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.

Usage-based dynamic pricing of Web services for optimizing resource allocation

Web services technology is becoming an important technological trend in Web application development and integration. Based on open standards, such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, Web services allow Web-based applications to communicate with each other through standardized XML messaging and to form loosely coupled distributed systems. Although the open feature of Web services benefits service providers in servicing consumers, the unlimited computing resources access of Web services to network bandwidth, storage throughput, and CPU time may lead to overexploitation of the resources when applications based on the Web services technology are widely accepted. Therefore, it is critical to optimize the operation of Web services, subject to the QoS requirements of service requests, to assure the total benefits of the service providers and the service consumers. This paper proposes a usage-based dynamic pricing approach to optimizing resource allocation of Web services in the principle of economics, and reports on a pilot implementation demonstrating the technical feasibility of the proposed approach.

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.

Guided interaction: A mechanism to enable ad hoc service interaction

Ad hoc interaction between web services and their clients is a worthwhile but seemingly distant goal. At present, most of the interest in web services is focused on pre-planned B2B interaction. Clients interact with services using advance knowledge of the data and sequence requirements of the service and pre-programmed calls to their interfaces. This type of interaction cannot be used for ad hoc interaction between services and their clients such as mobile devices moving in and around rich dynamic environments because clients may not have the necessary knowledge in advance. For unplanned ad hoc interaction an interaction mechanism is required that does not require clients to have advance knowledge of programmatic service interfaces and interaction sequences. The mechanism must ensure clients with different resources and diverse competencies can successfully interact with newly discovered services by providing assistance such as disambiguation of terminology, alternative types of inputs, and context sensitive error reporting when necessary. This paper introduces a service interaction mechanism called guided interaction. Guided interaction is designed to enable clients without prior knowledge of programmatic interfaces to be assisted to a successful outcome. The mechanism is grounded in core computing primitives and based on a dialogue model. Guided interaction has two parts; the first part is a language for the exchange of information between services and their clients. The second part is a language for services to create interaction plans that allow them to gather the data they require from clients in a flexible way with the provision of assistance when necessary. An interpreter uses the plan to generate and interpret messages in the exchange language and to manage the path of the dialogue.

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.

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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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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Quick patching: an overlay multicast scheme for supporting video on demand in wireless networks

Many overlay multicast schemes have been proposed recently at the application level to support video-on-demand service over the Internet. With the proliferation of mobile devices and the increasing coverage of high speed wireless networks, such services are likely to be extended to support clients connected to the Internet through a wireless last hop. However, existing application level multicast schemes are not designed to handle the characteristics of the noisy wireless links. In this paper we propose an overlay multicast scheme called Quick Patching which arranges additional patch streams to clients under poor link conditions to improve their clients’ viewing quality. We demonstrate through extensive simulation experiments that Quick Patching is not only scalable, but can also sustain the required viewing quality under different network conditions including fluctuating error conditions as well as heterogeneous user viewing quality requirements.

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.

Evaluating legacy assets in the context of migration to SOA

A key activity in the introduction of service oriented architecture (SOA) for an organization is to evaluate the suitability of existing assets for service orientation. We identify the core principles of SOA as the guide lines in evaluating the suitability of the existing assets. The existing metrics and guidelines that could be helpful in evaluating these principles are surveyed. This would benefit an organization in understanding the effort needed for migration and also to build proper services from the existing assets.

P-chaining: a practical VoD service scheme autonomically handling interactive operations

Providing scalable VoD streaming services has recently become a hot issue, and many approaches have been proposed. Because video streaming services through the Internet are widely used, the need to support VCR operations also increases. However, there are few approaches to supporting VCR operations on the Internet. We propose a service scheme based on chaining, in which clients as well as the server provide streaming services. In the proposed scheme, services are provided by unicast and managed locally using node lists. In addition, our scheme can support frequent VCR operations without incurring significant overhead in the server workload. We have evaluated our scheme through simulation with real traces from a content distribution network (CDN) company and with various parameters. The results show that the proposed scheme reduces server workload significantly. The results also verify that frequent VCR operations can be served smoothly without causing too much overhead.

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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Attitudes to telecare among older people,professional care workers and informal carers: a preventative strategy or crisis management?

This paper reports findings from an attitudinal survey towards telecare that emerged from 22 focus groups comprising 92 older people, 55 professional stakeholders and 39 carers. These were convened in three different regions of England as a precursor to telecare service development. The results from this study suggest that informants’ views were shaped by prior knowledge of conventional health and social care delivery in their locality, and the implication is that expectations and requirements with respect to telecare services in general are likely to be informed by wider perceptions about the extent to which community care should operate as a preventative strategy or as a mechanism for crisis management.

Ubiquitous service access through adapted user interfaces on multiple devices

The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) addresses the problems of design and development that arise from services that need to be accessed from many different devices. In the UBI, a service can present itself with different user interfaces on different devices. This is done by a separation of the user–service interaction and presentation. The interaction is kept the same for all devices, and different presentation information is provided for different devices. This way, tailored user interfaces for many different devices can be created without multiplying the development and maintenance work. In this paper, we describe the design of the UBI, the system implementation, and two services implemented for the system: a calendar service and a stockbroker service.

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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Tycho: a wide-area messaging framework with an integrated virtual registry

In a distributed environment remote entities, usually the producers or consumers of services, need a means to publish their existence so that clients, needing their services, can search and find the appropriate ones that they can then interact with directly. The publication of information is via a registry service, and the interaction is via a high-level messaging service. Typically, separate libraries provide these two services. Tycho is an implementation of a wide-area asynchronous messaging framework with an integrated distributed registry. This will free developers from the need to assemble their applications from a range of potentially diverse middleware offerings, which should simplify and speed application development and more importantly allow developers to concentrate on their own domain of expertise. In the first part of the paper we outline our motivation for producing Tycho and then review a number of registry and messaging systems popular with the Grid community. In the second part of the paper we describe the architecture and implementation of Tycho. In the third part of the paper we present and discuss various performance tests that were undertaken to compare Tycho with alternative similar systems. Finally, we summarise and conclude the paper and outline future work.

E-redesigning of society: towards experiential connectivity of generations in Lithuania

The paper reflects on the unique experience of social and technological development in Lithuania since the regaining of independence as a newly reshaped society constructing a distinctive competitive IST-based model at global level. This has presented Lithuanian pattern of how to integrate different experiences and relations between generations in implementing complex information society approaches. The resulting programme in general is linked to the Lisbon objectives of the European Union. The experience of transitional countries in Europe, each different but facing some common problems, may be useful to developing countries in Africa.

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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.

Methods for quantitative usability requirements: a case study on the development of the user interface of a mobile phone

Quantitative usability requirements are a critical but challenging, and hence an often neglected aspect of a usability engineering process. A case study is described where quantitative usability requirements played a key role in the development of a new user interface of a mobile phone. Within the practical constraints of the project, existing methods for determining usability requirements and evaluating the extent to which these are met, could not be applied as such, therefore tailored methods had to be developed. These methods and their applications are discussed.

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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).