a prototype mobile service and interviewed about their experiences. Secondly, a pointing-device task is presented in which quantitative data was gathered regarding the speed and accuracy with which participants aimed and clicked on visual-tags using camera-phones. We found that participants’ attitudes to visual-tag-based applications were broadly positive, although they had several important reservations about camera-phone technology more generally. Data from our pointing-device task demonstrated that novice users were able to aim and click on visual-tags quickly (well under 3 s per pointing-device trial on average) and accurately (almost all meeting our defined speed/accuracy tradeoff of 6% error-rate). Based on our findings, design lessons for camera-phone and visual-tag applications are presented.

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Personalised e-learning through an educational virtual reality game using Web services

This paper describes how a personalised educational game architecture has been used in conjunction with Web services to provide remote access to the system. The educational game is a virtual reality adventure game that performs affective user modelling by measuring emotional characteristics of users. Virtual reality (VR) games are so popular among children and adolescents that can be used for the purposes of educational software to render it more attractive and motivating. The benefits of such an application can be maximised if it is available over the Web. Software applications that operate over the Web are targeted to a wide range of users. Hence they need a high degree of adaptivity and dynamic individualisation to each user that interacts with the application. This should include the students’ emotional state that affects their learning. However, the environment of a Web-based VR-game that performs user modelling is so demanding that the technology of Web services is necessary for its effective operation and interoperability. Moreover, reusability may be achieved for the user modelling component.

Trust management towards service-oriented applications

In service-oriented computing (SOC) environments, service clients interact with service providers for services or transactions. From the point view of service clients, the trust status of a service provider is a critical issue to consider, particularly when the service provider is unknown to them. Typically, the trust evaluation is based on the feedback on the service quality provided by service clients. In this paper, we first present a trust management framework that is event-driven and rule-based. In this framework, trust computation is based on formulae. But rules are defined to determine which formula to use and what arguments to use, according to the event occurred during the transaction or service. In addition, we propose some trust evaluation metrics and a formula for trust computation. The formula is designed to be adaptable to different application domains by setting suitable arguments. Particularly, the proposed model addresses the incremental characteristics of trust establishment process. Furthermore, we propose a fuzzy logic based approach for determining reputation ranks that particularly differentiates new service providers and old (long-existing) ones. This is further incentive to new service providers and penalize poor quality services from service providers. Finally, a set of empirical studies has been conducted to study the properties of the proposed approaches, and the method to control the trust changes in both trust increment and decrement cases. The proposed framework is adaptable for different domains and complex trust evaluation systems.

Connecting the family with awareness systems

Awareness systems have attracted significant research interest for their potential to support interpersonal relationships. Investigations of awareness systems for the domestic environment have suggested that such systems can help individuals stay in touch with dear friends or family and provide affective benefits to their users. Our research provides empirical evidence to refine and substantiate such suggestions. We report our experience with designing and evaluating the ASTRA awareness system, for connecting households and mobile family members. We introduce the concept of connectedness and its measurement through the Affective Benefits and Costs of communication questionnaire (ABC-Q). We inform results that testify the benefits of sharing experiences at the moment they happen without interrupting potential receivers. Finally, we document the role that lightweight, picture-based communication can play in the range of communication media available.

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Intelligent Network Provisioning for Dynamically Downloadable Applications in Beyond 3G Mobile Networks

Mobile communications beyond 3G will integrate different (but complementary) access technologies into a common platform to deliver value-added services and multimedia content in an optimum way. However, the numerous possible configurations of mobile networks complicated the dynamic deployment of mobile applications. Therefore, research is intensely seeking a service provisioning framework that is technology-independent, supports multiple wireless network technologies, and can interwork high-level service management tasks to network management operations. This paper presents an open value chain paradigm, a model for downloadable applications and a mediating platform for service provisioning in beyond 3G mobile settings. Furthermore, we introduce mechanisms that support a coupled interaction between service deployment and network configuration operations, focusing on the dynamic provisioning of QoS state to data path devices according to the requirements of dynamically downloadable mobile value-added services (VAS).

End-to-end privacy control in service outsourcing of human intensive processes: A multi-layered Web service integration approach

With the recent adoption of service outsourcing, there have been increasing general demands and concerns for privacy control, in addition to basic requirement of integration. The traditional practice of a bulk transmission of the customers’ information to an external service provider is no longer adequate, especially in the finance and healthcare sectors. From our consultancy experience, application-to-application privacy protection technologies at the middleware layer alone are also inadequate to solve this problem, particularly when human service providers are heavily involved in the outsourced process. Therefore, we propose a layered architecture and a development methodology for enforcing end-to-end privacy control policies of enterprises over the export of personal information. We illustrate how Web services, augmented with updated privacy facilities such as Service Level Agreement (SLA), Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), and the P3P Preference Exchange Language (APPEL), can provide a suitable interoperation platform for service outsourcing. We further develop a conceptual model and an interaction protocol to send only the required part of a customer’s record at a time. We illustrate our approach for end-to-end privacy control in service outsourcing with a tele-marketing case study and show how the software of the outsourced call center can be integrated effectively with the Web services of a bank to protect privacy.

Efficient integration of fine-grained access control and resource brokering in grid

In this paper, we present a novel resource brokering service for grid systems which considers authorization policies of the grid nodes in the process of selecting the resources to be assigned to a request. We argue such an integration is needed to avoid scheduling requests onto resources the policies of which do not authorize their execution. Our service, implemented in Globus as a part of Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS), is based on the concept of fine-grained access control (FGAC) which enables participating grid nodes to specify fine-grained policies concerning the conditions under which grid clients can access their resources. Since the process of evaluating authorization policies, in addition to checking the resource requirements, can be a potential bottleneck for a large scale grid, we also analyze the problem of the efficient evaluation of FGAC policies. In this context, we present GroupByRule, a novel method for policy organization and compare its performance with other strategies.

Decentralized Access Control Management for Network Configuration

Configuration management is of great importance for network operators and service providers today. Sharing of resources between business parties with conflicting interests is a reality and raises many issues with respect to configuration management. One issue is access control to configuration data. A network operator or service provider needs appropriate tools, not only to control its networked resources, but also to specify how this control should be exercised. We propose an access control model for the IETF NETCONF network configuration protocol, based on the OASIS XACML access control standard, which allows a flexible and fine-grained control for NETCONF commands. Our approach does not require any additions to the NETCONF protocol and is independent of the configuration’s data-model. Furthermore our approach can easily be extended to cover new NETCONF functionality.

A model-driven development framework for enterprise Web services

The growing scale and complexity of the enterprise computing systems under distributed and heterogeneous environments present new challenges to system development, integration, and maintenance. In this paper, we present a model driven Web service development framework to combat these challenges. The framework capitalizes on the unified modeling language (UML) profile for enterprise distributed object computing (EDOC), MDA (model-driven architecture) and Web services. Within the framework, firstly, a general PIM (platform independent models) is created using the EDOC CCA structural specification and CCA choreography specification which defines the general functions of a system. Secondly, the general PIM is broken down into sub-PIMs according to functional decomposition, each of which can provide service independently and will be implemented in a Web service. Thirdly, all of the PIMs are transformed to Web service interface models for publication and invoking. Afterward, transform each PIM to a BPEL specified Web service orchestration model. Finally, supported by model transform techniques, the sub EDOC PIMs are implemented into Web services on specific platforms. Automatic model transformation is the key to this framework, therefore, the transformation from EDOC CCA models to WSDL specified Web service interface models and the transformation from EDOC CCA models to BPEL specified Web service orchestration models are deeply discussed, and the detailed transformation rules are proposed. A case study is also provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of these rules and the merits of this framework.

Method of design and specification of web services based on quality system documentation

In this paper, we present a method for development and specification of web services based on the quality system documentation. The general assumption is that service oriented architecture is based on business services and these business services mostly correspond to exchanged documentation in a real business system. Documentation of a quality system is recognized in form of documents that describe business processes in a real business system and identify exchanged documentation with environment. Presented method uses documentation of quality system and documentation flow for web service specification. We developed the CASE tool for web service specification based on a new approach, and we compare it to other existing tools.

Multimodal support to group dynamics

The complexity of group dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing support to dysfunctional teams from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of capturing and understanding group dynamics. In this paper, we discuss a particular scenario, in which meeting participants receive multimedia feedback on their relational behaviour, as a first step towards increasing self-awareness. We describe the background and the motivation for a coding scheme for annotating meeting recordings partially inspired by the Bales’ Interaction Process Analysis. This coding scheme was aimed at identifying suitable observable behavioural sequences. The study is complemented with an experimental investigation on the acceptability of such a service.

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The 2007 IEEE CEC simulated car racing competition

This paper describes the simulated car racing competition that was arranged as part of the 2007 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Both the game that was used as the domain for the competition, the controllers submitted as entries to the competition and its results are presented. With this paper, we hope to provide some insight into the efficacy of various computational intelligence methods on a well-defined game task, as well as an example of one way of running a competition. In the process, we provide a set of reference results for those who wish to use the simplerace game to benchmark their own algorithms. The paper is co-authored by the organizers and participants of the competition.

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